Posted by borisandcrispin 1/7/2026
The real unlocks were:
- using the bookmarklet that pops open a small browser window with the page title, suggested tags
- doing the same on my iphone
- have a couple in browser bookmarks that point to the tags for important things
It's so good I even used it to track all of my LinkedIn connections tagged by location, job function etc (inspired by Derek Sivers post on having a database [1])
I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.
What I don’t understand is:
(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”
(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.
c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.
On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.
I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.
1. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here...
If its important, I just remember it.
The article does actually explicitly address this as well.
>I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists. So I keep tabs open, group them by project, save things to read later. Before I know it, I have another browser window with multiple tabs sprawling across my screen.
Which mirrors my experience. My brain can obsess over things all it wants but if I don't see that set of tabs open roughly in the same order as I had them then I am promptly forgetting about that. I've gone through setting things up before only to realize a week before I had done the same thing in a different spot that I didn't name very well.
This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/
The basic idea: It closes any tab that has not been visited in the last N hours.
You can lock tabs to prevent them from closing (you can match on domain names, etc).
You can also see the last so many tabs it closed (1000? I forgot if this is configurable).
It's been fantastic. I don't need to manually manage tabs any more. I happily keep opening new tabs, knowing full well it will clean up after me.
I never close tabs or re-use old open tabs on mobile, since the UI just buries them and I just open a new tab if i want to check something, so I will just accumulate useless tabs.
On my Laptop i try to only hoard a handful of tabs. I just noticed I have some open since months, but never gotten to reading them.
The thing is i want to read the content, but never find time, so they just stay there.
smells like ADHD
"I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists."
yup
I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it?
Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.
and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe
I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?
To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.