We all have many open windows and tabs. How do you control that?
Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#2Tab stacks to keep them in collapsible groups, and closing the tabs I'm not using anymore
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#3Pruning. When I feel that I have too many, I go through them (or maybe just a subgroup of them) and close the ones that no longer are relevant or interesting.
This requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#4I think everyone is different, but for me bookmarks don't work (I just don't do it) and history rarely works (too much noise there).
Really, most of the time I can just close the tabs, and I will "re-discover" them when needed. But I don't do that: there is a fair amount of tabs that I don't dare closing because I feel like they contain something useful or I may need them.
I found an extension that I use as a "tab cemetery": a place where I can just store all the open tabs once in a while and start from fresh. And the two times a year I actually need to find one of them, I can open the cemetery and search there (it's organised by "dump date").
This extension is called "OneTab" (I have no interest in promoting it, that's just what I use). Works well for me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#5I usually make tab groups to sort the frequently visited tabs properly but still most of the times, I am opening a lot of tabs outside the groups then I keep closing all the tabs outside the groups.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#6RAM/OOM does this for me very effectively. For example, I have opened several dozens of books right now, because when it happens to be a reading time I hate to look for any books in Downloads I am interested to read. I feel better to have opened all the books I am interested in right now. Maybe my reading session will be 5 minutes only, or maybe I want to see what I have read before leaving the reading with as little of digging in interfaces as possible.
I remember the times when 3GB computer could have 300 tabs hanging per months of everyday heavy using of the machine, but now a regular 1000$ computer can not open 300 tabs of modern webpages, so there is none of that problem any more.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#7I just wait till I feel I have too many and just nuke them all at one lol.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#8I use the Arc browser -- it has a different way of organizing tabs into spaces in a quite intuitive and easy way.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#9I close my browsers with prejudice. If it mattered I would have put it into an issue or committed it to SCM before I wandered away from the tab. Also, history exists. If the reason we are keeping our tabs open is because we've disabled browsing history, then I have a simple suggestion to make.
Walking up to my workstation in the morning and seeing all the trash from yesterday's efforts causes me meaningful loss in motivation. I get down to a blank desktop at the end of each day now.
Re: Ask HN: How do you manage too many open tabs?
#10I don't really control them, it just when I feel the system response becomes slow, I close every tab I don't need anymore.