Why do people keep so many tabs open? I usually top out around 5. Bookmarks are a thing, I wonder if just leaving pages open is the new bookmark? But the URL is gone when a tab is closed.
IMHO people using so many tabs seems to suggest a shortcoming somewhere else.
At work I start off with 14 tabs, they're tools and references that I use every day.
At home I have several projects, I use TST (tree-style tabs), each project has a subtree. Sometimes I'll close off a tree, sometimes I'll save a tree to bookmark. An example tree was where I was investigating a problem with pdf files across some public resources (related to work), I had the principle sources for the PDFs, the PDFs themselves open, 6 tabs, then some searches looking for bug reports and each of those having child tabs of actual reports, then reference material raised through the bug report pages (gs and convert documentation). We're at about 20 tabs now -- meanwhile my console has at least 4 tabs open with gs and convert commands and man pages, I upload finding to gitlab (for reference when I'm at work) -- gitlab pages added to tab count. I test some pdf conversion commands, open a file manager (with its own tabs!) and open the results in the browser too. Midway one of the kids asks me about buying something, I switch to my Amazon tree of tabs, open a couple of searches and my basket, stack up some comparison prices in other tabs; one shop has several options where Amazon only has the one so I open them all and control-tab to do visual comparison; roughly +30 tabs, but I close off the tab trees that are poor prices or out-of-stock, down to about 10 tabs left until I make the actual purchase in ~10 days time.
At work I have five tabs open just for the story I’m working on. Five more for our telemetry monitoring. Researching an API issue can easily be another five, and when I find the solution I may discover I’m wrong and then have to remember which pages in my history are involved, or I can leave them open until I’m deployed cleanly in preprod. It can be hours or days before I notice the extra tabs and close them.
And then a couple times a day I’ll open a bunch of threads in HN to read over the next few hours between other things.
Anything researching for a hobby can reach 10 tabs easily, though that usually happens “at home” so replaces rather than supplements the work tab count. And now we’re already at a few dozen tabs.
Having three monitors and other apps running you can “lose” a window and thus end up with the same site open in two or three windows. 50 tabs is usually about when I start garbage collecting, and I always manage to close something I still needed.
I use it like a program uses its stack. That's why I prefer to use extensions like TreeTabs, and/or Tab Groups (of which I was a regular user).
For every subtopic, I open a few tabs, then browse them, compare them, reorder them, then close them. This is a recursive operation, hence why TreeTabs works well, esp. with the abimity to collapse.
If a new topic comes up, I'll open a new tab.
I often leave tabs for if I have time to go back to them later, and that's where my thousands of tabs come from :/
Ideally I'd like to represent my tabs (and other OS windows, why not?) as a mind map. Open and close some topics. Export the topic to my bookmarks, share it... pearltrees come close.
For people who don't spend time sorting and managing their bookmarks, tabs can be an equivalent alternative. Modern browsers will search and suggest both bookmarks and open tabs, so the UX is pretty much the same. Just that unsorted bookmarks are hidden somewhere in a separate menu/window, a bookmark bar would shrink the available space for web content. The tab bar is always there and a huge list of tabs tells me at a glance that I might want to get rid of old stuff.
> But the URL is gone when a tab is closed.
Accidentally closed tabs can be easily restored for as long as you don't delete the history. And when I reinstall a system I just restore the profile directory from the backup and Firefox will start with all plugins, settings and tabs from before.
Because tabs and bookmarks are not the same thing. It's harder to find something in a bookmark, easier to just go through the opened tabs quickly if you know it's there but don't remember the name
Look at them open few more and it's already easy to land on 10-20 tabs. Add some stuff always open (chats, webmail etc) and it's easy to get into 30s
I start every day with zero tabs but getting to 40-50 (then mass-closing if I found solution) is common. Vertical tabs addon is necessity (hell it's even nice with just 10 tabs)
weather, two work chats, gmail, hnews, personal mail, 2 fediverse accounts, current work tabs (currently at a low 8 for that), then the ones that change hourly, social media, youtube, wikipedia, searches, etc.
Tabs are really starting to bug me, i've tried a few tree tab managers and the ones i tried just don't work. I don't have a better solution. multiple windows is potentially bad news, as a crash may lose tabs you had open, even with a tab session manager. That is if you load several tabs in a new window and the computer or firefox crashes / reboots, you could lose history, cookies, possibly your old window layouts, etc. Tab session managers help a bit, by keeping consistently open tabs saved somewhere, but it doesn't help with new tabs and new windows if there's a crash.
Also it kinda solves the new window problem, as long as the new window is set to one of the tab groups (closing the window doesn't delete the tab group).
Also afaik when firefox crashes and is set to recover tabs, it should recover all the windows as well as the tabs.
IMHO people using so many tabs seems to suggest a shortcoming somewhere else.