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Hacker News Hacker NewsThird party managers don't hit the spot either. They all spread out over too large of a surface area, trying to do read it later or moodboards or canvases and whatever else, without offering much in the way of material improvements over built in bookmarks (aside from being cross-browser).
At some point you adopt a workflow where every browser activity starts with opening a new tab. Plus, so many websites have broken browser history management that it’s easier to open all links in new tabs, too.
I do close tabs on occasion, usually when I see that the device starts to struggle. Closing all tabs helps make things fast again.
Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab. Saves me time for page reloads.
Sometimes entering the same keywords into a search engine does not land you on that article, though, so closing tabs as rarely as possible pays out for me a few times a year. But it’s ultimately not that important and I don’t keep tabs around for the sake of it.
I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs.
The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs.
I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.
The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.
I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.
I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.
I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.
If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.
Occasionally I type a keyword for something I previously bookmarked and the browser finds it in the bookmarks. Other times I don’t have the right word so I have to google it instead. But that’s ok. I know that the bookmarks aren’t hugely useful, but at least they helped me stop hoarding tabs :)
"Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024)
Still, it always baffles me how poorly browsers handle high tab counts. Browser tabs should be able to proliferate as freely as spreadsheet rows. There's no reason you shouldn't be able to have 100,000 tabs open, or even a million, and switch between them smoothly. Only the tabs that are active should impose a meaningful performance cost. The tab itself is just a tiny UI element with some text and an icon.
The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.
Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.
I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.
I have been using tree style tabs on Firefox for so long, I can't function without it. I can nest tabs together and collapse them, but most importantly, I can read all the tab titles due to the vertical layout.
I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe
I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.
What I don’t understand is:
(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”
(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.
c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabsio/kfgpkekbcoae... (I have done zero marketing on this hence why basically no users)
For example, my HN-dedicated firefox window has ~900 tabs right now, from June. All save the recent 5 are unloaded. I probably won't look at them again but just going through the list is a chronological reminder of what I was doing. Honestly, I could close them all but there's a "what if I need that sub-list of tabs dedicated to XYZ again?" in my head that wins out.
I have a separate note/data management system so this is mostly just... something.
Bookmark titles are editable. If you create a bookmark and the title doesn't mean anything, change it.
I often put bookmarks on the toolbar, so I shorten them to one character, or empty string (if the icon is clear) to have space for as many as possible.
> I don't like the browser bookmarking system because it's too hard to organize the folders and it's not visual
But then goes on to write a whole section of the article "Here's a few interesting links I discovered buried in those 664 tabs" which gives nothing but topic headings, under which are lists of raw links with no description.
:)
The real unlocks were:
- using the bookmarklet that pops open a small browser window with the page title, suggested tags
- doing the same on my iphone
- have a couple in browser bookmarks that point to the tags for important things
It's so good I even used it to track all of my LinkedIn connections tagged by location, job function etc (inspired by Derek Sivers post on having a database [1])
If its important, I just remember it.
This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.
I never close tabs or re-use old open tabs on mobile, since the UI just buries them and I just open a new tab if i want to check something, so I will just accumulate useless tabs.
On my Laptop i try to only hoard a handful of tabs. I just noticed I have some open since months, but never gotten to reading them.
The thing is i want to read the content, but never find time, so they just stay there.
smells like ADHD
"I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists."
yup
Why do I do it? To see all my tabs visually and quickly go back to a particular page. And also as a hard limit to start cleaning up tabs.
"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.