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Comment by Houshalter | Hacker News Reader

I am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it.

Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I feel they are important to read but don't feel motivated to do so ever.

I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt. So I had to triage away the least important tabs and bookmark them or force myself to read them, just to keep my computer running. I just starting using firefox though, which is not helping this bad habit.

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Hello, you mention it as a serious problem. I agree and I think it's good to be aware of it.

I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.

Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.

You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.

"You're holding it wrong"?

Greetings fellow hoarder. Should you be using Chrome I highly recommend the great suspender. It will unload tabs from memory if they're not used after a set time. That way one can open and return at your leisure without as much of an impact.

That sounds interesting. What happened when you return to a suspended tab?

It's immediately reloaded. As far as I can remember you can set it to reload from cache or it will download it again.

In my experience (unlike my sibling comment), it displays a mostly blank page with a "click to reload" link.

I am in the same boat as you. I hoard on tabs, having over 200 Chrome tabs on my macbook pro, over 350 on the Ubuntu desktop, same over 350 on the Windows Desktop and 16 Safari tabs on my iPhone 6. Finally to help with this issue I made https://summarybrew.com

Same. I stopped using bookmarks around 1999 or so because I found them to be a terrible solution to anything, really (it was a graveyard where links went to die, and this was before bookmark syncing was a thing, so you always forgot to back them up as well).

I've tried all the third-party type attempt to solve it (everything from saving the links in a textfile I always keep open to ReadItLater, OneTab, Pocket etc. All those things are where tabs go to die, never to be read again. More like ReadItNever, amirite?). That's a "solution" I guess.

Now I try to be more selective in what I "keep" to read later, and as soon as I hit 40-50 tabs, I go through and kill a bunch of them. It hurts a bit, but not as bad as when I have hundreds of tabs.

You are not alone.

I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt.

Yep, been there before too. My "light" laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so Chrome starts to dog out pretty quick if I go tab crazy on it. It can handle about 25 tabs and then it starts freezing the entire system for minutes at a time.

Fortunately my "big" machine has 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor so it can handle 4 or 5 Chrome windows each with oodles of tabs, 2 or 3 Eclipse instances, and various server processes all running at the same time. I just can't bear carrying that thing around because it weighs a frickin' ton. :-(

Yep, another here. I have tabs that have been there in FF for several months ...

I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.

Chrome has profiles. I use multiple profiles for this. You can easily have two or more profiles loaded and running at the same time, and each has its own cookie jar/login set. When I need to do it on a borrowed computer, then I just use incognito mode for the second profile.

I also use chrome profiles to separate my workspaces, so I don't have to load everything all the time and search through my tabs to find the one I want. I even sync them to different accounts.

Mobile is the only place I use multiple browsers, due to mobile browsers not supporting multiple windows, even though chrome has already had the functionality for it in the past (remember the chrome 'desktop' when chrome ran in metro mode? Alternatively, just have multiple entries in overview). On my tablet I have six browsers, which is probably more than I really need; two incognito browsers and four mobile browsers. Various combinations of add-ons (firefox) and not (chrome), incognito (focus and inbrowser) browsers, and browsers (chrome) with JavaScript disabled.

> (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers)

You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.

Exactly the same here. For Example at the moment it is Crypto Currency. Likely in the range of 50 Tabs.

Like you said about the boring material. I wouldn't think of them as boring. But detailed, and basically takes a long time to grasp. I will need to spend at least an hour or two on the topic. And i since it is not the most important things in life This two hours schedules gets put away for the time being.

Then there is the Apple News tabs hoard which happens in Apple Events.

I'm a hoarder in recovery, I try to consciously limit the number of tabs I open these days.

If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.

You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.

I have found Pocket to be very helpful in this regard. The key is to set it as your default page upon tab creation.

Using a bookmark manager like diigo might let you save those articles with your own keywords and search on those topics later.

The feature I like best about diigo is for what I do read, I can highlight the sentences I want to recall or locate later.

That just puts it out of sight, out of mind. I have thousands of meticulously tagged tabs, including a tag called "toread". I think I can count the number of those I've read without taking my shoes off. And if I want something in the future I generally find myself googling it.

But I have on more than one occasion been unable to remember how I got to a page, or even how to search for it, and in those times I found my system invaluable.

I find I don't bookmark a page as much as bookmark a sentence in my mind.

Less out of sight as well, the next time I do a google search, diigo plugin injects my existing stuff beside the search. I like the offline copy it keeps for me like you said.

It's not perfect but not a sinkhole of bookmarks.

Just don't use chrome, it is not at all suited for this use case.

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