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A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

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Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#31

Post by QuantumNomad_ »

I cured my tab hoarding by transforming myself into a bookmark hoarder instead. I bookmark pretty much every tab I open if it seems even remotely interesting. And in return I don’t keep open tabs. The handful of bookmarks that I actually use I keep on the bookmarks bar (and on the favourites view in iOS Safari). All of the random crap goes in the general bookmarks. I don’t try to organize the bookmarks in any way other than keeping those I actually use on the bookmarks bar.

Occasionally I type a keyword for something I previously bookmarked and the browser finds it in the bookmarks. Other times I don’t have the right word so I have to google it instead. But that’s ok. I know that the bookmarks aren’t hugely useful, but at least they helped me stop hoarding tabs :)

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#32

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it.

The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#34

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #16

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 thi…

Given your nick, I must be your other, long lost twin. My workflow precisely!

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#35

Post by RBerenguel »

I wrote a (not published to the store, it's kind of just for me) Chrome extension (together with Gemini, pretty early in the days of it) that attaches an expiration date to tabs. Works reasonably well to cure it (except I keep setting many to 31 days… but eventually a month passes)

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#36

Post by tacker2000 »

Tabs on mobile arent really the same.

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.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#37

Post by miladyincontrol »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding.

Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.

Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#39

Post by SoftTalker »

ashleyn wrote: post #17

It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common . I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is. I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.

Same, if I have half a dozen tabs open that's a lot and I start to lose track of which one is which. Cannot imagine how I'd manage hundreds or thousands of tabs.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#40

Post by temp0826 »

ashleyn wrote: post #17

It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common . I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is. I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.

My tab hoarding has evolved a bit. I use separate windows that are mostly subject-based now. I might have an Amazon window that sticks around for several days that will explode with tabs before I decide to put in an order. If I get on a Factorio kick I end up with a window with dozens of blueprints and forum posts that will stay for a few months (until I get bored/overwhelmed with the game again...it's a cycle, that one...). I usually have a "main window" with stuff like email and nextdns allow list (stuff that I tend to fiddle with often) and a discord/reddit window. The wikipedia window comes and goes but sometimes gets several dozen tabs and might last a few days.

Always vertical tabs since forever. I feel like if I bookmark something I probably just missclicked at some point, it's just never been in my flow, even before tabs restoring on launch and automatic tab unloading.

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