Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it.
Third 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).
I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.
The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.
Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.
It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.
I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.
What I find works better than tabs for things like YouTube is “installed” PWAs. In my case under macOS, I use Safari to do this (File > Add to Dock…), which spins out an independent single site browser process that has a dock icon, presence in OS window management functions, etc as well as both windows and tabs. This way I can keep a few YouTube videos open without them getting lost in the shuffle of browser windows and tabs. These windows stay open even if I close my main browser too which is also nice.
Some content just can't be bookmarked. The only way to keep the state is to keep the tab open and the browser running. If you reload the same URL, you get something else.
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding.
Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.
Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.
I was about to do exactly what OP did and create a chrome extension when I found karakeep which saved me from doing that. I really like the full archive because sites disappear all the time, and screenshots for a visual overview. Used to use pinboard but didn't like that archive feature was a subscription. It also works with SingleFile to archive logged-in sites.
Good catch on mentioning singlefile, I use it but I dont think about it much since it's such a background 'thing'. Havent really dug into it's usage beyond feeding pages over but seems like its got a ton of use cases.
I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle).
The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.
I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).
The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.
ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.
So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.
The middle ground is missing (on several axis):
- daily & semi-important -> bookmarks bar
- long-term & maybe important & !daily -> bookmark manager
- "need to read this" -> tab
daily, regardless of how important, works better as a tab. could even be a pinned tab.
"long-term & !daily" is the only thing that could be a bookmark. the problem then is categorization. tagging helps. but before i bookmark something i open it as a tab to look at it, which makes bookmarking a extra step over "i want to keep this, so i'll just not close the tab". somewhere the impulse from "i want to keep this" to "bookmark this" is missing.
Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're likely to just start throwing things into Other Bookmarks, which clutters it. Being able to sort by type, root URL, alphabetical order, and date saved would be so great.
The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.
it used to be that even an unloaded tab would load a cached version. they removed that feature. i loved it. i wish each tab would save at least one cached version not only in case the internet goes out, but also in case the page changes. it does matter for reading hackernews for example, because it helps me keep track of what i have not read yet.
What solved some of my problems was a Firefox plugin called MarkDownload. Instead of saving a bookmark, just download the thing (as a text file) which makes it easier to find by search (or just grep -R).
Efficacy plays a role in this effect, but so does unintuitive connections between search terms and results. "Google-fu" used to be a somewhat solid "science" but now small query differences can yield unpredictable effects on results, and the likelihood of remembering the exact query that yielded the desired result is low.
Tangent, I was searching for 3mm spherical magnets last night and literally every retailer's search is total garbage and delivered any kind of magnet you can imagine while occasionally sprinkling in things that were vaguely related to "3mm spherical magnets"
I don't understand how it's useful to anyone, even the companies. I just leave without buying things so why would their searches not just search for the specific thing that I ask for?
Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it.
The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.
I tried Sidebery for a while among other vertical tab extensions and found them all too flaky and tacked-on-feeling for my taste. Needing to edit userCSS to hide the redundant tab bar kind of sucked too. Now I don't use vertical tabs unless the browser has them built in as a first-class feature.
I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.
The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.
I ditched Pinboard a few years ago because I had a lot of difficulty getting my data out and there is no support. Marciej (idlewords) snarkily brags about not answering email (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789426).
Yeah, I've read similar complaints, but I haven't had any issues.
The only data I need—my bookmarks and tags—are already backed up in a JSON file. You can get this via the API. It would be good to have the crawled archives as well, but I don't really need it. A large number of my bookmarks are probably dead anyway, and could use pruning, so an archive of these is not that valuable.
> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades...
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.
I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
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 routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!
I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.
> 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.
Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air.
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.
It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common. I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is.
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.
Different strokes for different strokes. There is nothing wrong with how you use tabs, and nothing wrong with how others do. It is just different. The important part is that whoever can find things later that the saved for later, if the system works for you it is good. You don't even need to understand, since it is your/their personal system.
Now sometimes a different system is better. So there is nothing wrong with understanding - you might learn something that helps you. However it is optional if you are not aware of defects in what you are doing (but if you are aware of them...). Also technology marches on and so something better might come out in the future: keep an option mind.
The important part is to be slow to criticizing people who are different.
Same, if I have half a dozen tabs open that's a lot and I start to lose track of which one is which. Cannot imagine how I'd manage hundreds or thousands of tabs.
It sounds like when you, say, compare a bunch of different products, you have an uncanny ability to know exactly where in your tab history those products are? I really have to open them in a bunch of tabs as I go, and then I can quickly switch between them when I'm at the point of making a choice.
I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues
with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars
using computers with severly degradated performance.
.
When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar)
plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand
is so much more productive...
I think it comes down to differences in how our minds work. Some require neatly organized desks while others thrive on what to others looks like a chaotic, scattered mess of unrelated documents. It's kind of hierarchal vs. spatial, and it's also one of the key differing principles between Windows-style and Mac-style desktop environments.
I have 10 windows open and 8 of them have about 20-30 tabs (two of them have less than 10 each), I don't think my hoarding is thriving. It's more of a scatterbrain saying "Oh I'll get back to that idea", and taking days or weeks to get back to it.
In Vivaldi, vertical tabs mean each tab takes about 40 vertical pixels of height, and about 250 pixels width, so I can skim through the titles of each tab...
I have 546 tabs in Firefox (on macOS) at the moment. I've never noticed any degraded performance. On my phone (iPhone) it's 490+ but that's because 500 is the max. I don't think it keeps them truly loaded until you go back to them.
Now my bookmark list is crazy. I have started using 'open all' and then reviewing items in each folder to see if they are worth keeping. 99% of the time. no. Many times they are from years ago and the site doesnt even exist anymore. I have some items in my folders that go back to 1992. I have a bad habit of 'oh that is mildly interesting ctrl-d time'. Usually a few weeks later 'what was I thinking'.
My tabs however are wildly focused on what I am doing right now. Once that task is done. I close them out. Think my max is 20 tabs. But usually I really only need about 5. The rest I close out. I probably can find it again with search. That is how I found it the first time...
That also reminds me, time to delete more folders.
Ditto on the working set.
For the 'crazy' bookmark lists:
I now have 220 bookmarks, max 4 levels deep, counting the bookmark bar as level 1.
And that's work and private combined.
Before I add a tab to the bookmarks, I ask myself:
Am I likely to need this again?
If the answer is not a full yes, I just close the tab.
It can also be found again quickly enough with a simple google search
or the browsing history.
My tab hoarding has evolved a bit. I use separate windows that are mostly subject-based now. I might have an Amazon window that sticks around for several days that will explode with tabs before I decide to put in an order. If I get on a Factorio kick I end up with a window with dozens of blueprints and forum posts that will stay for a few months (until I get bored/overwhelmed with the game again...it's a cycle, that one...). I usually have a "main window" with stuff like email and nextdns allow list (stuff that I tend to fiddle with often) and a discord/reddit window. The wikipedia window comes and goes but sometimes gets several dozen tabs and might last a few days.
Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
Good article. I nodded along and wish OP had written more about their solutions!
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.
I cured my tab hoarding by transforming myself into a bookmark hoarder instead. I bookmark pretty much every tab I open if it seems even remotely interesting. And in return I don’t keep open tabs. The handful of bookmarks that I actually use I keep on the bookmarks bar (and on the favourites view in iOS Safari). All of the random crap goes in the general bookmarks. I don’t try to organize the bookmarks in any way other than keeping those I actually use on the bookmarks bar.
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 :)
I feel any fuzzy tab grouping feature [0] is a significant security risk by default. Especially with black-box LLMs.
Consider a phishing site which opens up in a new tab, tricking the browser into color-coding and sliding it over into the middle of the user's existing tabs for the real site: "Huh, my bank says I got logged out and need to re-enter my credentials, well, no problem, I mean this is obviously the same interface I was working with earlier, right?"
Protecting against that attack would require some deterministic security rules, such as refusing to add to any group if the domain isn't already represented there... But at that point, isn't the AI-fuzziness really only useful for deciding when not to group things by domain?
This one stood out to me even more:
> I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
I currently have 20,097 tabs open in one browser profile. The oldest tab appears to be an HN post from 2.5 years ago, which must be the last time I swept tabs into bookmarks.
I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?
The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.
I also have many tabs (that's why I could quickly recall and find the post). Restoring session takes a while (much more than 15 seconds). I measure this time by looking on the CPU consumption. Only once it drops to near zero I consider session completely restored.
I just timed it for accuracy. When launched alone, on my M2 MBA, it's about 18 seconds to full draw of visible tab list, and 29 seconds to snappy interactivity. I didn't check CPU utilization.
Usually, when I launch this 20+Kt profile, I also launch 2-3 other profiles simultaneously (work 2Kt, personal/misc 3Kt, sometimes commerce 400t). I've noticed that they each peg a core while launching, but this is the only one that isn't ready quickly.
Same here. Used FF+Sidebery (and Tab Center Reborn before that) for years. ~5k tabs and it worked perfectly. With Chromium/Brave I can open maybe a hundred before the browser croaks and takes up all available memory.
I don't open heavy websites in FF, though. For youtube links, I always use Brave.
I generally have several thousand tabs open at a time. Hacker News is a big source of them. I use Simple Tab Groups and it takes a few seconds to switch from one group to another but I've become fairly okay with that. I use Auto Tab Discard so that most of the tabs are "hibernated" and don't consume so many resources.
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.
Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.
Protip for a brain reset - right click on current tab - click close other tabs
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.
Second protip - the tab manager search is really useful, it will list out currently open and previously closed tabs for scanning, with a search feature. So searching open tabs is really fast, on Mac it is cmd + chift + a (think tAb).
I understand the need for hoarding tabs but it boggles my mind how people navigate tiny tabs and remember where everything is. In fact, they probably don't since I keep seeing people clicking back and forth a few times before finding the right tab.
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'm down to 7800 tabs (30 windows) on my main desktop. 4K on my other, 2K on my laptops. High was >11000 tabs. Firefox makes this easy; takes ~30 seconds to open all those windows and load a tab per window (plus ~8 pinned tabs)
"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).
And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)
I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.
This used to be an issue for me, but it seems that in Brave it unloads tabs efficiently enough that I can have many hundreds open (on an MBA) without adverse effect. The only time I go in and clear things out, it's when I need to reboot and have to categorize/save all my incognito tabs, which are wiped out on quit.
If this really is attributable to ADHD (and I’m sceptical) perhaps the opposite is those of us with (very mild, undiagnosed) OCD who insist on cleaning our tabs up several times a day?
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.
I wrote a Chrome Extension to save tabs to my local DB (till it stopped working with manifest v3) but I found all the tabs I saved I never actually used them again.
I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.
I can't deal with having more than ~5 permananent tabs and 5 temporary open tabs. if i have so many tabs open i cant read what they are I know something has gone wrong with what I'm trying to do, so I try and reset.
I used to hoard tabs, but these days I just switch profiles. If I have over 2000 tabs, I copy maybe a hundred over to a new profile. It's just easier.
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.
I switched to using Pinboard [0] for all bookmarking and never looked back.
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])
I hoard tabs as well, and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-manager-p... has been a game changer. Let's me move them around within windows, which I like a lot. Let's me create windows that have specific purposes. The tree style tabs never sat right with me mentally, couldn't say why, I want each window to have a purpose.
So this person's solution was to write a series of bespoke apps that allows them to...save bookmarks with tags? Instead of just trying Pinboard or one of the other dozen existing products that do the same thing, or even the built-in Bookmarks which I think support tags in most browsers since many years now?
Thankfully Firefox helped me with tab hoarding dependency, by silently losing saves session without any visible crash or issue, just on the normal open. Now I have to treat tabs as if they won't be saved ever again and don't leave anything important open. Thanks Mozilla, great use of your time and money, spending them on useless LLM integration and lining CEOs pockets instead of fixing damn basic functionality.
So much this. Thankfully it hasn't lost tabs for me for a very long time, but I find it ridiculous that Firefox's session persistence is basically "yeah let's deserialize it into a single line of JSON and write it to disk every 15 seconds".
On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.
I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.
Because some people might have 10 different things they're doing in any given day and sometimes their ADHD distracts them from one thing to the other and you don't want to lose all that context.
The article does actually explicitly address this as well.
>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
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.
Why is their browser using so much memory?
I'm quite bad at closing tabs since I've switched to vertical and just open new windows instead.
And even with that I don't think I ever broke 10gb on edge except for when I opened many YouTube videos at once and then went through them which kept the tabs loaded
Doesn't make sense to me, and I've been diagnosed with the same.
I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it?
Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.
if you're not like working on much then of course no need for many tabs, but I tend to ctrl click a lot of links / videos etc. so I end up with having 10 tabs in one window 5 in another, 15 one other etc...
and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe
I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?
To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.
This is exactly my experience. sometimes it does come handy, but most of the time it really doesn't matter. but that "risk" of potentially closing something that you'll need / want to look at later makes me just create a new window and drag that one in the background for safekeeping
I wrote a (not published to the store, it's kind of just for me) Chrome extension (together with Gemini, pretty early in the days of it) that attaches an expiration date to tabs. Works reasonably well to cure it (except I keep setting many to 31 days… but eventually a month passes)
On a related note, I see that my oldest "favorite" is from September 2016, but I've been on HN since 2009. Is that around when the "favorites" feature was added? Or is it possible that some older favorites have been dropped?
"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.
The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.
> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles
Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.
> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.
I might typically have 4-5 tabs open for serious work, and then 0 when not.. am I the weird one? I've never once found value with tab groups or multiple sessions
Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it.
Third 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).
I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.
The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.
Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.
It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.
I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.
What I find works better than tabs for things like YouTube is “installed” PWAs. In my case under macOS, I use Safari to do this (File > Add to Dock…), which spins out an independent single site browser process that has a dock icon, presence in OS window management functions, etc as well as both windows and tabs. This way I can keep a few YouTube videos open without them getting lost in the shuffle of browser windows and tabs. These windows stay open even if I close my main browser too which is also nice.
In Chrome, you can use cmd+shift+a or ctrl+shift+a to do fuzzy search in all your tabs (I believe this uses the URL and the page title)
For anyone else using firefox: Alt+D to select address bar (or F6 or Ctrl/Cmd+L), then start your search with '%' to search your tabs.
How long has this existed?
It didn't exist (or was undiscoverable) when I was last using Chrome / Chromium, though that was ~6+ years ago.
~2-3 years I believe
Thanks!
tabs is just not the correct abstraction for focused work.
To clarify - is Internet, the browser (to which tabs are implicit) not the “correct” abstraction either? What are you trying to say?
Some content just can't be bookmarked. The only way to keep the state is to keep the tab open and the browser running. If you reload the same URL, you get something else.
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding.
Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.
Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.
I was about to do exactly what OP did and create a chrome extension when I found karakeep which saved me from doing that. I really like the full archive because sites disappear all the time, and screenshots for a visual overview. Used to use pinboard but didn't like that archive feature was a subscription. It also works with SingleFile to archive logged-in sites.
Good catch on mentioning singlefile, I use it but I dont think about it much since it's such a background 'thing'. Havent really dug into it's usage beyond feeding pages over but seems like its got a ton of use cases.
I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle).
The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.
I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).
The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.
ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.
So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.
The middle ground is missing (on several axis):
daily, regardless of how important, works better as a tab. could even be a pinned tab.
"long-term & !daily" is the only thing that could be a bookmark. the problem then is categorization. tagging helps. but before i bookmark something i open it as a tab to look at it, which makes bookmarking a extra step over "i want to keep this, so i'll just not close the tab". somewhere the impulse from "i want to keep this" to "bookmark this" is missing.
Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're likely to just start throwing things into Other Bookmarks, which clutters it. Being able to sort by type, root URL, alphabetical order, and date saved would be so great.
The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.
it used to be that even an unloaded tab would load a cached version. they removed that feature. i loved it. i wish each tab would save at least one cached version not only in case the internet goes out, but also in case the page changes. it does matter for reading hackernews for example, because it helps me keep track of what i have not read yet.
What solved some of my problems was a Firefox plugin called MarkDownload. Instead of saving a bookmark, just download the thing (as a text file) which makes it easier to find by search (or just grep -R).
> Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers
It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.
Efficacy plays a role in this effect, but so does unintuitive connections between search terms and results. "Google-fu" used to be a somewhat solid "science" but now small query differences can yield unpredictable effects on results, and the likelihood of remembering the exact query that yielded the desired result is low.
Tangent, I was searching for 3mm spherical magnets last night and literally every retailer's search is total garbage and delivered any kind of magnet you can imagine while occasionally sprinkling in things that were vaguely related to "3mm spherical magnets"
I don't understand how it's useful to anyone, even the companies. I just leave without buying things so why would their searches not just search for the specific thing that I ask for?
"I see you're searching for 19th-century mayors of New York City. Here's some 4k UHD TV's for sale! (Promoted)"
Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it.
The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.
I tried Sidebery for a while among other vertical tab extensions and found them all too flaky and tacked-on-feeling for my taste. Needing to edit userCSS to hide the redundant tab bar kind of sucked too. Now I don't use vertical tabs unless the browser has them built in as a first-class feature.
> Third party managers don't hit the spot either.
I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.
The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.
I ditched Pinboard a few years ago because I had a lot of difficulty getting my data out and there is no support. Marciej (idlewords) snarkily brags about not answering email (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789426).
Yeah, I've read similar complaints, but I haven't had any issues.
The only data I need—my bookmarks and tags—are already backed up in a JSON file. You can get this via the API. It would be good to have the crawled archives as well, but I don't really need it. A large number of my bookmarks are probably dead anyway, and could use pruning, so an archive of these is not that valuable.
> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades...
I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).
A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?
Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).
I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.
Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.
For me, what works for filesystems does not work for bookmarks. I'd have to give some thought about why that's the case.
I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.
I agree this is a factor. The friction of bookmarking pages in a way that would actually reduce the effort of finding the page later is too high.
Firefox has bookmark tags, except they're not accessible on mobile.
Browser devs do not seem interested in improving the state of bookmarks.
Yes, I agree, there is one exception.
Onetab add-on in FF works fine. After every work you just “onetab” all tabs. It is flat structure, so I usually store similar tabs into one box.
There are 2 features: restore all tabs into browser. And fulltext search is easier.
I was a tab hoarder too. I am cured now as Onetab helped me a lot. (No affil. here.)
I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
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 routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.
You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!
I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.
> 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.
Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.
I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air.
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.
[0] https://zen-browser.app/
Love Zen.
I am not sure it fixed my tab problem, but it improved tab management and overall efficiency.
Omnivore helped a bunch before they shut down. I need to see if any good apps exist that are similar.
[dead]
Love Zen's approach to tabs. I just wish that folders didnt have to live in the pinned area and could be down with all my junk tabs.
It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common. I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is.
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.
Different strokes for different strokes. There is nothing wrong with how you use tabs, and nothing wrong with how others do. It is just different. The important part is that whoever can find things later that the saved for later, if the system works for you it is good. You don't even need to understand, since it is your/their personal system.
Now sometimes a different system is better. So there is nothing wrong with understanding - you might learn something that helps you. However it is optional if you are not aware of defects in what you are doing (but if you are aware of them...). Also technology marches on and so something better might come out in the future: keep an option mind.
The important part is to be slow to criticizing people who are different.
Same, if I have half a dozen tabs open that's a lot and I start to lose track of which one is which. Cannot imagine how I'd manage hundreds or thousands of tabs.
It sounds like when you, say, compare a bunch of different products, you have an uncanny ability to know exactly where in your tab history those products are? I really have to open them in a bunch of tabs as I go, and then I can quickly switch between them when I'm at the point of making a choice.
I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars using computers with severly degradated performance. . When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar) plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand is so much more productive...
I think it comes down to differences in how our minds work. Some require neatly organized desks while others thrive on what to others looks like a chaotic, scattered mess of unrelated documents. It's kind of hierarchal vs. spatial, and it's also one of the key differing principles between Windows-style and Mac-style desktop environments.
I have 10 windows open and 8 of them have about 20-30 tabs (two of them have less than 10 each), I don't think my hoarding is thriving. It's more of a scatterbrain saying "Oh I'll get back to that idea", and taking days or weeks to get back to it.
In Vivaldi, vertical tabs mean each tab takes about 40 vertical pixels of height, and about 250 pixels width, so I can skim through the titles of each tab...
> severly degradated performance
I have 546 tabs in Firefox (on macOS) at the moment. I've never noticed any degraded performance. On my phone (iPhone) it's 490+ but that's because 500 is the max. I don't think it keeps them truly loaded until you go back to them.
That is the way I work.
Now my bookmark list is crazy. I have started using 'open all' and then reviewing items in each folder to see if they are worth keeping. 99% of the time. no. Many times they are from years ago and the site doesnt even exist anymore. I have some items in my folders that go back to 1992. I have a bad habit of 'oh that is mildly interesting ctrl-d time'. Usually a few weeks later 'what was I thinking'.
My tabs however are wildly focused on what I am doing right now. Once that task is done. I close them out. Think my max is 20 tabs. But usually I really only need about 5. The rest I close out. I probably can find it again with search. That is how I found it the first time...
That also reminds me, time to delete more folders.
Ditto on the working set. For the 'crazy' bookmark lists: I now have 220 bookmarks, max 4 levels deep, counting the bookmark bar as level 1. And that's work and private combined. Before I add a tab to the bookmarks, I ask myself: Am I likely to need this again? If the answer is not a full yes, I just close the tab. It can also be found again quickly enough with a simple google search or the browsing history.
40 years ago Apple figured this out: Spatial file manager.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476605
My tab hoarding has evolved a bit. I use separate windows that are mostly subject-based now. I might have an Amazon window that sticks around for several days that will explode with tabs before I decide to put in an order. If I get on a Factorio kick I end up with a window with dozens of blueprints and forum posts that will stay for a few months (until I get bored/overwhelmed with the game again...it's a cycle, that one...). I usually have a "main window" with stuff like email and nextdns allow list (stuff that I tend to fiddle with often) and a discord/reddit window. The wikipedia window comes and goes but sometimes gets several dozen tabs and might last a few days.
Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.
This is similar to my usage patterns. If the browser has native "spaces" support (like Arc, Zen, and Orion do), replace windows with spaces.
Good article. I nodded along and wish OP had written more about their solutions!
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.
I cured my tab hoarding by transforming myself into a bookmark hoarder instead. I bookmark pretty much every tab I open if it seems even remotely interesting. And in return I don’t keep open tabs. The handful of bookmarks that I actually use I keep on the bookmarks bar (and on the favourites view in iOS Safari). All of the random crap goes in the general bookmarks. I don’t try to organize the bookmarks in any way other than keeping those I actually use on the bookmarks bar.
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 lets you group tabs and unload tabs individually or as groups. Super useful for preventing tab accumulation from becoming a memory issue.
It can also do so automatically, which is a great post-hoc feature.
I feel any fuzzy tab grouping feature [0] is a significant security risk by default. Especially with black-box LLMs.
Consider a phishing site which opens up in a new tab, tricking the browser into color-coding and sliding it over into the middle of the user's existing tabs for the real site: "Huh, my bank says I got logged out and need to re-enter my credentials, well, no problem, I mean this is obviously the same interface I was working with earlier, right?"
Protecting against that attack would require some deterministic security rules, such as refusing to add to any group if the domain isn't already represented there... But at that point, isn't the AI-fuzziness really only useful for deciding when not to group things by domain?
[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-ai-enhanced-tab...
[dead]
A "hoarder" but less than 1000 tabs combined - rookie numbers!
This one stood out to me even more: > I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone
iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.
I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".
> 300+ on my Mac.
"Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156568
I currently have 20,097 tabs open in one browser profile. The oldest tab appears to be an HN post from 2.5 years ago, which must be the last time I swept tabs into bookmarks.
I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother?
The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox or macOS is updated, so every week or two.
> about 15 seconds for the browser to launch
I also have many tabs (that's why I could quickly recall and find the post). Restoring session takes a while (much more than 15 seconds). I measure this time by looking on the CPU consumption. Only once it drops to near zero I consider session completely restored.
I just timed it for accuracy. When launched alone, on my M2 MBA, it's about 18 seconds to full draw of visible tab list, and 29 seconds to snappy interactivity. I didn't check CPU utilization.
Usually, when I launch this 20+Kt profile, I also launch 2-3 other profiles simultaneously (work 2Kt, personal/misc 3Kt, sometimes commerce 400t). I've noticed that they each peg a core while launching, but this is the only one that isn't ready quickly.
Same here. Used FF+Sidebery (and Tab Center Reborn before that) for years. ~5k tabs and it worked perfectly. With Chromium/Brave I can open maybe a hundred before the browser croaks and takes up all available memory.
I don't open heavy websites in FF, though. For youtube links, I always use Brave.
I generally have several thousand tabs open at a time. Hacker News is a big source of them. I use Simple Tab Groups and it takes a few seconds to switch from one group to another but I've become fairly okay with that. I use Auto Tab Discard so that most of the tabs are "hibernated" and don't consume so many resources.
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.
Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.
Given your nick, I must be your other, long lost twin. My workflow precisely!
Protip for a brain reset - right click on current tab - click close other tabs
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.
Second protip - the tab manager search is really useful, it will list out currently open and previously closed tabs for scanning, with a search feature. So searching open tabs is really fast, on Mac it is cmd + chift + a (think tAb).
I understand the need for hoarding tabs but it boggles my mind how people navigate tiny tabs and remember where everything is. In fact, they probably don't since I keep seeing people clicking back and forth a few times before finding the right tab.
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'm down to 7800 tabs (30 windows) on my main desktop. 4K on my other, 2K on my laptops. High was >11000 tabs. Firefox makes this easy; takes ~30 seconds to open all those windows and load a tab per window (plus ~8 pinned tabs)
"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).
And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)
I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.
This used to be an issue for me, but it seems that in Brave it unloads tabs efficiently enough that I can have many hundreds open (on an MBA) without adverse effect. The only time I go in and clear things out, it's when I need to reboot and have to categorize/save all my incognito tabs, which are wiped out on quit.
If this really is attributable to ADHD (and I’m sceptical) perhaps the opposite is those of us with (very mild, undiagnosed) OCD who insist on cleaning our tabs up several times a day?
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.
I wrote a Chrome Extension to save tabs to my local DB (till it stopped working with manifest v3) but I found all the tabs I saved I never actually used them again.
I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabsio/kfgpkekbcoae... (I have done zero marketing on this hence why basically no users)
I can't deal with having more than ~5 permananent tabs and 5 temporary open tabs. if i have so many tabs open i cant read what they are I know something has gone wrong with what I'm trying to do, so I try and reset.
I used to hoard tabs, but these days I just switch profiles. If I have over 2000 tabs, I copy maybe a hundred over to a new profile. It's just easier.
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.
> bookmarks only show titles and favicons
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.
:)
I switched to using Pinboard [0] for all bookmarking and never looked back.
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])
0 - https://pinboard.in
1 - https://sive.rs/dbt
I hoard tabs as well, and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-manager-p... has been a game changer. Let's me move them around within windows, which I like a lot. Let's me create windows that have specific purposes. The tree style tabs never sat right with me mentally, couldn't say why, I want each window to have a purpose.
So this person's solution was to write a series of bespoke apps that allows them to...save bookmarks with tags? Instead of just trying Pinboard or one of the other dozen existing products that do the same thing, or even the built-in Bookmarks which I think support tags in most browsers since many years now?
Thankfully Firefox helped me with tab hoarding dependency, by silently losing saves session without any visible crash or issue, just on the normal open. Now I have to treat tabs as if they won't be saved ever again and don't leave anything important open. Thanks Mozilla, great use of your time and money, spending them on useless LLM integration and lining CEOs pockets instead of fixing damn basic functionality.
So much this. Thankfully it hasn't lost tabs for me for a very long time, but I find it ridiculous that Firefox's session persistence is basically "yeah let's deserialize it into a single line of JSON and write it to disk every 15 seconds".
On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.
I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.
1. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here...
lol - Chrome does the same - state management is pure crap
I just close my browser and all tabs all the time. I cannot understand why this bothers people so much. I don't even bookmark stuff.
If its important, I just remember it.
Because some people might have 10 different things they're doing in any given day and sometimes their ADHD distracts them from one thing to the other and you don't want to lose all that context.
The article does actually explicitly address this as well.
>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
Every couple weeks, I click the red "x" and close all my tabs and start fresh.
This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.
Here's a more intermediate approach:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/
The basic idea: It closes any tab that has not been visited in the last N hours.
You can lock tabs to prevent them from closing (you can match on domain names, etc).
You can also see the last so many tabs it closed (1000? I forgot if this is configurable).
It's been fantastic. I don't need to manually manage tabs any more. I happily keep opening new tabs, knowing full well it will clean up after me.
This sort of denies there was any purpose to keep the tab open to begin with.
Tabs on mobile arent really the same.
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.
Why is their browser using so much memory? I'm quite bad at closing tabs since I've switched to vertical and just open new windows instead. And even with that I don't think I ever broke 10gb on edge except for when I opened many YouTube videos at once and then went through them which kept the tabs loaded
>reads title
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
Doesn't make sense to me, and I've been diagnosed with the same.
I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it?
Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.
if you're not like working on much then of course no need for many tabs, but I tend to ctrl click a lot of links / videos etc. so I end up with having 10 tabs in one window 5 in another, 15 one other etc...
and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe
I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?
You know in a chrome you can search through tabs, right?
> if I don't see something, I forget it exists.
To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.
This is exactly my experience. sometimes it does come handy, but most of the time it really doesn't matter. but that "risk" of potentially closing something that you'll need / want to look at later makes me just create a new window and drag that one in the background for safekeeping
I wrote a (not published to the store, it's kind of just for me) Chrome extension (together with Gemini, pretty early in the days of it) that attaches an expiration date to tabs. Works reasonably well to cure it (except I keep setting many to 31 days… but eventually a month passes)
If you’ve hit the 500 tabs for a tab group limit on iPhone and opened another group you’re a real tab boarder like me!
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.
Haven't read the article yet, but I added it to my HN favorites to read later...
On a related note, I see that my oldest "favorite" is from September 2016, but I've been on HN since 2009. Is that around when the "favorites" feature was added? Or is it possible that some older favorites have been dropped?
I'm so tired of this topic.
"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.
The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
> The problem is hardly a resource one
Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.
> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles
Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.
> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.
I might typically have 4-5 tabs open for serious work, and then 0 when not.. am I the weird one? I've never once found value with tab groups or multiple sessions
The worst part of tab hoarding is when your browser crashes or your computer powers off. My hoard is gone! I'm penni^H^H^H^H^Htabless!!!
If you don't read it instantly and bookmarking it is too much of a hassle it wasn't important to begin with.
https://archive.today/8z09s
The title is a bit confusing so I want to clarify that not all tab hoarders are insane.
This is why I used ReadItLater and now Instapaper. It's integrated in my ebook reader too.
Subscription Bookmarking apps will never be part of my workflow.
I just use Safari to fix my tab hoarding issue because tabs on Safari sucks.
Tree Style Tab for Firefox is your friend. Hoard away and look like a pro doing it
Select all tabs, save as bookmarks, close all. Every couple of months
Alt link: <https://xcancel.com/borisandcrispin/status/20087094790687949...>
I save to Instapaper instead of keeping the tab open.
great, another tab I'm going to keep open till I get around to it
...is it normal for Terminal to be using nearly 5GB memory?
[dead]
[flagged]