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Posted by borisandcrispin 1/7/2026

A tab hoarder's journey to sanity(twitter.com)
106 points | 123 commentspage 2
wintermutestwin 1/7/2026|
Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.
PaulDavisThe1st 1/7/2026|
Given your nick, I must be your other, long lost twin. My workflow precisely!
ElijahLynn 1/7/2026||
Protip for a brain reset - right click on current tab - click close other tabs

The beauty here is that if you are at risk of losing anything, in a form that is not yet submitted, then the browser will pop up a prompt saying are you sure you want to close, you will lose data. So there is no risk of losing something you can't get back.

Then, after they are all closed, as needed, I just type in the browser bar the names of the tabs and it searches history and suggests previously closed tabs, then up/down arrow, then enter.

I do this frequently and it really helps my brain.

ElijahLynn 1/7/2026|
Second protip - the tab manager search is really useful, it will list out currently open and previously closed tabs for scanning, with a search feature. So searching open tabs is really fast, on Mac it is cmd + chift + a (think tAb).
thire 1/7/2026||
I understand the need for hoarding tabs but it boggles my mind how people navigate tiny tabs and remember where everything is. In fact, they probably don't since I keep seeing people clicking back and forth a few times before finding the right tab.

I have been using tree style tabs on Firefox for so long, I can't function without it. I can nest tabs together and collapse them, but most importantly, I can read all the tab titles due to the vertical layout.

jesup 1/7/2026|
I'm down to 7800 tabs (30 windows) on my main desktop. 4K on my other, 2K on my laptops. High was >11000 tabs. Firefox makes this easy; takes ~30 seconds to open all those windows and load a tab per window (plus ~8 pinned tabs)

"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).

And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)

Noumenon72 1/7/2026||
I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.
apparent 1/7/2026||
This used to be an issue for me, but it seems that in Brave it unloads tabs efficiently enough that I can have many hundreds open (on an MBA) without adverse effect. The only time I go in and clear things out, it's when I need to reboot and have to categorize/save all my incognito tabs, which are wiped out on quit.
ge96 1/7/2026||
I wrote a Chrome Extension to save tabs to my local DB (till it stopped working with manifest v3) but I found all the tabs I saved I never actually used them again.

I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe

jdprgm 1/7/2026||
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabsio/kfgpkekbcoae... (I have done zero marketing on this hence why basically no users)

kraftman 1/7/2026||
I can't deal with having more than ~5 permananent tabs and 5 temporary open tabs. if i have so many tabs open i cant read what they are I know something has gone wrong with what I'm trying to do, so I try and reset.
precompute 1/7/2026||
I used to hoard tabs, but these days I just switch profiles. If I have over 2000 tabs, I copy maybe a hundred over to a new profile. It's just easier.

For example, my HN-dedicated firefox window has ~900 tabs right now, from June. All save the recent 5 are unloaded. I probably won't look at them again but just going through the list is a chronological reminder of what I was doing. Honestly, I could close them all but there's a "what if I need that sub-list of tabs dedicated to XYZ again?" in my head that wins out.

I have a separate note/data management system so this is mostly just... something.

kazinator 1/7/2026|
> bookmarks only show titles and favicons

Bookmark titles are editable. If you create a bookmark and the title doesn't mean anything, change it.

I often put bookmarks on the toolbar, so I shorten them to one character, or empty string (if the icon is clear) to have space for as many as possible.

> I don't like the browser bookmarking system because it's too hard to organize the folders and it's not visual

But then goes on to write a whole section of the article "Here's a few interesting links I discovered buried in those 664 tabs" which gives nothing but topic headings, under which are lists of raw links with no description.

:)

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