Zero. I think I’m the odd one out here. I have a habit of closing all tabs once I’m done, always have.
I dig it, start fresh each time.
Exactly. I cannot comprehend people with dozens of windows with thousands of them. How do you find literally anything at that point?
I usually close all, sometimes if I start a long video I'll keep it open and paused until I come back to watch more of it. But that's just one, and just because that site won't remember where I left off, and I don't want to memorize what the timestamp is. I will have to refresh the page to get it to resume loading the video, but I can remember the timestamp for the 2 seconds it takes to reload and click back to it. But I'll forget if I have to come back hours later.
How do you find literally anything at that point?
I got so used to the Safari tab system that I decided to replicate it in Firefox (recently switched).
For me Three Styles Tabs and Simple Tabs Groups have helped me enormously to keep track of all of my tabs, additionally, I think you can search your tabs within the search section.
As almost all crap I have, I keep categories/groups of it:
Random searches
NAS related stuff
Mac related stuff etc.
The part I can't figure out is why?
Bookmarks/favorites are designed specifically for managing large collections of more or less frequently accessed sites. They have descriptions, tags, folder structures, etc all built in and requiring a few kb of disk space each instead of 100MB of RAM. I'm wracking my brain for a reason why deliberately keeping hundreds or thousands of tabs loaded could possibly be more effective at managing a collection of resources. I got nothing though...
Well, using the aforementioned add-ons is way faster IMHO.
Have you ever given a look at Vivaldi browser? That is power user tab management indeed.
I only use bookmarks to, well bookmark links that I really like a lot, not anything related to "ongoing projects".
On top of that, browsers can offload the tabs thus making the ram usage minimal, but yeah that would only be useful if you have a ton of stuff opened.
On linux, with kde, there is usually a browser extension preinstalled called plasma integration.
It makes it so that when you search from the KDE equivalent of window's start menu, you can also search open browser tabs or history.
I close all tabs once I'm done, but when trying to solve a programming/devops related problem, having lots of tabs open lets me see more than one approach to a problem, along with opinions, side by side.
And research in general requires a lot of tabs, in my experience.
That's kinda nifty. I had no idea that was there.
So that's not the norm?
Judging by a lot of the replies and other discussions I’ve seen, no it’s not the norm.
So how did you type this comment?
I’m using an iPhone app. Nothing to do with a web browser or tabs.
my firefox app gave up counting and just shows an infinity symbol :(
That's all I ever see on my wife's phone in Chrome. Just a smiley face. Personally it bugs the shit out of me. I close any unwanted tabs.
hey I saw that as well on my wife’s chrome on phone, it’s really scary
chrome don't have a way to automaticly close tabs like firefox?
Not that I know of
phone in Chrome
I was so confused when I saw that face in my parents phones, I thought it was some kind of easter egg, well, maybe it actually is.
That's.. kinda scary. How much RAM do you have?
Doesn't matter that much if they're unloaded.
take notes Chrome
Chrome in Android behaves very similar to Firefox, perhaps a bit more aggressive due to being a system app.
Firefox in macOS keeps all my tabs open, and that is a huge perk for me, Safari would just randomly unload them because of high resource usage crap, like dude, I have 16 GBs or RAM, let me hoard enjoy it.
5k tabs
At 1k tabs firefox was snappy and responsive, but at 5k tabs it was bad, very unstable, buggy and sluggish.
Firefox would crash often even doing simple tasks, some times it took 2 or 3 tries to open firefox. scrolling through all the tabs a couple of minutes.
But all good things must come to an end. Now I close any extra tabs, have 5 - 30 tabs open.
Who are you so wise in the ways of tabs?
I am in awe.
Legitimate question - just how do you accumulate 5K tabs? Did you just never close any tabs, like ever?
Something like that.
At first I opened tabs for ”This sounds interesting I will read / watch it later” or ”I'll probably need it later” This got me to ~300 - 800 tabs but then it became a joke, I just left tabs open knowing full well where not needed.
Some times keeping all tabs open payed off like, using the search feature to find back to a project I left off. This happened very rarely.
I think this is a generational question. I'm anal about tabs being left open like a light in the house being on
My ex and I were the same age and totally different on this. I open tabs, close them, don’t leave any open long term. She’d have Safari open with dozens or hundreds as far as I could tell. But I operate like an older millennial and she has the sensibilities of a boomer - TV on 18 hours a day, etc
TV on 18 hours a day, etc
Damn, this frames boomer mentality perfectly.
It particularly drives me insane. I've known people of that age to act super worried if they go somewhere and there's not a TV they can have on. My ex would call it 'background noise' which is exactly what I don't want... annoying and repetitive commercials, concerning and distracting news broadcasts, fictional people engaged in trauma - why not some music? or silence? I've also wondered, what's the psychology of having dialogue playing on a loudspeaker all day and just tuning it out? I pointed out to her that no wonder she seemed to have a hard time listening to me in conversation when she has trained herself to hear people talking all day and not pay any attention to what they're saying. Leaving TVs on when nobody is watching them seems really improper to me too.
Which generation leaves them open/closed?
I haven't noticed a pattern, but I also haven't really explored
Both of my parents are/were notorious for leaving roughly 655489357 tabs open at a time. I get stressed if I have more than a couple at a time. We're boomers/a millennial, respectively. But it could also be a result of my severe anxiety. Who knows?
Interesting
I think my whole family uses few tabs. For me, once I can't read the titles easily, I start splitting them into separate windows and virtual desktops. Once I finish a task associated with a window I close it
It's so nice when I can restart the browser clean
If I'm not actively using a tab, I'll close it, unless I'm working on a longer term project. Right now I'm planning a fairly long trip to South America, so I've had several travel sites up for multiple weeks.
Edit: am X/millennial cusp.
Fun fact: if you open more than 100 tabs in chrome (at least on android), it no longer shows the number of open tabs, it just says ":D".
If it's incognito tabs, it says ";)".
I haven't seen a number in years. This means I'd have to count manually which I'm not going to do. Hope this answers your question sufficiently.
On Firefox it's an infinity symbol.
100 incognito tabs
You're picky indeed, my friend.
I didn't know about that feature. Kinda snarky of the devs if you ask me. Good luck with your tabs!
You should get vertical tabs on your browser. Tree style tab for Firefox is pretty good.
I prefer Sidebery, but vertical tabs of any sort are the way to go. Plus userChrome.css to nuke the top tab bar.
Sidebery is the best
Thank you for the suggestion!
100's. It's easy when using a tool like tree tabs.
I have several different ongoing projects with different avenues of research and I use it like a temporary store until I organise and store them.
I should go back to tree tabs. On my old laptop I got firefox properly messed up and got rid of a lot of addons.
4
if tab not relevant to task then am close
What happens when you have more than 4 relevant tabs 🙃
am only close irrelevant ones
Had 300 on my laptop a while ago, finished up a project which let me drop it down to 160.
On my desktop I have 1,300 or so. Both of them on a single Firefox window with Sidebery
Have you used TreeStyleTab? I'm wondering how it compares with Sidebery
I started with TST actually! I can't remember the exact reasons but I thiiink I switched over to Sidebery for better/faster session restores
Wow and I thought I had a lot. I salute you.
But why?
And how many of those can be closed?
Cuz I use them as a way to keep tabs (heh) on different projects I'm involved in. Tree tabs are much faster for me to organize into folders compared to bookmarks since they're already part of my flow of using tabs in the first place :)
That being said, I end up using them more as a way to search through pages I had opened before, using the URL bar. Browser history is a little more finicky to search in that regard
As for how many I can close, I tend to close tabs once I'm done with something in a project (though some tabs I keep around if i find them to be useful beyond that specific project). I also have a bunch of tabs open for music and videos that I want to share with my friends when they get time which could be closed once I share them
That's a heck of a lot of tabs there. Good luck with them!
Finally someone who had a decent amount! Last time I checked I had 1100!
How do people manage to have more than 6 tabs open? What is this talk about 500-1000+?
I do when researching buying a product, having different tabs open comparing different models, with each their different stores and a bunch of reviews. You can easily get more than 20.
Same with researching a science topic.
But after being done, those tabs get closed. I rather start with a fresh browser each time.
As soon as I can't see letters anymore I just burn it all down and start with a fresh window
burn it all down
People with Burn my windows GNOME extension:
Duck Duck Go mobile has a fun burn animation for clearing too
Tabs I want to get back to later but never do is why I'm in the 1000+ camp
We have something wrong with us, that's all.
136
Most are unloaded. Using Firefox and sidebery on Linux with 32GB of RAM.
Very similar 153 tabs currently, had to check with Tab Session Manager for the count. Linux with 32Gb Ram. Firefox gets restarted maybe every 2-4 weeks. Occasionally I kill a tab that takes more then 1Gb of memory.
I use Tab Counter Plus and put the number at the top of the sidebery sidebar.
My mindset is, I paid for 64GB of RAM, I'm gonna use all of it
I dig it. Thanks for the details!
Seeing that many tabs gives me actual anxiety.
How can anyone even track them? Like is there anyone out there with that many tabs open who actually knows which is which?
I don't need to know which is which, they're more or less sorted by recency. So I go through the most recent tabs and get the info I need or do the task associated, then close them, until I get back to the previous task or subject.
Sometimes I get interrupted with a new thing to look up or do, and more tabs get made and the cycle begins anew, regardless of how many already exist.
Some projects last days or weeks, and tabs related to them end up being longer-lived. If I get on one of those tabs and don't want to work on the project right then, I'll continue going back (leftwards) til I find something I can do or read in the time I have available. So I definitely have tabs that have been open for months but I do need to get to eventually.
Also, sometimes when I need to look at something I know I have (or had) open in a tab, I'll just search for it (literally, i.e. Google) again in a new tab and handle it there. Then if I do come across the old tab, it gets closed quickly.
I'm "done" when I'm back at my inbox or calendar (first or 2nd tabs, pinned). This rarely happens and when it does I'm sure there is a something in my email or a new ticket in JIRA for me to start on...
So overall it's not about knowing what's in each tab, but having a system to navigate them that works for you.
Your reason is actually totally justified, and I do the same at times, but I have never needed too many tabs. I think the max I've ever needed was like 7 or something like that. I'm talking about people like my wife where her browser on her phone shows an infinity sign from how many tabs she has open 😂
Yea I didn't know about the infinity (or smiley face in chrome apparently) until reading this thread. Most I've ever had is probably in the 60 range, but on average probably 25-35.
The infinity and smiley will show when you're over 99 tabs.
Me too :( Since about 2017 I've been telling myself I'll get around to cleaning them.
Zero. Maybe it's the OCD, but I never ever leave open a tab I'm not actively using, even if it means I open and close the same few tabs every five minutes for 8 hours every day.
Yeah, probably the ocd lmao.
I just closed 47. All of them Amazon...
My best friend is having a babby...
Xmas...
Starting a small business and tools are needed...
I just moved to south Florida, and the bugs are the size of house cats, so I require a salt shotgun...
SO. MANY. HOLIDAY. DEALS.
Like I've never been a shopping addict, but I had a budget of about $1000 for all of that, and I blew through it QUICK.
I could see how it could be addictive, but I do know when to walk away.
the bugs are the size of house cats
Lmao, I feel that in my soul
When I first moved to south Louisiana, I encountered a giant (black and orange) grasshopper. My first thoughts were along the lines of, "Wtf kind of grasshopper is that!? Did I move to fucking Jurassic Park or something!? Fuck!"
It was very jarring to see insects so big (milipedes that excrete some kinda fluid when touched, ground spiders, thunker af orb weavers, wood roaches flying)... now that I actually type it out, it still seems like Jurassic Park almost 20 years later lol; but I'm not much bothered anymore by most of them.
But the electrified tennis racquet for killing mosquitos... that shit is priceless. Wish I could find the $5 walmart ones still, because I would dual wield them and have extra for guests. I've gone from mosquito prey to predator, and it's a joy
The way people use tabs is bizarre to me. My ex would have so many open that it was really difficult to navigate between them. Seems like a better idea to use features like bookmarks or reading list.
It depends on what you are doing.
I do programming and I need access to project management sites, communication sites, documetations (language and library) and tools sites opened.
When I am researching the topics I am not very familiar I usually read 4 or 5 sources. So in the middle of developing a feature I have at least tens of tabs.
When it combined with home lab servers, entainments, side readings and related readings I usually tends to end up with hundreds.
I used to have 20-30 open at a time when I was doing the same things, but I can't imagine building up to hundreds. Maybe I'd leave them open for the next day, but generally I try to stay more organized than that. When you have hundreds of tabs open you can't even see the titles so I find it a lot more difficult to navigate between them.
Firefox and Sidebery let me do that.
Before that I have tabs opened in 3 or 4 windows each with 20 or 30 opened.
I agree. I think it's more of an organizational deficiency for me.
Or just open multiple windows if you have multiple projects open.
This one. I used to have a bunch of tabs pinned but having to restore them frequently just became a hassle, so I added them to my bookmarks.
When I start up, I right click on a folder and "open all in new tabs"
Then shift click to pin them again. Makes it easier to restart when I need to
I think you can middle-click the folder.
I need to do that. I hate when pinned tabs crash or get messed up.
Zero. Not using a browser right now but I usually only have 1-2. Anything more than 6 tabs open and I start getting turned around.
That sounds like a healthy approach to web browsing. I dig it.
Bare minimum is 7 cus they are pinned. These are tabs I reference constantly. 2 for monitoring servers, 2 for emails, 2 for chat, 1 for lofi girl.
After that it's just based on the current project. So anywhere from 1 for browsing to 20 while doing research.
Add another 7 if you include my work computer for the various sites I work out of.
I try to close anything not currently used quite often and just store things in bookmarks.
A few hundred. At the end of a “project/idea/thing” I’ll bookmark the entire set, dated, described, and close them all at once, things always come back in need later. It’s very satisfying.
For normal day to day browsing I have a window with about 15 pinned tabs that I just cycle through in the morning catching up on stuff and then close that window.
I had over 2000 in Firefox. That's when I decided to clear them...
All those tabs... Lost to time...
I mean I love tabs, use em all the time. But currently my computer has just 1 open.
I don't use em as bookmarks to get back to. People seem to just hoard them. And for no reason.
You can't tell me there's a good reason to keep hundreds open. It's just laziness at that point.
You're correct. I don't pretend that more than a dozen of mine are actively used anymore.
69 (okay actually it was 67 but I opened a few more to make it the funny number)
After closing a dozen left over from looking up various topics over the last few days, 164 tabs, some of which are probably 5 years old. I swear I'll look at them someday!
You're entering the danger zone of tab hoarding there..
At current count, 911. I used to sit around 3000 but managed to shave it down, now it's creeping back up.
Too many things I want to download or read later and not as much time as I used to have. I have been making an effort to use alternative methods though such as bookmarks, YouTube playlists, or just, you know, doing the thing in the moment.
More than I can count thats for sure.
∞
I use a browser extension that closes the least recently used tab after 15 minutes. It stops closing when it reaches five for the current window.
I don't think I'm missing anything.
That sounds cool! Do you have the name?
Tab Wrangler
It fluctuates as I'm researching a topic to me snapping out of it and realizing "damn that's a lot of tabs" and closing pretty much all of them.
So it usually goes from around 30 or something, down to 3 or 5 and it repeats.
On my phone I do actually have 1,500 since my browser opens another one everytime I use search on the home screen
Right now? 2. Generally? under 10.
I envy that, it certainly sounds like the proper amount.
Zero across my phone and desktop at the moment. Having more than around 5 tabs open at once does not sit well with me.
Usually one, maximum 10.
I admire your self control!
Look, it's not self control. Too many tabs just scare me.
I'm scared of them too, it's just too late for me haha.
Just close them. Can always do another search when you really need it. It'll sit in your history anyway.
I've never found searching browsing history to be very reliable. I guess it's just a preference.
I use multiple profiles. Got both personal and work ones for both me and the wife, close the windows when they're not active, and they are set to keep track of the tabs. But keeping them open? Hell no. And I'm retired now. It's been six months since I've used the work profile.
If you want to do profiles (in Firefox), add -p to the shortcut's target line, at least in windows. I think. It's been a while since I set it up. It's -p somewhere
I'm the same. Too many tabs confuses me and I start clicking around forgetting what I was doing. Keep it to a minimum.
24 on my mobile browser. Not too bad, really.
8 windows, ~17 tabs.
That's a pretty good mix.
Basically just an evolution of the same way I used my desktop 20 years ago. Always had this concept of an Internet-connected computer as a dynamic newspaper, windows were individual columns arranged around the page/screen. Used to be a bunch of IRC windows along the bottom of my screen, maybe a couple of MSN windows up the side, and one or two browser windows (substitute one browser window with an email client or RSS reader) taking up the rest of the screen.
Well now everything is javascript. Google had the same idea with Google Wave a few years later, they abandoned it, but the javascript future happened anyway. Bunch of tiny browser windows along the bottom of the screen for discord, two large ones across the top for everything else (webmail, content aggregators like lemmy have largely replaced RSS), and a couple more on a second monitor.
None. I open as many as I need then close every single one of them before closing my browser. That also includes my phone browser
Usually not more then 30 before I close most of them with "Close all tabs to the right".
I have browsing history so don't need tabs.
Agreed. My rule of thumb is: if it takes enough more than a second to figure out why I had the tab open, then I might as well just close it and re-open it if the need to have it available reemerges. It takes a lot of effort (several seconds and a lot of mental energy) to create the mental context that I need to make use of the tab. On the other hand, opening it takes a few seconds and requires little to no thought whatsoever.
So I just close them. In fact, having too many tabs open just makes it take longer to find the open tabs that I'm actually currently using.
one
No more than around 10, I actively try to keep the number of tabs I have in check. Sometimes I quit the browser and reopen tabs again as a way clear my head.
The zen method. I dig it.
Eleven. Kinda felt like that was too many though.
I organize my tabs by topic window (small project, chunk of work for a larger project, related idea) then kick them into onetab as a bundle with a short description when I'm done with whatever it is I needed them for.
I typically have 5-30 tabs open in topic windows at any time but I can open onetab and ctrl-f to find anything I've saved over the last 7 or 8 years. There must be 5000 tabs in there at this point.
You are the tab master. Thank you for describing your workflow!
None. I bookmark stuff if I need to come back.
I envy your discipline.
Yeah but my bookmarks likely massively outweigh your tabs haha
I tried keeping up with bookmarks before I entered this stage of tabbed life. I have 1378 bookmarks, almost all of them neglected at this point.
Bookmarks are good though. How many do you have?
7 at most
On my phone I have 4 tabs but on my laptop I have 4 windows open each having 10 tabs open
Eight.
Around 5 or 6 most the time. I can't manage more than that.
That's a good number.
Zero. I don't have a browser open, just a phone app.
I'm still counting that as one. What app do you use and how do you like it?
Boost. I used Boost for Reddit, so this app for Lemmy feels very familiar.
I like how few taps it takes to switch accounts. I like how I can set my default feed and sort and it sticks where some other lemmy apps I tried frequently reset to a trending feed, gross.
I like the feature that allows me to apply a custom tag to users that only I can see. I use it to keep an eye on potential trolls. If I have a person tagged as "MAGA troll", I know not to engage with them but to grab the popcorn and enjoy the ride.
Thanks!
16, counting this one that I'm about to close.
If I leave a tab open for more than a couple of days, I bookmark it and then close it.
5-6 per open project at work and other work, so, about a thousand.
Really about 50-80 in 20 windows because I've only just learned of tab groups.
Six.
That's a good number!
Usually about 10-30. It depends. I have a minimum of 6010 tabs open for stuff I check several times a day, like mail, news feeds, and such. Then I have a few working projects, like Google docs. Then some "temporary tabs" that expand from 10 to 30, as a reminder of tasks I have to complete or get back to someone on, only to shrink them down later in the day.
As someone who is anal about closing tabs, the answers in this thread hurt my soul.
Genuine question, why so many tabs? What are you using them all for??
I'm not too happy about them either. To some extent I think I avoid organizing them because leaving them as tabs makes them more "pressing" for me to some day get to reading. I'm like a failed data hoarder/archivist.
mostly less than five.
but if I'm programming it's around 50-70
Never more than ten. Currently, seven.
probably around 300, split into 2 windows, one "main" and one that's effectively my YouTube to watch list
Why not add them to the watch later list?
unless they've changed it, removing videos from the list I don't want to watch always felt like a hassle, closing tabs is easier and has an easy "undo" function
That's pretty interesting, I find myself doing that with 3-5 youtube videos at a time. I'll watch maybe two and eventually close the window and lose the others.
Typically 1~10. Four right now (all four are Lemmy: inbox, another thread, front page, this thread)
I close them as the tabs bar feels cluttered and/or I see no reason to keep them open.
6
18 pinned, 3 non-pinned.
I dig it.
One
I'm on my phone so none.
Apps however...
Apps ought to count, given so many of them should have just been a webpage in the first place.
24, including the one I opened for this thread.
24 is a respectable number. Not too cluttered but still getting things done. Do you keep them on a single window?
Yes, all in one window.
... although you just reminded me I have another tab open in a separate window, and 4 more open in a private window. I'll close those windows once I stop working on them though.
4 windows with 36 tabs on my desktop, 29 tabs on my phone browser. In my defense I'm shopping for a pillow and need to compare and find something that will work. It's not going well because it is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't cheap Chinese shit nowadays. Even the expensive "top brand" products not ordered from Amazon end up being low quality crap.
36 tabs for a pillow is a pretty thorough investigation. Good on you.
I usually have a minimum of 8 tabs open, but right now it's something like 24. I've recently gotten into a bad habit of opening tabs & not getting around to them until maybe a week or two, maybe sometimes more. I really need to sort out my tab game & start being more productive....
On my personal Firefox, five pinned and usually 3-4 more. On my work Firefox, six pinned and 4-6 more in one window, and probably another 6-10 on a window in the other monitor.
If I can't see at least part of the page title on each tab, I start feeling anxious. I do a lot of bookmarking, sending to Pocket, etc.
:D (I'm using my phone)
Three windows, with 7, 4 and 1 tab respectively.
I just did a big cleanup! I think it's down to about 40 on my work computer and 70ish on my computer.
Don't ask about the phone I'm typing this on... It's a lost cause.
Firefox on android keeps garbage collecting tabs too aggressively for me to do my thing.
I've set the browser to close all tabs when I close the broswer. So whenever I start, I start fresh. Doesn't seem to result in a mess.
I dunno like 25 in two windows.
Seldom more than 5 or 6 before using Firefox to 'close tabs to right'. It keeps a short history of recently visited URLs in the toolbar, and a deeper, searchable 'library' of visited sites going way back. Longer term interests I save to Bookmarks.
That sounds like a good process.
Too many. And I have honestly no idea.
:)
About five, maybe six most of the time.
Personal: right now I have 6 open. I might get up to 15-20 if I'm going down a rabbithole of some sort.
On a side note, Windows 11 finally put in an option to go back to normal Windows taskbar buttons so I can actually read tab titles from the taskbar:
Work (software engineer): sometimes dozens if I'm deep in the weeds with loads of reference pages open/etc.
am i the only person that prefers the combined labels?
No more than 10 per browser, i like using multiple browser profiles. For example one browser profile just for YouTube, the other for Reading.
I should be making better use of profiles. That's a good idea.
It’s especially useful if you use VPN. You should never use same browser for VPN and shopping for example.
I'm annoyed if I have more than 1 or 2 open.
Only time I open more is when I am downloading a big thing split into multiple files and I can only download a couple at a time due to the file host's BS.
Can recommend the Vivaldi browser.
It has some really neat tab management, worth checking out at least for people who hoard tabs 🫣
Zero. I think I’m the odd one out here. I have a habit of closing all tabs once I’m done, always have.
I dig it, start fresh each time.
Exactly. I cannot comprehend people with dozens of windows with thousands of them. How do you find literally anything at that point?
I usually close all, sometimes if I start a long video I'll keep it open and paused until I come back to watch more of it. But that's just one, and just because that site won't remember where I left off, and I don't want to memorize what the timestamp is. I will have to refresh the page to get it to resume loading the video, but I can remember the timestamp for the 2 seconds it takes to reload and click back to it. But I'll forget if I have to come back hours later.
I got so used to the Safari tab system that I decided to replicate it in Firefox (recently switched).
For me Three Styles Tabs and Simple Tabs Groups have helped me enormously to keep track of all of my tabs, additionally, I think you can search your tabs within the search section.
As almost all crap I have, I keep categories/groups of it:
Random searches
NAS related stuff
Mac related stuff etc.
The part I can't figure out is why?
Bookmarks/favorites are designed specifically for managing large collections of more or less frequently accessed sites. They have descriptions, tags, folder structures, etc all built in and requiring a few kb of disk space each instead of 100MB of RAM. I'm wracking my brain for a reason why deliberately keeping hundreds or thousands of tabs loaded could possibly be more effective at managing a collection of resources. I got nothing though...
Well, using the aforementioned add-ons is way faster IMHO.
Have you ever given a look at Vivaldi browser? That is power user tab management indeed.
I only use bookmarks to, well bookmark links that I really like a lot, not anything related to "ongoing projects".
On top of that, browsers can offload the tabs thus making the ram usage minimal, but yeah that would only be useful if you have a ton of stuff opened.
On linux, with kde, there is usually a browser extension preinstalled called plasma integration.
It makes it so that when you search from the KDE equivalent of window's start menu, you can also search open browser tabs or history.
I close all tabs once I'm done, but when trying to solve a programming/devops related problem, having lots of tabs open lets me see more than one approach to a problem, along with opinions, side by side.
And research in general requires a lot of tabs, in my experience.
That's kinda nifty. I had no idea that was there.
So that's not the norm?
Judging by a lot of the replies and other discussions I’ve seen, no it’s not the norm.
So how did you type this comment?
I’m using an iPhone app. Nothing to do with a web browser or tabs.
my firefox app gave up counting and just shows an infinity symbol :(
That's all I ever see on my wife's phone in Chrome. Just a smiley face. Personally it bugs the shit out of me. I close any unwanted tabs.
hey I saw that as well on my wife’s chrome on phone, it’s really scary
chrome don't have a way to automaticly close tabs like firefox?
Not that I know of
I was so confused when I saw that face in my parents phones, I thought it was some kind of easter egg, well, maybe it actually is.
That's.. kinda scary. How much RAM do you have?
Doesn't matter that much if they're unloaded.
take notes Chrome
Chrome in Android behaves very similar to Firefox, perhaps a bit more aggressive due to being a system app.
Firefox in macOS keeps all my tabs open, and that is a huge perk for me, Safari would just randomly unload them because of high resource usage crap, like dude, I have 16 GBs or RAM, let me
hoardenjoy it.5k tabs
At 1k tabs firefox was snappy and responsive, but at 5k tabs it was bad, very unstable, buggy and sluggish.
Firefox would crash often even doing simple tasks, some times it took 2 or 3 tries to open firefox. scrolling through all the tabs a couple of minutes.
But all good things must come to an end. Now I close any extra tabs, have 5 - 30 tabs open.
Who are you so wise in the ways of tabs?
I am in awe.
Legitimate question - just how do you accumulate 5K tabs? Did you just never close any tabs, like ever?
Something like that. At first I opened tabs for ”This sounds interesting I will read / watch it later” or ”I'll probably need it later” This got me to ~300 - 800 tabs but then it became a joke, I just left tabs open knowing full well where not needed. Some times keeping all tabs open payed off like, using the search feature to find back to a project I left off. This happened very rarely.
I think this is a generational question. I'm anal about tabs being left open like a light in the house being on
My ex and I were the same age and totally different on this. I open tabs, close them, don’t leave any open long term. She’d have Safari open with dozens or hundreds as far as I could tell. But I operate like an older millennial and she has the sensibilities of a boomer - TV on 18 hours a day, etc
Damn, this frames boomer mentality perfectly.
It particularly drives me insane. I've known people of that age to act super worried if they go somewhere and there's not a TV they can have on. My ex would call it 'background noise' which is exactly what I don't want... annoying and repetitive commercials, concerning and distracting news broadcasts, fictional people engaged in trauma - why not some music? or silence? I've also wondered, what's the psychology of having dialogue playing on a loudspeaker all day and just tuning it out? I pointed out to her that no wonder she seemed to have a hard time listening to me in conversation when she has trained herself to hear people talking all day and not pay any attention to what they're saying. Leaving TVs on when nobody is watching them seems really improper to me too.
Which generation leaves them open/closed?
I haven't noticed a pattern, but I also haven't really explored
Both of my parents are/were notorious for leaving roughly 655489357 tabs open at a time. I get stressed if I have more than a couple at a time. We're boomers/a millennial, respectively. But it could also be a result of my severe anxiety. Who knows?
Interesting
I think my whole family uses few tabs. For me, once I can't read the titles easily, I start splitting them into separate windows and virtual desktops. Once I finish a task associated with a window I close it
It's so nice when I can restart the browser clean
If I'm not actively using a tab, I'll close it, unless I'm working on a longer term project. Right now I'm planning a fairly long trip to South America, so I've had several travel sites up for multiple weeks.
Edit: am X/millennial cusp.
Fun fact: if you open more than 100 tabs in chrome (at least on android), it no longer shows the number of open tabs, it just says ":D".
If it's incognito tabs, it says ";)".
I haven't seen a number in years. This means I'd have to count manually which I'm not going to do. Hope this answers your question sufficiently.
On Firefox it's an infinity symbol.
You're picky indeed, my friend.
I didn't know about that feature. Kinda snarky of the devs if you ask me. Good luck with your tabs!
You should get vertical tabs on your browser. Tree style tab for Firefox is pretty good.
I prefer Sidebery, but vertical tabs of any sort are the way to go. Plus userChrome.css to nuke the top tab bar.
Sidebery is the best
Thank you for the suggestion!
100's. It's easy when using a tool like tree tabs.
I have several different ongoing projects with different avenues of research and I use it like a temporary store until I organise and store them.
I should go back to tree tabs. On my old laptop I got firefox properly messed up and got rid of a lot of addons.
4
if tab not relevant to task then am close
What happens when you have more than 4 relevant tabs 🙃
am only close irrelevant ones
Had 300 on my laptop a while ago, finished up a project which let me drop it down to 160.
On my desktop I have 1,300 or so. Both of them on a single Firefox window with Sidebery
Have you used TreeStyleTab? I'm wondering how it compares with Sidebery
I started with TST actually! I can't remember the exact reasons but I thiiink I switched over to Sidebery for better/faster session restores
Wow and I thought I had a lot. I salute you.
But why?
And how many of those can be closed?
Cuz I use them as a way to keep tabs (heh) on different projects I'm involved in. Tree tabs are much faster for me to organize into folders compared to bookmarks since they're already part of my flow of using tabs in the first place :)
That being said, I end up using them more as a way to search through pages I had opened before, using the URL bar. Browser history is a little more finicky to search in that regard
As for how many I can close, I tend to close tabs once I'm done with something in a project (though some tabs I keep around if i find them to be useful beyond that specific project). I also have a bunch of tabs open for music and videos that I want to share with my friends when they get time which could be closed once I share them
That's a heck of a lot of tabs there. Good luck with them!
Finally someone who had a decent amount! Last time I checked I had 1100!
How do people manage to have more than 6 tabs open? What is this talk about 500-1000+?
I do when researching buying a product, having different tabs open comparing different models, with each their different stores and a bunch of reviews. You can easily get more than 20.
Same with researching a science topic.
But after being done, those tabs get closed. I rather start with a fresh browser each time.
As soon as I can't see letters anymore I just burn it all down and start with a fresh window
People with Burn my windows GNOME extension:
Duck Duck Go mobile has a fun burn animation for clearing too
Tabs I want to get back to later but never do is why I'm in the 1000+ camp
We have something wrong with us, that's all.
136
Most are unloaded. Using Firefox and sidebery on Linux with 32GB of RAM.
Very similar 153 tabs currently, had to check with Tab Session Manager for the count. Linux with 32Gb Ram. Firefox gets restarted maybe every 2-4 weeks. Occasionally I kill a tab that takes more then 1Gb of memory.
I use Tab Counter Plus and put the number at the top of the sidebery sidebar.
My mindset is, I paid for 64GB of RAM, I'm gonna use all of it
I dig it. Thanks for the details!
Seeing that many tabs gives me actual anxiety.
How can anyone even track them? Like is there anyone out there with that many tabs open who actually knows which is which?
I don't need to know which is which, they're more or less sorted by recency. So I go through the most recent tabs and get the info I need or do the task associated, then close them, until I get back to the previous task or subject.
Sometimes I get interrupted with a new thing to look up or do, and more tabs get made and the cycle begins anew, regardless of how many already exist.
Some projects last days or weeks, and tabs related to them end up being longer-lived. If I get on one of those tabs and don't want to work on the project right then, I'll continue going back (leftwards) til I find something I can do or read in the time I have available. So I definitely have tabs that have been open for months but I do need to get to eventually.
Also, sometimes when I need to look at something I know I have (or had) open in a tab, I'll just search for it (literally, i.e. Google) again in a new tab and handle it there. Then if I do come across the old tab, it gets closed quickly.
I'm "done" when I'm back at my inbox or calendar (first or 2nd tabs, pinned). This rarely happens and when it does I'm sure there is a something in my email or a new ticket in JIRA for me to start on...
So overall it's not about knowing what's in each tab, but having a system to navigate them that works for you.
Your reason is actually totally justified, and I do the same at times, but I have never needed too many tabs. I think the max I've ever needed was like 7 or something like that. I'm talking about people like my wife where her browser on her phone shows an infinity sign from how many tabs she has open 😂
Yea I didn't know about the infinity (or smiley face in chrome apparently) until reading this thread. Most I've ever had is probably in the 60 range, but on average probably 25-35.
The infinity and smiley will show when you're over 99 tabs.
Me too :( Since about 2017 I've been telling myself I'll get around to cleaning them.
Zero. Maybe it's the OCD, but I never ever leave open a tab I'm not actively using, even if it means I open and close the same few tabs every five minutes for 8 hours every day.
Yeah, probably the ocd lmao.
I just closed 47. All of them Amazon...
My best friend is having a babby...
Xmas...
Starting a small business and tools are needed...
I just moved to south Florida, and the bugs are the size of house cats, so I require a salt shotgun...
SO. MANY. HOLIDAY. DEALS.
Like I've never been a shopping addict, but I had a budget of about $1000 for all of that, and I blew through it QUICK.
I could see how it could be addictive, but I do know when to walk away.
Lmao, I feel that in my soul
When I first moved to south Louisiana, I encountered a giant (black and orange) grasshopper. My first thoughts were along the lines of, "Wtf kind of grasshopper is that!? Did I move to fucking Jurassic Park or something!? Fuck!"
It was very jarring to see insects so big (milipedes that excrete some kinda fluid when touched, ground spiders, thunker af orb weavers, wood roaches flying)... now that I actually type it out, it still seems like Jurassic Park almost 20 years later lol; but I'm not much bothered anymore by most of them.
But the electrified tennis racquet for killing mosquitos... that shit is priceless. Wish I could find the $5 walmart ones still, because I would dual wield them and have extra for guests. I've gone from mosquito prey to predator, and it's a joy
It depends on what you are doing.
I do programming and I need access to project management sites, communication sites, documetations (language and library) and tools sites opened.
When I am researching the topics I am not very familiar I usually read 4 or 5 sources. So in the middle of developing a feature I have at least tens of tabs.
When it combined with home lab servers, entainments, side readings and related readings I usually tends to end up with hundreds.
I used to have 20-30 open at a time when I was doing the same things, but I can't imagine building up to hundreds. Maybe I'd leave them open for the next day, but generally I try to stay more organized than that. When you have hundreds of tabs open you can't even see the titles so I find it a lot more difficult to navigate between them.
Firefox and Sidebery let me do that.
Before that I have tabs opened in 3 or 4 windows each with 20 or 30 opened.
I agree. I think it's more of an organizational deficiency for me.
Or just open multiple windows if you have multiple projects open.
This one. I used to have a bunch of tabs pinned but having to restore them frequently just became a hassle, so I added them to my bookmarks.
When I start up, I right click on a folder and "open all in new tabs"
Then shift click to pin them again. Makes it easier to restart when I need to
I think you can middle-click the folder.
I need to do that. I hate when pinned tabs crash or get messed up.
Zero. Not using a browser right now but I usually only have 1-2. Anything more than 6 tabs open and I start getting turned around.
That sounds like a healthy approach to web browsing. I dig it.
Bare minimum is 7 cus they are pinned. These are tabs I reference constantly. 2 for monitoring servers, 2 for emails, 2 for chat, 1 for lofi girl.
After that it's just based on the current project. So anywhere from 1 for browsing to 20 while doing research.
Add another 7 if you include my work computer for the various sites I work out of.
I try to close anything not currently used quite often and just store things in bookmarks.
A few hundred. At the end of a “project/idea/thing” I’ll bookmark the entire set, dated, described, and close them all at once, things always come back in need later. It’s very satisfying.
For normal day to day browsing I have a window with about 15 pinned tabs that I just cycle through in the morning catching up on stuff and then close that window.
I had over 2000 in Firefox. That's when I decided to clear them...
All those tabs... Lost to time...
I mean I love tabs, use em all the time. But currently my computer has just 1 open.
I don't use em as bookmarks to get back to. People seem to just hoard them. And for no reason.
You can't tell me there's a good reason to keep hundreds open. It's just laziness at that point.
You're correct. I don't pretend that more than a dozen of mine are actively used anymore.
69 (okay actually it was 67 but I opened a few more to make it the funny number)
After closing a dozen left over from looking up various topics over the last few days, 164 tabs, some of which are probably 5 years old. I swear I'll look at them someday!
You're entering the danger zone of tab hoarding there..
At current count, 911. I used to sit around 3000 but managed to shave it down, now it's creeping back up.
Too many things I want to download or read later and not as much time as I used to have. I have been making an effort to use alternative methods though such as bookmarks, YouTube playlists, or just, you know, doing the thing in the moment.
More than I can count thats for sure.
∞
I use a browser extension that closes the least recently used tab after 15 minutes. It stops closing when it reaches five for the current window.
I don't think I'm missing anything.
That sounds cool! Do you have the name?
Tab Wrangler
It fluctuates as I'm researching a topic to me snapping out of it and realizing "damn that's a lot of tabs" and closing pretty much all of them.
So it usually goes from around 30 or something, down to 3 or 5 and it repeats.
On my phone I do actually have 1,500 since my browser opens another one everytime I use search on the home screen
Right now? 2. Generally? under 10.
I envy that, it certainly sounds like the proper amount.
Zero across my phone and desktop at the moment. Having more than around 5 tabs open at once does not sit well with me.
Usually one, maximum 10.
I admire your self control!
Look, it's not self control. Too many tabs just scare me.
I'm scared of them too, it's just too late for me haha.
Just close them. Can always do another search when you really need it. It'll sit in your history anyway.
I've never found searching browsing history to be very reliable. I guess it's just a preference.
I use multiple profiles. Got both personal and work ones for both me and the wife, close the windows when they're not active, and they are set to keep track of the tabs. But keeping them open? Hell no. And I'm retired now. It's been six months since I've used the work profile.
If you want to do profiles (in Firefox), add -p to the shortcut's target line, at least in windows. I think. It's been a while since I set it up. It's -p somewhere
I'm the same. Too many tabs confuses me and I start clicking around forgetting what I was doing. Keep it to a minimum.
24 on my mobile browser. Not too bad, really.
8 windows, ~17 tabs.
That's a pretty good mix.
Basically just an evolution of the same way I used my desktop 20 years ago. Always had this concept of an Internet-connected computer as a dynamic newspaper, windows were individual columns arranged around the page/screen. Used to be a bunch of IRC windows along the bottom of my screen, maybe a couple of MSN windows up the side, and one or two browser windows (substitute one browser window with an email client or RSS reader) taking up the rest of the screen.
Well now everything is javascript. Google had the same idea with Google Wave a few years later, they abandoned it, but the javascript future happened anyway. Bunch of tiny browser windows along the bottom of the screen for discord, two large ones across the top for everything else (webmail, content aggregators like lemmy have largely replaced RSS), and a couple more on a second monitor.
None. I open as many as I need then close every single one of them before closing my browser. That also includes my phone browser
Usually not more then 30 before I close most of them with "Close all tabs to the right".
I have browsing history so don't need tabs.
Agreed. My rule of thumb is: if it takes enough more than a second to figure out why I had the tab open, then I might as well just close it and re-open it if the need to have it available reemerges. It takes a lot of effort (several seconds and a lot of mental energy) to create the mental context that I need to make use of the tab. On the other hand, opening it takes a few seconds and requires little to no thought whatsoever.
So I just close them. In fact, having too many tabs open just makes it take longer to find the open tabs that I'm actually currently using.
one
No more than around 10, I actively try to keep the number of tabs I have in check. Sometimes I quit the browser and reopen tabs again as a way clear my head.
The zen method. I dig it.
Eleven. Kinda felt like that was too many though.
I organize my tabs by topic window (small project, chunk of work for a larger project, related idea) then kick them into onetab as a bundle with a short description when I'm done with whatever it is I needed them for.
I typically have 5-30 tabs open in topic windows at any time but I can open onetab and ctrl-f to find anything I've saved over the last 7 or 8 years. There must be 5000 tabs in there at this point.
You are the tab master. Thank you for describing your workflow!
None. I bookmark stuff if I need to come back.
I envy your discipline.
Yeah but my bookmarks likely massively outweigh your tabs haha
I tried keeping up with bookmarks before I entered this stage of tabbed life. I have 1378 bookmarks, almost all of them neglected at this point. Bookmarks are good though. How many do you have?
7 at most
On my phone I have 4 tabs but on my laptop I have 4 windows open each having 10 tabs open
Eight.
Around 5 or 6 most the time. I can't manage more than that.
That's a good number.
Zero. I don't have a browser open, just a phone app.
I'm still counting that as one. What app do you use and how do you like it?
Boost. I used Boost for Reddit, so this app for Lemmy feels very familiar.
I like how few taps it takes to switch accounts. I like how I can set my default feed and sort and it sticks where some other lemmy apps I tried frequently reset to a trending feed, gross.
I like the feature that allows me to apply a custom tag to users that only I can see. I use it to keep an eye on potential trolls. If I have a person tagged as "MAGA troll", I know not to engage with them but to grab the popcorn and enjoy the ride.
Thanks!
16, counting this one that I'm about to close.
If I leave a tab open for more than a couple of days, I bookmark it and then close it.
10 max per window: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/dustman/
And no duplicate tabs on a window: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duplicate-tabs-closer/
Thank you for the links!
5-6 per open project at work and other work, so, about a thousand.
Really about 50-80 in 20 windows because I've only just learned of tab groups.
Six.
That's a good number!
Usually about 10-30. It depends. I have a minimum of 6010 tabs open for stuff I check several times a day, like mail, news feeds, and such. Then I have a few working projects, like Google docs. Then some "temporary tabs" that expand from 10 to 30, as a reminder of tasks I have to complete or get back to someone on, only to shrink them down later in the day.
As someone who is anal about closing tabs, the answers in this thread hurt my soul.
Genuine question, why so many tabs? What are you using them all for??
I'm not too happy about them either. To some extent I think I avoid organizing them because leaving them as tabs makes them more "pressing" for me to some day get to reading. I'm like a failed data hoarder/archivist.
mostly less than five.
but if I'm programming it's around 50-70
Never more than ten. Currently, seven.
probably around 300, split into 2 windows, one "main" and one that's effectively my YouTube to watch list
Why not add them to the watch later list?
unless they've changed it, removing videos from the list I don't want to watch always felt like a hassle, closing tabs is easier and has an easy "undo" function
That's pretty interesting, I find myself doing that with 3-5 youtube videos at a time. I'll watch maybe two and eventually close the window and lose the others.
Typically 1~10. Four right now (all four are Lemmy: inbox, another thread, front page, this thread)
I close them as the tabs bar feels cluttered and/or I see no reason to keep them open.
6
18 pinned, 3 non-pinned.
I dig it.
One
I'm on my phone so none.
Apps however...
Apps ought to count, given so many of them should have just been a webpage in the first place.
24, including the one I opened for this thread.
24 is a respectable number. Not too cluttered but still getting things done. Do you keep them on a single window?
Yes, all in one window.
... although you just reminded me I have another tab open in a separate window, and 4 more open in a private window. I'll close those windows once I stop working on them though.
Android: 82 active, I-lost-count-after-90 inactive
4 windows with 36 tabs on my desktop, 29 tabs on my phone browser. In my defense I'm shopping for a pillow and need to compare and find something that will work. It's not going well because it is nearly impossible to find anything that isn't cheap Chinese shit nowadays. Even the expensive "top brand" products not ordered from Amazon end up being low quality crap.
36 tabs for a pillow is a pretty thorough investigation. Good on you.
I usually have a minimum of 8 tabs open, but right now it's something like 24. I've recently gotten into a bad habit of opening tabs & not getting around to them until maybe a week or two, maybe sometimes more. I really need to sort out my tab game & start being more productive....
On my personal Firefox, five pinned and usually 3-4 more. On my work Firefox, six pinned and 4-6 more in one window, and probably another 6-10 on a window in the other monitor.
If I can't see at least part of the page title on each tab, I start feeling anxious. I do a lot of bookmarking, sending to Pocket, etc.
:D (I'm using my phone)
Three windows, with 7, 4 and 1 tab respectively.
I just did a big cleanup! I think it's down to about 40 on my work computer and 70ish on my computer.
Don't ask about the phone I'm typing this on... It's a lost cause.
Firefox on android keeps garbage collecting tabs too aggressively for me to do my thing.
I've set the browser to close all tabs when I close the broswer. So whenever I start, I start fresh. Doesn't seem to result in a mess.
I dunno like 25 in two windows.
Seldom more than 5 or 6 before using Firefox to 'close tabs to right'. It keeps a short history of recently visited URLs in the toolbar, and a deeper, searchable 'library' of visited sites going way back. Longer term interests I save to Bookmarks.
That sounds like a good process.
Too many. And I have honestly no idea.
:)
About five, maybe six most of the time.
Personal: right now I have 6 open. I might get up to 15-20 if I'm going down a rabbithole of some sort.
On a side note, Windows 11 finally put in an option to go back to normal Windows taskbar buttons so I can actually read tab titles from the taskbar:
Work (software engineer): sometimes dozens if I'm deep in the weeds with loads of reference pages open/etc.
am i the only person that prefers the combined labels?
No more than 10 per browser, i like using multiple browser profiles. For example one browser profile just for YouTube, the other for Reading.
Have you heard of account containers in firefox?
I should be making better use of profiles. That's a good idea.
It’s especially useful if you use VPN. You should never use same browser for VPN and shopping for example.
I'm annoyed if I have more than 1 or 2 open.
Only time I open more is when I am downloading a big thing split into multiple files and I can only download a couple at a time due to the file host's BS.
Can recommend the Vivaldi browser.
It has some really neat tab management, worth checking out at least for people who hoard tabs 🫣