2K? Not bad. My main linux box is running around 7500 tabs in 34 windows right now. Takes about 30s to start, which is fine since that browser gets restarted only every few weeks. My secondary desktop (windows) only has 2750 tabs.
And there are users of Firefox out there with >15000 tabs.
Two reasons for tab hoarding:
1) spatial -- related tabs are close together (frequently open a bunch of related search results; if I come back to them to continue later, they're all together).
2) history -- unlike bookmarks or history entries, tabs retain the forward and back history, so when you return to them you can know how you go there (go back to the search for example).
I do periodically clear out tabs, especially duplicates. The Tab Stats extension by glandium is very handy for tab hoarders
I just mass-bookmark mine into a new bookmark folder periodically. Keeps it from getting anywhere near 2k.
I've been doing this for years and have never, not once, looked at the bookmarks. But it gives me the peace of mind I need to close all tabs and start over.
Exactly. You can even name the bookmark folder either with the thing you're researching/interacting with or just by the date if it's a ton of miscellaneous stuff. Then later on you can go thru and delete all the date-named bookmarks older than 6 months. At that point just search your browser history
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend using Tab Session Manager plugin. You can easily save all tabs, although from my own experience I've almost never restored them anyway lol
I prefer Tab Stash. It can be also used as a side bar for your tabs, but can close every currently open one and put them into a group you can optionally name for later reuse.
Pocket is builtin to Firefox, but in my experience, searching something you saved to Pocket (a thing that should be pretty core to the Pocket product) sucks and you really need simonw's https://github.com/dogsheep/pocket-to-sqlite to actually search it.
Not sure how it works now, but 2k tabs in Chrome used to be outright impossible on any reasonable hardware anyway, while Firefox always handled it pretty well aside of slowdowns ;)
As a fellow tab hoarder, I recommend Auto Tab Discard. Tabs are still open but aren't actually loaded until you click on them. With various configurable options for how that works.
I have five windows open with about 1000 tabs in each, no performance problems at all. It's great!
If you restart Firefox, it won't load a restored tab until you navigate to it, so presumably most of his are already backgrounded.
I find it useful to periodically prune, though. Save to Pocket or other "to read" list for things I intend to eventually read. Bookmark things I may want sometime, but don't need open. Potentially use Tab Stash to save groups of references for particular research tasks. Toss things that realistically I'm just not going to get to ever.
- I'm likely to return back to some of them. I might not know which ones. Typing in the address bar brings them back fast and the page does not need to be loaded again. Having the tab already open is also a strong signal that this is what I'm looking up.
- no noticeable slowdown anyway, Firefox is actually quite efficient.
- I don't care for taking the time of closing them progressively. It happens that I will close them all at the same time at some point when I feel like I need some clean up. Usually when I'm done with something.
- I think I learned to mostly ignore this part of the screen. Everything happens in the address bar.
In short, it's a combination of intentionally leaving tabs open so I can go back to them later without reloading the page, and not wanting to spend the time to manage them.
I usually have under 100 tabs open though, often even fewer.
Same applies to thousands of them, the "close everything" time just happens later in that case. I usually clean them up once Firefox starts slowing down, which is at tens of thousands.
With a good UI the unused ones just don't bother you anymore anyway until you scroll or filter them. They show me my train of thoughts without having to consciously organize anything. Unused tabs get unloaded from RAM anyway, so the cost of keeping them open is minimal.
A few years ago there was a version of Firefox that didn't slow down and opened quickly even at tens of thousands of tabs, but unfortunately it quickly regressed, so throwing everything out periodically is still inevitable:)
