this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2024
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I never really found a use for this. Do people really need so many tabs open they have to sort them?
yes
Just did a rough estimate and I have approximately 200 tabs currently open in Firefox on my work laptop.
Of those which were opened more than 1 hour ago, how many have you used in the last hour, would you suppose?
In the last hour? I just started work an hour ago, so like 4.
So the other 196 are sort of, things you're not working on, but haven't really done with, and might need again?
I think most people use some combination of notes, bookmarks, history, and search to manage this.
I'm not most people
Obviously.
I'm not being critical. More power to you.
I know there's lots of people that use lots of tabs and I'm just trying to understand how it works.
Honestly I might dispute your assertion that "most people" are doing anything different. IME, people are generally pretty disorganized.
A bold assertion good sir, and one we can test:
https://telemetry.mozilla.org/new-pipeline/dist.html#!cumulative=0&end_date=2023-12-17&include_spill=0&keys=__none__!__none__!__none__&max_channel_version=nightly%252F122&measure=SCALARS_BROWSER.ENGAGEMENT.MAX_CONCURRENT_TAB_COUNT&min_channel_version=null&processType=*&product=Firefox&sanitize=1&sort_by_value=0&sort_keys=submissions&start_date=2023-11-20&table=0&trim=1&use_submission_date=0
I'm on mobile but if that data is showing what I think it is, the median "Max tabs per session" is 4? Less than I expected? That's firefox nightly too, which I would expect to skew more towards excessive tabs than the main releases.
Also... someone has more than 7,000 tabs open?
Why? Bookmarks exist. Are you trying to make sure all your ram stays full or what?
Isn't this an old thing by now? Pretty sure tabs that are not used for X amount of time are put to "sleep".
Bookmarks also need a huge redesign, and not only with FF.
That is why services like Pocket and reading lists exist... Heck, I have been using Evernote as a bookmark replacement for many years (and now I need to find a replacement for it, Sadly).
Yeah, I think you're right, but open tabs are sort of similar, they just make using your computer slower and tabs harder to find at a certain point. I say this and I have 32 GB of RAM. I find it noticeably slower if I have like 30 tabs open.
And yeah 5 characters isn't enough for me to know what that open tab is. I have watched people use tabs like that, and no one seems to actually deal with it well. It always seems to be a struggle that they just cope with. Clicking 17 times to find a tab isn't making anyone's life easier.
That is only because stock FF tab management today is trash.
I don't like Chrome's too much better, but for me Safari having an integrated Simple Tab Groups feature was a must have feature.
Now with these new changes can actually help to manage this, and it seems that it won't affect FF usage at all, so one could keep using TST or Sidebery if they wanted to, for a more serious tab management.
Also, I only have 16 GBs of RAM, but I have yet to feel my MacBook Pro any slower because of FF, especially when FF is able to sleep tabs or if you restart it manually.
I am confused by most of what you're saying.. what the acronyms are, how safari come into play (talk about an absolute trash browser)...
You do you, but I'll probably never think opening a bunch of tabs is helpful. Making it easier to do so is enabling bad behavior. I'll probably use it, and at times stress myself out because even with a nicer UI I'll be struggling to find something with 42 tabs open.
It's like keeping a messy and cluttered desk. Some people are going to do that and say they can find everything, but 9 times out of 10 if you watch them work you can tell it makes life a little more difficult, they're just coping with it because they'd rather not straighten up as often as others.
I look up a lot of things and sometimes one page doesn't fully answer it so you need to do extra research, then you end up 40 tabs deep in the history of it and it all ties back to each other.
Also programming, that also requires a crap load of tabs.
The stackoverflow has a stack overflow.
I thought you only needed one: chatGPT.
If only chatgpt was that good, it can help point you in the right direction, but it will either use deprecated code or start hallucinating things, it is only a tool.
I think I have five browser containers across three devices with dozens of tabs on each. I don't sort them. Autocomplete from the omnibox usually gives an option to jump to the tab I need.
I usually always have between 20 and 40 tabs open, but I’ve seen a few people in forums complaining that some add-ons would crash because those individuals had hundreds or even over a thousand tabs open simultaneously.
For work, ya I've found it useful. Personally, at home no.
It may be a little niche, but I’d bet plenty of people will use it. I’m in the middle of a personal research project, and it would make things so much easier for me. I’m currently grouping my tabs by having multiple windows open…
I mentioned it in my reply to this comment, but Simple Tab Groups is a pretty solid alternative in Firefox.
Its not quite as elegant as the built-in Chrome ones, but it does make it easy to have a bunch of groups sorted out that you can flip between.
Sweet, thanks.
I use it on a regular basis and while it is great to have it, its not on a level where I want it to be. I am very excited about this announcement
No. No it's not.
Different people have different ways of working. Some people are accustomed to having a million tabs open, others can’t stand it.
My use case is probably a bit more niche but I have Memory Impairment and bookmarks don't work that well for me. I'm a very organised person and did previously use things like bookmarks extensively. But since my memory has gotten really bad I need more visual representations. Visual bookmarks could kinda work for this but I am yet to find something that's private, easy to set up (or just works out of the box) and isn't fiddly to use. Bookmarks that aren't visual, don't stay in my memory so I forget about them. Search bar helps a bit but sometimes I also can't think of the right words to use to get Firefox to bring up the right bookmark (even with extensive keywords - because I also can't always think of the right keywords to set).
So I have heap of tabs open. I need things to stay in my recent memory and recent use, otherwise they just get forgotten. It does mean over time more and more tabs get left open. But I do fairly regular sort throughs where I go through each tab to make sure it's something unimportant where I've just forgotten to close the tab or something I am actually using/working on.
It's not ideal but it's the only thing that works for me right now. I have so many things going on at once, it sucks that I have to remember so much at once when I have memory issues but such is life when disabled folks aren't properly supported, lack of volunteers means I have to take more volunteer work that I should, western society sucks for supporting parents, and sexism means that I'm still default parent (mother) despite my husband being more progressive than most hsubands/dads are (he's also woefully disorganised which is in part just him and also in part how boys and men are socialised). Anyway, this isn't meant as a commentary on the differences in organisations levels and how that affects tab usage between mothers and fathers lol.
I have two windows in my main profile and two in a secondary profile. The main profile windows have 83 and 29 tabs open, and the secondary profile has 50 and 38 tabs.
And then more tabs in multiple windows on my tablet (sadly, Firefox still doesn't support multiple windows on iPadOS despite the feature being introduced nearly 5 years ago and all other major browsers supporting it...At this point it's literally the only reason I don't use Firefox as my main browser) and yet more on my phone.
That said, I don't actually use tab groups very much. I currently have just 4 of them, with a total of 19 tabs in them combined.
Yeah me neither.
ITT it kinda looks like people just leave tabs open as a way to remember where something is, or even as a way to remember that something needs their attention.
There are much better ways, but everyone needs to do their own thing I guess.
The thing about open tabs is that they are already open, I don't need to do anything to put down the note. And I'd usually need to open the site again to continue working - and often other sites as well (that are now also already open in tabs nearby). So I use them even though I kinda hate them. I just wish I could organize them easier.
A fair point.
For me, I get frustrated with more than a few open.
I work in a legal adjacent field. Lots of research, skipping down rabbit holes. For me personally I find it difficult to see why a tab was open because visually they're all very similar. I need to read and remember the context, by which time I've lost the "working data" I had been juggling.
My thoughts and opinions coalesce more quickly if I'm copying & pasting stuff into my notes as I go anyway.
Everyone needs to do their own thing. Mine is not necessarily better.
Having available ram apparently is just a me-thing
Generally, its not that I have too many tabs as much as I have some tabs I leave open all the time and want to condense down a bit.
For example, at work I use Chrome for my main web work, and FF for my... uh... shit like this. So I have a bunch of Chrome tabs open that I know I'll have to make changes to again in the future, so they stay open. I also have 'projects' which contain a bunch of pages that are all related to each other. Being able to group those together and collapse makes it easy to quickly get back into them when someone wants a small, insignificant (sorry, extremely important!) change to them that needs to be done yesterday, and I can eventually just throw the group away once the project is mostly complete and not going to be touched by human hands ever again (until a year later, when it suddenly becomes a critical problem for someone, and thus a problem for me... I'm not complaining, you're complaining).
At home, I mainly use Firefox. I have an extension that allows me to have tab groups, but its not as nice looking as the built-in Chrome version (Simple Tab Groups, which is actually quite nice, but not as pretty as the Chrome ones). I have a group for my usual fucking around stuff (Discord, YT, Kbin, DIM (Destiny app), wiki for whatever other game I'm playing), a tab for my streaming stuff (which I don't use often, but as I have a few container tabs for logging in to my brother's account for a handful. I like to just leave those open so I don't have to worry about it), and a group for my "working from home" stuff like email/OneDrive and a smaller amount of pages I always keep open because I'm always editing them for work.
So all in all, I don't have like a hundred tabs open at any given time, and I could make due with just having them all bookmarked and open them as need be... but honestly, that's a bit of a hassle and would also either leave me with a ton of useless bookmarks after a month or two, or require me to curate my bookmarks every month or two. Versus just having a tab group I can just kill off once I know I'm done with their work.
Shit I have so many tabs open. Bookmarking is essentially the same as closing them because I'll never find them when I want them let alone remember I bookmarked them. Then I'll head to a search engine to relentlessly try and remember the term I searched for in the first place but not see any visited links or the visited links were the non-helpful sites and the one I want is gone.
After all that I'll just give up and some weeks later find the bookmark I was looking while looking for another non-related bookmark.
No not really a need at all, just an alternative to bookmarks imo. Having more than ~ 20 tabs open is a very inefficient way to work imo.