Ask HN: Your browser tab count

My following question is to gain insight and understanding rather than anything malicious and or any sort of judging.

Questions:

- When you've gone back to a tab that has been unloaded, how often has the site been changed when it reloads the data and or just not worked anymore? If you get that a lot, have you considered saving as a single file html or something?

- In your daily life, do you collect and find it difficult to throw away items that you think you'll need at some future point?

- How would you describe your organization style of non-digital items/goods?

- Since you have so many tabs open, how do you search for the things you care about in opened but unloaded tabs?

Ah, don't worry about it, his comment put me off a little and I didn't want subsequent comments to snowball.

My browser is messy because it is not my primary organizational structure. It's a dumping ground of sorts that I try to organize by date (tab # in window) and window. The info in most open sequences of tabs is usually saved somewhere, so I don't need to go back to that tab but it's very convenient for quick "reminders" of how I reached a certain position / conclusion / found some info.

> When you've gone back to a tab that has been unloaded, how often has the site been changed when it reloads the data and or just not worked anymore? If you get that a lot, have you considered saving as a single file html or something?

From my OLD tabs (2017 and before) almost everything has changed. I do preserve the cache folders, so occasionally the old version of the website will load (when I enable networking but don't connect to a network). I don't see why it wouldn't work, URL deprecation isn't a very big deal for that time frame. I did use an addon to save some pages as HTML files. I don't remember its name, it was a XUL (pre-webextension) addon.

> In your daily life, do you collect and find it difficult to throw away items that you think you'll need at some future point?

> How would you describe your organization style of non-digital items/goods?

I'm not a hoarder :)

I throw out stuff I don't want / use

As far as information goes, I maintain backups although I usually never go back to them except for very broad file name / tree searches / greps. Storage is cheap and plentiful, what's a few gigs?

> Since you have so many tabs open, how do you search for the things you care about in opened but unloaded tabs?

I use a tabs sidebar extension, and a tab search extension if one isn't natively provided by the sidebar extension. It's also possible to search open tabs from the FF omnibar. Also, the windows / tabs form an ad-hoc organizational structure that's very helpful. Anyway, like I said before, the browser is just my dumping ground. I could lose all but the last 500 tabs and still sleep like a baby.

Firefox seems to have problems around 8000 (or maybe it's just me?), so don't go there :).

If you do, and Firefox crashes at startup, you might need to delete (or better: rename) some files under .mozilla/firefox//:

.mozilla/firefox//sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4

.mozilla/firefox//sessionstore-backups/recovery.baklz4

.mozilla/firefox//sessionstore.jsonlz4

You'll obviously lose the tabs opened since the last start.

You can have a backup with Tab Session Manager (for Chrome too):

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager/releases