Posted by borisandcrispin 3 days ago
Why do I do it? To see all my tabs visually and quickly go back to a particular page. And also as a hard limit to start cleaning up tabs.
"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.
Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.
> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles
Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.
> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them
I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.