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A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

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Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#51
Good article. I nodded along and wish OP had written more about their solutions!

The problem for folks like me/us is fear of "losing" something, and like the OP. knowing that something can be saved and found again (or stumbled across) later solves the problem, whether it's ever searched for again. The act of "hoarding" actually scratches the itch for me. I'm fine to close a tab if it doesn't feel like I'm "throwing it away forever." And bookmarking a site is just a slower way to lose something forever. It's not easily findable, and I won't take the time to organize my bookmarks into a nice hierarchy. That reminds me of those old "internet yellow pages" that were sold at Microcenter back in the early days. That's a silly, slow way to organize information for retrieval.

I wish that 99% of my browser history was automatically indexed/recorded for later searching. I could imagine "boosting" particular links' importance with a bookmark concept, but I think you could also choose to elevate any site I spent a little bit longer on to actually read, or that I came back to later. If you added semantic search into that, and offline plain-text greppability, we'd really be in business. A lot of my searches boil down to "Didn't I see a tool or HN post that solved this problem 6 to 12 months ago?" Sometimes I find it again. Often I don't.

I keep hoping that someone like Kagi (which I already happily pay for) will let me build my own personalized internet index consisting "only" of the tens of thousands of URLs I've seen...They've built some stuff that is kinda close, and they already have a good crawler/indexer.

I have been using OneTab to quickly consolidate a lot of tabs to a single list of URLs, which actually does help me "feel" a bit better, but doesn't solve the semantic search issue. It sounds like Karakeep (mentioned by @miladyincontrol) does some of what I want already, and that they're working on semantic search too, but it doesn't offer it yet.

If anyone (including the OP) has something to help me auto-hoard, I'd love to hear it.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#52
post #46
post #20

> 300+ on my Mac. "Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156568

I currently have 20,097 tabs open in one browser profile. The oldest tab appears to be an HN post from 2.5 years ago, which must be the last time I swept tabs into bookmarks. I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother? The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox…

> about 15 seconds for the browser to launch

I also have many tabs (that's why I could quickly recall and find the post). Restoring session takes a while (much more than 15 seconds). I measure this time by looking on the CPU consumption. Only once it drops to near zero I consider session completely restored.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#53

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…

I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.

The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.

Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#54
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabsio/kfgpkekbcoae... (I have done zero marketing on this hence why basically no users)

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#56
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.

I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars using computers with severly degradated performance. . When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar) plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand is so much more productive...

That is the way I work.

Now my bookmark list is crazy. I have started using 'open all' and then reviewing items in each folder to see if they are worth keeping. 99% of the time. no. Many times they are from years ago and the site doesnt even exist anymore. I have some items in my folders that go back to 1992. I have a bad habit of 'oh that is mildly interesting ctrl-d time'. Usually a few weeks later 'what was I thinking'.

My tabs however are wildly focused on what I am doing right now. Once that task is done. I close them out. Think my max is 20 tabs. But usually I really only need about 5. The rest I close out. I probably can find it again with search. That is how I found it the first time...

That also reminds me, time to delete more folders.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#57
Why is their browser using so much memory? I'm quite bad at closing tabs since I've switched to vertical and just open new windows instead. And even with that I don't think I ever broke 10gb on edge except for when I opened many YouTube videos at once and then went through them which kept the tabs loaded

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#58
post #7

A "hoarder" but less than 1000 tabs combined - rookie numbers!

This one stood out to me even more: > I'm used to have 495 tabs open on my iPhone

iOS Safari lets you have 500 tabs max in a "tab group", including the default tab group which is the one that shows "N Tabs" when you open the browser.

I tend to hit this limit every few months and end up saving everything that's currently open into a new tab group with a name like "Old Tabs January 2026".

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#59
If you’ve hit the 500 tabs for a tab group limit on iPhone and opened another group you’re a real tab boarder like me!

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.

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