Ways to avoid keeping so many browser tabs open

TidBITS Talk
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What are you folks doing that you need hundreds of tabs open? I couldn’t possibly have hundreds of papers, notes or jobs on my desk and expect to get anything done.

I don’t use tabs at all, just windows. If I want to access something I open it, then close it when I’m done. Maybe it’s my OCD tendency but leaving all those tabs open would be like leaving a month’s worth of dirty clothes on the floor of my room - yuck.

I rarely bookmark anything anymore, preferring to use Notes to keep well organised folders and lists of sites I wish to organise. Added benefit is the videos I save can be viewed in Notes for a quick reminder.

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Living my best life. It’s just how I’m wired. I get a lot done, regardless of having so many open tabs.

In fact, the reason I don’t close a lot of my tabs is because I’m so busy getting stuff done I consider the time required to make the decision whether or not to close a tab to be a waste of time and energy.

So I’d rather save my decision-making energy for something more important than whether or not to close a tab.

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I used to hit this every so often when I was using Chrome. At first, there was a single file that could be restored, but at some point, Google changed its approach and I had to restore the entire Chrome folder.

~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome

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When I get more than four or five tabs open at once, I start to feel overwhelmed and treat them as I do papers accumulating on my desk: deal immediately with any that can be dispatched with less than a few minutes’ effort, and relegate the rest to a specific task on my to-do list.

I was intrigued by all the discussion of the Arc browser, but never tried it because it seemed to be all about helping organizing tabs. I currently have three tabs open in my browser: one a countdown of days until I move, one to my digital garden that I update daily, and this tab for TidBITS Talk. I’ll close this one before I open any others.

I understand people who use lots of tabs, but for me they just become another good-intentions-pile.

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I avoid multiple tabs by opening multiple browsers: Safari, Firefox, Brave, Orion, etc. :smile:

I rarely use more than two or three tabs at a time and cannot see any situations where I might use more. But I am fascinated to learn that having many tabs open is common and also how folks are using multiple tabs.

Options are good.

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I’d be interested to see if there’s a correlation between number of open tabs in one’s browser and the amount (or lack) of clutter on one’s physical desk. :grin:

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I’m a window closer. My wife has hundreds of tabs open.

Boggles my mind but it is one facet among many of the mysteries of other people.

I guess if I want to keep something around but not archive it I would add it to Agenda for my work or my Notion inbox for College.

If I want to archive I would add it to the relevant DevonTHINK database.

My wife on the other hand would, eh, not.

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My open tabs are for many reasons.

One type I do close when done is client work, because when I’m done working for the day, I am done working.

But personal tabs are varied, and usually some sort of research. Lately I’ve been researching speakers so I have a number of tabs open for that: a speaker comparison chart, a couple of manufacturers, amazon reviews. There are things I buy that take awhile to figure out, because it’s not my line of work and I have to really consider the parts I am getting.

I have tabs open for a place I want to stay on a trip - I’ve actually lost that one before and it took a long time to find it again. I’m sure I put it in my DevonThink trip folder but until I actually sit down one day and look, I won’t close it.

I have tabs for the upcoming solar eclipse and camera gear for it. A few more for an event I’m doing next week.

I will usually find Craigslist and eBay tabs if something caught my eye over the week. Sometimes a concert video I want to listen to while at my desk, which means I have it open on this computer but will eventually play it on the iMac in my office. So I leave it open to remind me.

I do try and go through some of them while sitting on the couch.

For me, tabs are kind of like sticky notes. I am a big brain dump person and this is a brain dump for me, but in a tab vs a piece of paper.

If I don’t go through them frequently, they are an interesting slice of life when I get back to them. I personally feel some of this (for me) has to do with how complex (too many choices) and expensive some things have become over the decades. Even buying a case of paper the other day - would you expect Hammermill to be cheaper than the Staples brand? It wasn’t! And now I am seeing reams of paper that are less than 500 sheets, cases less than 10 reams. I really had to pay attention to make sure I got exactly what I wanted and it took about 3 tabs because I was comparing pricing too.

Diane

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Just as I can’t stand too much clutter on my desk I can’t deal with a gazillion open tabs. I lose track of what is where and then I waste more time searching than I do thinking. Once I get “into the zone” I need to be able to access information quickly and without fuss. If I then have to root around first, I’ll choke off the process. Obviously, that’s just how I work. I know plenty of people who like “creative chaos”.

Safari has decent bookmark management supporting folder structure. Thanks to iCloud*, once a bookmark is set or revised, it’s updated everywhere (at least most of the time). Stuff I need frequently for a brief period goes at the end of my favorites bar. Stuff for longer-term repeat access goes into the folder structure I curate in my bookmarks. And URLs I want archived go into a .webloc files or Notes. I treat my browser window and tabs like my inbox: the only stuff in there is what I am working on right now or stuff I need to deal with later today. Stuff for tomorrow or next week goes into its own holding area, and everything else gets filed properly.

*) Long before iCloud bookmark syncing I relied on a script to translate my Netscape bookmarks to a simple html file which would then get uploaded to my personal web server. That way even when I was on some remote computer somewhere (hotel business centers, LOL, remember those?) I had access to stuff I needed. The final version of that html file still exists on my personal web server and occasionally I’ll still use it. In the meantime I’ve changed bits and pieces of it by hand. Mainly nostalgia. :wink:

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I am similar, but for this I’m a big fan of tab groups in Safari. Right now I have a groups of tabs with gift ideas for my wife; another groups researching replacement car audio receivers to add CarPlay to one of our cars (I’ve been collecting the cash back from my Apple Card to use for this - I’m almost there). I had one group I used last year to research our trip to the UK and Ireland, now closed, and a group that I have with research for a leak in my espresso machine, with suggested remedies and spare parts in case I need one. (Cleaning the three-way valve seems to be working.)

And the new profiles have allowed me to stay logged out of Google for most of my browsing and switch to a specific profile when I want to use my Google account, rather than open Chrome (on my Mac).

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I haven’t used new Safari tab groups, but I do have Arc setup on a machine with a newer OS, mainly for client work. That way I can have each clients passwords (banks, gmail etc) in one workspace.

Bookmarks - I always did have neatly organized bookmarks, but at some point my older version of Safari was struggling to bring things up when I was typing - I’d have to go open bookmarks and search for it. I think it was around that time I bought Devonthink.

Back to the tabs and researching, when I’m done with a project and close a tab (or more), to me it’s like throwing away that sticky note. It’s “complete”. I think I’d have a harder time bookmarking things and then going back and deleting everything when I’m done. It’s easier for me to just open tabs and then close them. For instance, the speaker thing. Having speakers that will pair in stereo is important to me. I recently discovered that was called TWS and it was easy for me to click on the open tabs, check them and close whichever ones didn’t have TWS, and then add a couple new ones.

Diane

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One of the advantages of Safari Tab Groups is that, unlike Bookmark folders, when you close a tab, it disappears from the group (and, when you open a new tab within a group, it stays)… I’m guessing that ARC works similarly. You could have a tab group for each project or client. If I were still working, I could see myself opening a browser window for the current project and also having another one open for general references. I would then add and delete tabs as necessary. When I wanted to switch to another project, I would switch tab groups; when I wanted to come back, I would reopen the appropriate tab group.

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FireFox hoses me when I get a crash, only restores 1 of ever so many "browser windows, which may not be the main one, e.g. search, print or a secondary window, and is rarely the one I needed.

Much vexation, not often , but not needed. Painful recovery any way I do it. Devon think may be my go to on this since Evernote is getting unstable.

I have the “go back and read” problem ,too. Those who don’t have it don’t understand those that do. I don’t think he realized it had some backhand to it.

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My first thought was “yes that’s me,” but then I realized that 95% of my work is done on my computer desktop, and I clean that much more often than I do the physical desktop (which is an old-fashioned metal desk that is behind me when I work on my computer).

I do a lot of research for my writing, and I find it useful to open new tabs when I am checking out something but don’t want to lose what I was working on before. I find it very useful to switch back and forth between two (or more) tabs to compare multiple sources. If I’m interrupted, it’s convenient to be able to go right back to what I was doing in another tab. I do check every so often how many tabs I have and whether they are important. Firefox handles up to about 20-30 tabs pretty well, but is known to either crash or slow down once I get too many tabs running.

A downside of having too many tabs open is that you can lose track of some of the things you were juggling with all those tabs. I haven’t found anything else that works any better. I don’t find bookmarks work very well.

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I keep lots of tabs open, in a largish number of windows (currently 23 windows). It’s a lot less painful than bookmarks, of which there are currently more than 15,000 just on my primary sierra mac. Sync is not an option I want, because I do different things on different computers/devices and I prefer to have some separation.

There are windows for mail, weather, the week’s news, projects, books to track down, online books that I’m reading off and on, rabbit holes, and the ever present ‘misc’.

They don’t intrude on the desktop (though other things do), because most of the windows are minimized. Some, like the book ‘list’ and the news window’s unread or keeper residue at the end of the week, get saved to dated bookmark folders when they hit ~50 tabs. Safari search for bookmarks is abysmal, so every now and again I export the bookmarks, which produces an html file that includes the page titles so I can search in bbedit or safari.

There are no tab groups in sierra safari. They do exist in catalina, but I just played a bit with them, and they’re fussier and afaict no more useful than just minimizing windows.

Once upon a time when the web was young I kept bookmarks organized, but it eventually became futile. The time and energy it takes to organize is better spent doing almost anything else.

Speculation: those of us who prefer living in a rich and varied environment (what neatniks call a mess), have many interests and possibly shortish attention spans. I can think of one counter example, but his interests have been serial, not parallel.

Remember, a mess is many excitingly satisfying selections.

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I’m in the no-way more than 3 tabs group. In fact, I almost never use more than one tab (well, except when I’m comparing two or more products).

The habit is a product of the early years of sparse RAM, code debugging, and ill-behaved applications I suppose. Yes, I usually close all applications before signing-off for the day. :flushed: :slight_smile:

And, er, normally there are only 4 icons on my desktop: 3 drives and one Recents folder.

Mind you, there are project folders with hundreds of files but if I’m not working on them I don’t want to see them. . . .

It’s so interesting how people think differently about such things.

Dave

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I’ve now removed the back-and-forth about this decision fatigue—I’m sure no offense was meant, and the Wikipedia page in question does include a section on criticism of the concept. Let’s stay focused on solutions to the too-many-tabs problem.

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And how to recover lost tabs from Time Machine?

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@schwartz see my solution earlier in the thread: Ways to avoid keeping so many browser tabs open - #10 by gingerbeardman

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I generally have zero tabs open when I go to bed and feel a little antsy if I have ten or so tabs open.

I do rely on Instapaper a lot; I use it speculatively, as in “that might be interesting to read,” not “I will definitely read that.” I use Pinboard for bookmarks of stuff that’s not reading per se (like a color calculator, for example), although there’s some speculation that the owner, Maciej Cegłowski, has lost interest in maintaining it.