Death by 1k Tabs: Confessions of a Tab Hoarder | Hacker News Reader

Death by 1k Tabs: Confessions of a Tab Hoarder

vice.com

18 pointspodiki17 comments

I'd been using 'tab suspender (memory saver)' with firefox for a long time - I'm not sure if this is the exact one that was bought by a spyware company? So I have been considering a new one - CodesInChaos mentions one-tab, I will look at that one today.

I recently discovered I can click one tab - then hold shift and select a group - and then move those to a new browser window - then ctrl-shift-D to save all into a bookmarks folder name.

I love doing that and sorting by subject and by date then hunting in that group makes it easier for me to re-get info later, which I love.

I 'm kind of shocked there is not some sort of extension or standalone software that will take my history and group chunks together like - bunch of tabs from yahoo news, a bunch from HN, a bunch from EntertainHub - and then also give the option to sort by date/time - all automatically with a few rules that are modifiable - would be great.

I think if some groups were able to be all saved local copy for archive would also make me feel better about just closing a bunch of tabs and not keeping them all open.

and also a todo-list of get-back to these tabs.. checkboxes - these pages to blog about - these to send to a friend.

some automation and UX changes would make a big impact.

If I could import these lists into other firefox profiles I could have one of those blog-this-press-this buttons for wordpresses that I used to use - haven't done that in a long time - need to look into that again.

// I recently discovered I can click one tab - then hold shift and select a group - and then move those to a new browser window - then ctrl-shift-D to save all into a bookmarks folder name. //

You can just select tabs then right click on a tab to bookmark all into a folder. No need for the new window stuff.

If you aren't already familiar with it, the "OneTab" extension is quite handy to me as a tab hoarder.

I just wish Safari would gave me a list of Tabs instead of Screen Shot in Tab Overview. And allow me to move or close Tabs in that list view.

Someday we will need to fix History, Bookmark and Tabs Hoard. All three are related and all three dont really fix our problem. Organise, retrieval and grouping of past information. Come to think about it. Browser UX has been pretty much the same for the past 20 years.

Currently sitting at 293 Tabs. Which is much better than my past self but still way too much.

> Currently sitting at 293 Tabs.

I hope you aren't on an iPad. At 500, Safari won't allow you to open any new ones.

That's happened to me twice now and that's the point at which I just close every single one of them and "start over".

What's frustrating is you can't solve this with tech anymore.

For my last gaming build I bought a boatload of RAM thinking it'd let me have my tabs and play games without issue...

At some number of tabs well before you've maxed out your RAM your entire system slows to a crawl and you end up having to close them all anyways

I find browsers (or at least my Firefox set up) much better at not loading every single tab, at least after you start up the browser with previous tabs. If you just leave it open and keep opening tabs...yeah that adds up. Though of course there are extensions to deal with that too, auto sleeping a tab. (I had a bad experience with one such extension a long time ago, that lost a lot of tabs. aaaagh)

On Windows yes [0] on macOS not so much [1]

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ldDTgp5irKA

This hasn't been the case for Firefox and Safari, and quite recently on Chrome.

Those tabs that are not active will be unloaded after a period of time. And if you close your browser and reopen, all of tabs will remain but unload by default. So they are more like a list.

This is how it should work, but eventually Chrome will grind to a halt

A big part of it seems to be sites with memory leaks which for one reason or another aren't suspended

I don't get why there even needs to be a separate concept between bookmarks and tabs. They both represent a webpage you have saved.

A tab retains the history (could hit back and go to the page that led me there), a booknark does not.

As a tab hoarder (I hit 7k at one point), I recommend using an extension like one-tab, which closes the tabs, but preserves them.

I've seen that recommended in several places. I think for me (author of the article) it really comes down to taking more control and not just mindlessly opening things. In the end I do keep saving these tabs, but never look at them. Then again, maybe that's enough, to just know they are there if you ever "need" them again. More likely I'll just reach for a web search though.

Why would you ever want to have 7k tabs open at once? Surely this is a joke?

I didn't close unread tabs for a couple of years, so they kept accumulating.

I see, so not for any practical purposes?

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