Finally back down to 14 tabs, still too embarrassed to show anyone

AresUII@lemmy.world to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 159 points –
108

That's not too many.

Before it broke, I had 58 tabs open on my phone, currently I have only 19. Although on desktop I generally don't cross 10.
But my aunt surpassed everything.
Her Chrome (Android) doesn't even show a number anymore. It's just ":D" -

I guess if there were a way to turn off favicons -//-

How is that embarrassing? I have literally 639 tabs right now, across 39 windows. Just live your life as you see fit.

I usually clear mine out when I get over 150 or so. My workflow absolutely doesn't work on Chrome, but Firefox seems to handle it fine.

How much memory does your computer have?

32gb. The browser is using about 11.2gb of ram at the moment, but I haven't restarted the browser or the computer in about a week. After a browser restart it's usually only using 5~6gb, though that steadily climbs as I reactivate hibernated tabs.

Reposting from a previous comment I've made about this topic:

Bookmarks are for things I’ll need to reference again and again in the coming years. I do keep a tightly-curated bookmark collection, I just don’t want it clogged up with a bunch of stuff I can’t foresee needing in the long term.

Tabs are for things I’m working on right now and don’t need bookmarking for the long term. And, for what it’s worth, most of the browser windows are custom-titled, so the windows themselves are a lot like bookmark folders, while the tabs are like temporary bookmarks.

Plus, the ability to search through tabs by hitting Ctrl+Shift+A means that it ends up being faster to search through my tabs than my bookmarks, without using the mouse. ex: Ctrl+Shift+A, Type needed page, up/down arrows if needed, then hit enter to move to the tab. With Ctrl+Shift+O, you don’t get the same ease of scrolling the results without tabbing through a bunch of junk first.

There are other reasons, including neurological ones surely, but those are my primary justifications.

..............why?

Reposting a comment I wrote in another thread that explains it:

Bookmarks are for things I’ll need to reference again and again in the coming years. I do keep a tightly-curated bookmark collection, I just don’t want it clogged up with a bunch of stuff I can’t foresee needing in the long term.

Tabs are for things I’m working on right now and don’t need bookmarking for the long term. And, for what it’s worth, most of the browser windows are custom-titled, so the windows themselves are a lot like bookmark folders, while the tabs are like temporary bookmarks.

Plus, the ability to search through tabs by hitting Ctrl+Shift+A means that it ends up being faster to search through my tabs than my bookmarks, without using the mouse. ex: Ctrl+Shift+A, Type needed page, up/down arrows if needed, then hit enter to move to the tab. With Ctrl+Shift+O, you don’t get the same ease of scrolling the results without tabbing through a bunch of junk first.

There are other reasons, including neurological ones surely, but those are my primary justifications.

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Yeah, I see no issue with this. Im not gonna save seasons or bookmark entire window, Ill just leve it there, why not. RAM is there to be used.

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Tree Style Tabs makes this much better. Horizontal tabs don't really work for >10 tabs. Vertical tabs are the only way to live.

Tried it and was disappointed that it was an additional thing that doesn't hide the default tab bar when enabled. Never ended up using it because of that, plus unreadable tabs is not a daily thing for me.

The trick is to use custom CSS to hide the default tab bar.

Or Firefox could add native support for both orientations, and tab grouping.

You can try Floorp browser (based on firefox) it hides the default tab bar and looks similar to vivaldi browser.

Also it has tree style tabs built in, you just have to enable it.

Try Sidebery instead.

OK neat I found the setting that allows hiding tabs (so it's just groups again), better than nothing but I'm guessing I'd still need to use custom CSS to just... turn off the horizontal tab bar completely when using the tree menu?

"Close all tabs" and bookmarks are also your friends.

If they made bookmarks that would update as you navigate, yes. Until then, no, they're not a substitute for tabs.

You mean history?

You're almost there. Imagine a thing that was like a bookmark but also had its own individual history, and also kept track of where you currently are in that history.

I think that's what the history is for...

Not at all the same thing. For one, you can open a history entry and then navigate back from that to the page you came from to that page - which there may be several. Tabs preserve per-tab history which makes it superior in many ways to both history and bookmarks.

fair point but in practice, I don't really see it being useful very often... You could write an extension to implement that feature so that tabs dont crowd your space...

I mean, do whatever works for you, but that sounds kinda unnecessary when you can just use an already existing feature - tabs.

I do use tab, but they are kind of a problem too... I usually have 20+ tabs opened and many of them I never revisit.

Use a tab unloader addon. That way if you don't revisit then they don't take up any resources.

I use "Basic automated tab unloader" but there are several.

They would still use my attention and screen real estate, no?

Ah you don't have to keep all the tabs in view at the same time. There are addons like "Panorama Tab Groups" that let you only work with one group at a time.

I find Edges grouped tabs well implemented, not sure why Firefox doesnt move this way natively?

As to 14 tabs, I'd have 50 or more

Gotta check out Sidebery. It’s a big upgrade from TST

Trees is sort of useful but vertical tabs and tree tabs take a lot more space and aren't useful .

Those G's are what you should be embarrassed about, not the amount of tabs. ◉⁠‿⁠◉

How do YOU know what the G's mean, boo?

Stare into the abyss long enough and the evil god of knowledge tells you things.

that's a christmas tree from above, and no amount of tentacles will convince me otherwise.

What are the G’s? I’ve tried everything I can think of but I can’t find it

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Tab hoarding is just poor man's bookmarks.

Oh wait, you're on Gelbooru. Nevermind, I get it.

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One of my friends is the worse tab hoarder I've ever seen.

Dude even had a script on his PC to actively backup his tabs for the inevitable moment his browser or PC would crash

I know someone's gonna say 'doesn't Firefox backup tabs automatically in the event of a crash anyway?' and you'd be correct

But ONE TIME it didn't and left my buddy distraught which is why he has multiple fail-safes now.

Dude even had a script on his PC to actively backup his tabs for the inevitable moment his browser or PC would crash

Hey, Simple Tab Groups do this for me!

I believe there is an add on called "Tab stash" or something like that on firefox. It stashes tabs so that the use can restore them later.

It's been some time since I last used it. seeing your comment just reminded me of it. Thanks

Y'all have terrible tab hygiene. I have 0 tabs 99% of the time, phone and desktop. Need something for later? Write it down. Once you're past so many tabs, you'll never look at it again.

It's like people forgot there is a bookmark feature in most browsers.

Sometimes I open a suggested video on YouTube in a new tab to watch later. That tab sometimes stays for a few days. Every now and then I have to remind myself that there is a a "watch later" feature on YouTube lol

100's of open tabs... And 100's of bookmarks.
It's like that for me on Android.
Searching and multi-selecting bookmarks is not available on fenix, so will have to open or organise them individually. Or will have to use sync and organise them on desktop.

So, it's a mix of tabs n bookmarks for me.
Have around 400+ tabs now, most are in the inactive section tho. Slowly working on them.

Many tabs would be less of a problem in Firefox if the tab handling was better.

I use Firefox on principle, but tbh, Chrome's and esp. Vivaldi's tab handling are miles ahead.

TabStash is the name of the extension that solved my tabs problems. Now I have hundreds of tabs "open", but they are neatly organized (stashed).

Yeah, I know that extension. It's great.

But.

It just cannot compare to the power of Chrome's/Edge's tab stacking, tab grouping and group renaming, Vivaldi's workspaces, saving tabs as sessions, tiling tabs etc. All out of the box.

sigh One day Firefox will catch up. I hope.

I couldn't agree more. I use ff with tab stash at home and Edge at work. Tab groups and workspaces are miles ahead of anything ff has.

Sadly, this is such a massively lacking set of features that indeed it can slow productivity in some scenarios and encourage the use of the Chromium engine in one of its many iterations.

When productivity matters, Firefox is not the first choice.

And I say that with deep disappointment, as I don’t want it to be like that. I’ve tried many extensions, but they don’t fully cover all the bases that I and the people I work with would need to reach the same productivity as with the above mentioned browsers.

Try Sideberry, tab grouping, renaming, dragging and dropping, snapshots, etc.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried it.

Unfortunately again: "Nice, but." It's a fantastic extension that does its best to make up for Firefox's lack of tab handling. Hats off to the developer. Nevertheless, it is a far cry from what the competition has to offer. The others don't need a space-consuming side panel. They can do all these things with the tabs themselves. Firefox can do almost nothing in comparison.

To each their own, I suppose. This has been my favorite tab management system I've used.

I haven't used Vivaldi in years and only tried it for a short period at the time, but what features exactly are miles ahead or is it just the fact that Firefox requires a plugin to do some of what the competition has natively?

This is the features page for Vivaldi's tabs. And it has two or three subpages that explain some features in more detail:

https://vivaldi.com/blog/how-to/tab-management-is-our-love-language/

It also offers the sidebar on top of all the other features (although the FF plugins are a bit more powerful in the sidebars). It also lets you hide the tab bar completely, unlike FF where the sidepanel exists in addition to the the always visible tab bar... that's the definition of redundancy.

As you say, to each his own. Unfortunately, I am just that little bit less productive when using FF.

Edit: minor edits for clarity

Is it an upgrade over TST ?

I can't speak to that 100% but I do remember trying both (albeit briefly) and ultimately settling on Sidebery. Looking at the addons page, TST dev actually mentions Sidebery and a few others in their Developer Comments.

*Edit: It seems to imply that Sidebery is a tree addon with extra features. The most notable of which that sold me was the snapshots. I kept losing all my (~200) tabs if I closed Firefox improperly on my Macbook which was not fun.

Let's agree to disagree, then. Tab Stashing offers more than I will ever do with my tabs. And it's always improving.

'Don't know about tabs alone but I regularly have 20-30 windows open. Many of those have more than 3 tabs. Firefox starts to get a little slow beyond that count on my machine.

No shame in that. My phone's at 305 tabs. I'll look random things up throughout the day and sometimes I'll find a longer article that I'd like to read later. But I hate reading on my phone. So it just hangs out until my next tab purge, which is perhaps a yearly event.

Few feelings are more freeing than closing basically all of them down. Usually I don't even miss them, essentially all upside.

I'm at 5k ±300 currently. Tab groups and containers for organization. I used tree for a while but all the plugins I've tried are janky and lack integration. This isn't a whole lot better but the container integration is nice for things with accounts.

Some web applications force me to open their screens in separate tabs and windows, by making the screens remove any filtering on revisit by back button. And thus I have 20 tabs open that all start with the same meaningless word.

This hurts me on a spiritual level. I would die if I had 14 tabs open. I used to be bad about having too many tabs open, but now it just kills me inside.

At least show 14 tabs of something other than porn, maybe you'll be less embarrassed that way?

I use multiple windows for multiple purposes. When I'm done with one of the windows, I shut it down. I find it to be a decent organisational method, although I still end up with about 20ish tabs regularly

I was recently forced to start my tabs from scratch again because I closed my main Firefox window while I had a private browsing window open. I finally adopted simple tab groups at home (been using it for work for a while) and was able to restore a bunch from history. But it's annoying that Firefox just overwrites/discards your tabs if there's another window open, especially a private browsing one where it's not saving anything anyways.

Ctrl + shift + n to get back that window you closed with all your tabs :D

It might be too late now but for the future. Has saved me multiple times

I have 7 counting this one on my phone. Work laptop is probably about 12, all of which are used almost every day. Home PC is usually around 10 with basically all used daily

I have developed a sense to bookmark all of my tabs when there are too many. I store all of them in a folder and later I order the tabs in the folder in my other folders or just delete them. I can't live with more than 6 tabs opened because I just forget why I want them.

I don't understand why people feel this way.

I have a lot of interests and things I do, if I see something I like online, I keep the tab open. This way, I've accumulated a lot of tabs, I've allocated a small amount of time in my daily activites just before sleeping in which I chip away at different tabs. That way I learn new things daily and get to close a lot of tabs. I can say I have over a thousand open tabs.

That said, I have a lot of browsers. I can literally say I collect browsers, but they have to be Foss or non-chromium. On my linux install, I have 12 browsers, I generally use or have open tabs in 8 of them, the rest I use from time to time. On my previous arch-install, I had over 15. On my lineageOS, I also have 12 and I'm still getting more from F-droid. I use around 6 on here.

Like I said, I group my tabs by interests, i.e tech, education and open new article depending on the topic in each tab. I use LinkSheet on android and Junction on linux. If I like a tab and want to keep it around, I use Native Alpha on android and Tangram on linux to create web apps for them. I open and save wikipedia articles on the Wikipedia apps on both OS's.