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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400 Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years

29 points

by redbell

13 days ago

| past

| 12 comments

| me.pcmag.com

| HN

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kevincox

13 days ago

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> I like to scroll back and see clusters of tabs from months ago—it's like a trip down memory lane on whatever I was doing/learning about/thinking about

Sounds like something that browser history was designed for. Maybe it is missing a use case that would make it a better fit for this situation.

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amenhotep

13 days ago

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The difference here is that tabs capture intention whereas history captures everything. A page remains in a tab because you opened it and didn't choose to close it; that's a signal. Example - if you are trying to find something elusive, you might end up opening a dozen blogspam pages in tabs and then closing them immediately because once you see them they're obviously useless. They are now gone from the tabs. By contrast the history will remember them forever and show you them, even though you don't care.

I use them as favourites rather than nostalgia, so even I think this use case is kinda crazy, but I get it. Tabs work really nicely without deliberate thought, you don't have to choose to save things, you don't have to choose to dismiss things, stuff you were at least vaguely interested in just sort of accumulates effortlessly as you use the browser in a natural way. There may be something browsers could offer to do this better, but it would be a hard problem.

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LSRegression

13 days ago

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Great point. Maybe history should capture time spent on page (with page visible) and allow you to filter and sort by that.

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mewpmewp2

13 days ago

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This won't help with pages that you thought were interesting, but got interrupted by something else immediately.

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crtasm

12 days ago

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Time viewed before closing the page could be a metric though.

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tonoto

13 days ago

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The browser history worked fine while the web still was rather static. Not so much now with dynamically generated pages where the content changes for better ..or worse. A tab, in contrast, keeps its state. There are tools, such as SingleFile, Zotero, Pocket, screenshot, "print/save" to PDF etc.. but depending on content, an open tab is convenient enough.

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kevincox

13 days ago

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Do tabs that are unloaded keep much state? My understanding was that they basically loaded as if a fresh navigation except for some extra form field preservation.

Or is the active state serialized to disk somehow?

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rcxdude

13 days ago

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Not much state is kept: maybe about as much as if you were to navigate to the page again with the back button (which is an annoyingly little nowadays).

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rcxdude

13 days ago

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It would be interesting to explore a UX that blended the two: history certainly feels unreliable, and the search is worse as well as fewer tools to organise it.

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millzlane

13 days ago

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I always see this behavior with young SDEs. But using chrome. And they are militant about not restarting their browser when they are clearly having browser issues. I always ask why don't you bookmark these things? Or how can you possibly see which tab is which? While they take a whole minute to bring back up thentab they had open.

As someone who doesn't even use bookmarks and instead just relies on the awesome bars history...why do you keep 100's of tabs open and not bookmarked?

This person can solve their "problem" by just saving the open session to a new folder in the bookmark toolbar. And never have this happen again. They can even call it memory lane.

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persnickety

13 days ago

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If the browser can keep thousands of tabs without ill effects, then, honestly, what does it matter if it's tabs or bookmarks? It's all down to user's preference. Tabs have their upsides over bookmarks.

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4death4

13 days ago

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I usually have dozens / hundreds of tabs open. I restart chrome every day, so I don’t really care about the tabs themselves per se. But the fastest, context free way to navigate to a new site is to open a new tab using the hot key and then typing a url / search query. As a result, you end up with a lot of tabs. And why would you spend time closing old tabs? Also, it often happens that the contents of those tabs proves useful later, e.g. the last stack overflow post you looked at probably contained something useful, etc.

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mewpmewp2

13 days ago

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I don't bookmark much either, I just remember a snippet from the url or a path and let auto complete find it from history.

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absoluteunit1

13 days ago

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I think I fall into this category…but I use vimium extension and it has a feature where you can fuzzy search open tabs so I just use this. Now people who have 100s of tabs open and switch by clicking through them; now thats crazy to me

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dzhiurgis

12 days ago

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I really wish more IDE features were built into OS/browsers.

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Lutzb

13 days ago

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Using the % modifier/prefix in the address bar searches open tab titles only.

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rchaud

13 days ago

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I do this on my laptop and phone, both of which usually have 100 or so tabs open.

What I've found to be helpful in organizing them is the Tab Stash browser extension. It allows you to view all tabs in a multi-column list, and group tabs into categories, like a much more intuitive version of bookmarks. It feels like card sorting, where you build your own nested information architecture by dragging and dropping tabs into boxes.

Then once you have your tabs organized, you can remove them from the list of active browser tabs. Tab Stash saves the list of tabs in its UI for browsing later.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/tab-stash/

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sharts

12 days ago

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If only bookmarks worked this way too.

Stashing tab sessions temporarily and then just re-arranging and selecting which ones to “bookmark” more permanently.

Oh well.

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wvbdmp

13 days ago

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I’m at 7124 right now, the oldest one is probably being a decade old. Not sure what the issue is with amassing tabs per se. It’s just stuff on a computer no different from some messy directory, inbox or reading list. Of course, things 404 all the time, but that’s a problem with the internet in general, and I’m not “archiving” tabs so much as just… keeping them.

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dzhiurgis

12 days ago

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How do you manage them? I can't imagine how many active windows you've got.

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wvbdmp

12 days ago

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I don’t, really. I open the browser and there they are, roughly in order of opening. So I continue where I left off, more often than not closing the browser with more tabs than I opened it. Sometimes I use the AllTabsHelper extension to prune things like a bunch of instances of the HN homepage or “window shopping” sprees that I forgot to close at the time. Of course I usually close tabs when I’m done with them. It’s more like owning a lot of books you never get around to reading. You’d like to do it eventually, but there’s always something more pressing or interesting etc.

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tnvmadhav

13 days ago

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imagining. head scratching sentry alerts or similar due to 2 year old client being incompatible with latest backend software for various websites.

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rcxdude

13 days ago

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you can fairly easily configure every browser to remember your tabs through updates. It's not one instance that has been running for two years.

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Modified3019

13 days ago

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I recommend the onetab extension to stuff those tabs into a page that’s just a list of links.

It’s perfect for users with tab hoarder tendencies, and much more ergonomic than bookmarks

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sharts

12 days ago

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One problem is organizing things in a more hierarchical fashion.

I like Onetab for saving everything in one go. But it would be nice to easily select / organize into bookmarks for later.

Onetab gets slow af when you have thousands of saved sessions

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BiteCode_dev

13 days ago

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Tabs have states.

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dzhiurgis

12 days ago

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Which are constantly lost.

Wish we had a way to preserve that state efficiently while also being able to search all of it. Makes bookmarks a bit redundant.

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jsnell

13 days ago

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Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40250672

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wintermutestwin

13 days ago

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~700 tabs here. If you have more than 8 or so, you will benefit greatly from using vertical tabs. Sidebery on firefox is great. And mozilla sucks for not having a default option for vertical that doesn’t require a bunch of goody steps and a requirement that I trust some random extension creator.

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ondronr

12 days ago

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I go up to 1000 tabs in Chrome session. Then I backup them in Session Buddy and start over. I even made a tab and window count exporter extension, that would pipe those numbers via telegraf to InfluxDB and Grafana.

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datavirtue

13 days ago

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7400 tabs open, otherwise known as "grandma mode."

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vs4vijay

13 days ago

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I have 1000+ tabs opened in 4 different Firefox instances. One of the beauty of using Firefox.

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wslh

13 days ago

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Sadly the article doesn't go into details of the user setup. Another missed opportunity to write something more meaningful. Instead they post an arbitrary test done by themselves.