No pinned tabs. Wasn’t an option. Usually one main tab. Sometimes an “open link in tab” to check something out before closing it. Almost never multiple tabs to do daily work.
For the pinned tabs, it’s zero for me. I’ve never liked them. The most tabs I use is three.
In my experience, Firefox does not re-open Private Windows (and therefore the tabs in non-Private Windows). With much less certainty, I believe Firefox has usually re-opened only one non-Private Window.
No pinned tabs for me.
106 open tabs.
I use a custom extension to keep track of the number of tabs open and when it gets over my set limit (I chose 100) a notification badge appears on it which encourages me to either save all tabs in a group and start a new blank window, or use “view all tabs” and have a clean up. Or just do nothing and let the count go up 
Hmm. I don’t think I interact with my old tabs that much?
I also use a portrait display which means I’m not a fan of side bars/tabs.
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same here: zero pinned tabs. never tried it cuz it wasn’t compelling. use two browsers, safari and firefox. rarely have more than one tab per browser but that makes two tabs, eh?
Drat! As an Arc user, I work 90% of the time with pinned tabs (I have several hundred), so I completely spaced the possibility that someone might have none at all, which is guaranteed to be the main answer. As much as I dislike doing this, I’ve edited the question to add 0 as an answer, which deletes all the previous data. Here’s what it looked like before I deleted.
It would be great if those who have voted in the pinned tab poll could do so again.
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If only it were that easy. For me, tabs often backstop non-trivial amounts of reference or research for articles that may gestate for days and take hours to write.
I’m going to add “normal tabs” to that list
First, all of these work, and technically, they don’t differ much. A modern Mac and browser should manage the memory and CPU usage behind the scenes, though if there bugs in the browser, using windows or normal tabs could result in significant memory use and slowdowns in the browser, possibly even on the Mac.
So here’s my take on the differences:
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Using a window for each favorite site: This suffers mostly with scale. As you open more windows, switching between them will become harder, and the screen will get cluttered with lots of overlapping windows, which may make using other apps harder. You can mitigate this by switching using the browser’s Window menu and hiding the app when not in use.
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Normal tabs: With normal top-mounted tabs, you have a single window that holds multiple sites and you can switch between them fairly easily. Once again, it gets harder as you open more tabs because it becomes very hard to find any one tab among the mix.
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Pinned tabs: What exactly a pinned tab is varies between Arc, Safari, and Chrome.
- With Arc, a pinned tab is more like a bookmark in that it always points to the same webpage when first loaded. However, it’s like a tab in that you can navigate around in it and switch to and from it, and while it’s active (loaded in memory), it reflects its current state. Once it goes inactive, such that the session ends, clicking it again opens its remembered URL like a bookmark. If you have a pinned tab to the TidBITS home page, you can browse around reading articles, and those will be remembered while you’re actively using them. But at some point, when the tab goes inactive, clicking it reloads the TidBITS home page.
- With Safari, a pinned tab always reflects the last state you left it, so if you create a pinned tab to the TidBITS home page, but then browse around reading articles, whenever you come back to it, it will always reflect the last page you were reading. To remember the state of a tab, you need to create a bookmark. Safari also prevents you from inadvertently closing a pinned tab by ignoring the Command-W command for pinned tabs. Safari pinned tabs are not window-specific, but clicking a link to a site other than one that you’ve pinned opens a new tab.
- With Chrome, pinned tabs are harder to close because they don’t get an X that lets you close with a click, but they can still be lost with Command-W. More problematic is that Chrome pinned tabs are tied only to the current window, so if you close the window, you lose all of them, permanently.
This is all rough, but I can see that when I write up the results of this poll, I’m going to have to tease out all the differences. I’m extremely familiar and comfortable with how Arc works, and Safari seems to have a decent concept of pinned tabs, but Chrome’s are just from the moon—I have to investigate more to see if I’m missing something.
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The Favorites bookmarks serve the same function for me, and they don’t take up any processing or memory resources.
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I was thinking the same thing. To me, the pinned tabs in Arc were like easily accessible bookmarks, like what the Favorites bar in Safari provides. (I didn’t even know Safari had pinned tabs until this thread.)
I still use both browsers. I use Arc for the classes I teach. I definitely prefer the way pinned tabs work in Arc compared to Safari, and the ability to switch between profiles in a single window really pays off for me here. I use Safari for most everything else, just out of habit.
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Arc is my main browser. I like left hand tabs. I have 10 spaces. I use pinned tabs like I used bookmarks in Safari. In fact my imported Safari bookmarks are one of the pinned folders. We’re planning a trip and I have about ten tabs in my main space. They should get moved to my Travel workspace.
Some opened tabs are things I’m following for a short time or things I want to read and I will or at some point I’ll just close them.
The mess I create in Arc works better for me than Safari or Chrome. I use both of those for pages that seem to have problems in Arc and I move pages to Safari, so I can Cmd-I particularly for sites which I have a subscription and my recipient might not.
I’m not looking forward to giving up on Arc. Although I’ve never quite figured out how to use Arc or Arc Search on my phone.
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When I voted, it was 1-5 because I had zero. As a result of this article, I now have ten, all in one window, dedicated to the National Weather Service pages. (They are on probation, and might go away.)
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If only it were that easy. For me, tabs often backstop non-trivial amounts of reference or research for articles that may gestate for days and take hours to write.
My fear is that I’m only one browser crash away from losing all of those tabs, so anything “being researched” that is important goes in a Obsidian doc for safe keeping. Different research goes into different docs, along with associated notes.
That said, for the last three days I have had a couple of windows open while I plan a 10 day road trip using Google Maps, but of course I have the URL copied for safe keeping. It’s rare for me to keep any windows / tabs open even when researching, but I get why others do it.
Being able to add a URL to a “reading list” for later processing would probably be a better system for me. Safari has this, but it is just a flat list. Multiple reading lists would be really helpful.
Similarly for me. If I’m researching something, I copy the important information elsewhere (a text file or Word document or hand-written notes), and I create a bookmark (in a project-specific folder) so I can get back to it later.
One of the great things about tab groups in Safari is that I have never lost a single saved tab that way. In the personal tab group - yep, that’s happened. But never in a tab group.
So I’m rather meticulous about saving tabs in groups when I want them saved.
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For most of my browsing life, I’ve never really used any sort of tab wrangling features. The only organization I would do is pluck tabs off, or slot tabs into, different windows to keep related sets of tabs somewhat organized.
Sometimes I’d lose tabs I’d wanted to keep by carelessly restarting or quitting. Since Safari now restores even private tabs after a restart, it has only reinforced my tab-hoarding habits.
I’ve never bothered with pinned tabs or tab sets.
At work, I use Firefox’s Tab Containers (its equivalent of Profiles in Safari) to keep my personal accounts separate from my work accounts. I had performance problems with Safari Profiles at home, so I gave up on them. That’s really the limit of my sophistication with regards to tabs.
I’ve also toyed with using Firefox’s Tab Grouping feature in the last few weeks, but I can’t say that I’m sold on it.
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Have these people who pin 100 tabs never heard of bookmarks?
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Safari is my daily-driver browser, although I do keep Firefox and Chromium around.
I tried Arc, and didn’t bond with it, but I thought sidebar tabs were a good idea. To me at least, it seems like they’ve thrown out the baby instead of the bathwater.
People with that many pinned tabs are probably using Arc, where pinned tabs are basically more capable versions of bookmarks.
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I have zero pinned tabs.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open at once. Like my Inbox, I try to keep my browser empty by the end of a workday. If I have something I need to save it either gets bookmarked, saved to PDF (courtesy of Safari’s excellent Export to PDF…), or I save a .webloc to a specific folder.
I am a big fan however of Tab Bookmarks or Bookmark Folder or whatever Safari calls those these days. I usually set them to replace all open tabs. I use that for standard collections of pages I routinely check: open an empty browser window and hit that bookmark (indicated by a little solid rectangle next to the name) and presto all relevant bookmarks open in tabs. Cmd-w as I finish with each one until the browser window goes away and then I know I’m done.
Because I rely so heavily on these Tab Bookmarks, I never got what Tab Groups is supposed to achieve. But perhaps that’s aimed at those folks who have one or multiple browser windows but each with 30+ tabs they somehow always seem to leave open. Never got that myself but to each their own of course.
For the longest time I had the Safari “Tab Overview” icon in my toolbar because I always thought it would help me find a certain tab when I’m looking for it. But since I never have that many tabs open in the first place, I never ended up using it. And because I’m a big fan of minimalism/efficiency and Konmari, I got rid of that button. In practice, I’m fastest just flipping through my tabs via shift-cmd-[ or shift-cmd-] (or shift-cmd-left / shift-cmd-right) until I find the one I’m looking for. I rarely have that many open I can’t read enough of the tab title to make out what I’m looking for anyway.
Totally different for me on iPhone by the way. There I always have the same ~2 tabs open but in addition I tend to open up many more (Open in Background) as I go about my daily reading. Once I’ve closed all but those 2 I always leave up, I know my reading is done.
A man after my own heart! I also like a ‘clean’ environment at days end.
With regards bookmarks, I rarely use them these days. I am however, a heavy user of Notes for saving sites or videos.
For example, for my current car restoration project I have a folder of Notes with things like Body, Suspension, Engine, Interior etc. If I have a web page or video I want to save I simply open the appropriate Note then click the icon to save it directly to the Note.
I love that I get a large preview and can play things like YouTube videos directly in the Note to remind me what it is (far more useful IMHO than a simple text link). I can also write accompanying notes alongside the previews noting particular things of interest.
Notes has basically replaced my need for Bookmarks and I find it far more useful, far better organised, more easily searched, and with much more pertinent information.
