I have firefox setup to close pins on my mobile after a week of not being accessed. if I haven't touched them in a week I don't need them.
My PC browser doesn't remember last session anyway so I've never had to worry.
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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I will open 15 tabs, forget why, and just close my browser. I keep history off. Writing a commemt? Doesn't matter. Email? There's probably a draft. Half finished video? The algorithm will guide it back to me if it was meant to be.
I dream about one day achieving this vibe. But what if I need it later????
Redo it. Don't overwhlem yourself with managaing everything all at once. If needed, plan your actions, but leaving your life in a constant state of chaos is really only a distraction. When you do come back, you had enough incentive to return. It'll help motivate you to finish stuff.
Years ago I made a habit of actively closing all tabs one-by-one when I'm done with work/research.
I'll also do this partially throughout the day. Imo feels nice and tidy.
Anything I might need later (aka never again in 99% of cases) I'll save as a bookmark or a as a note somewhere else.
Set them free. If they come back it's meant to be.
I do not understand people who have dozens of tabs open at once. i have three, maybe four at max. Most the time i have only two. what is even the point of having a dozen or more tavs open, you aren't using them all, are you?
Backlogs, unloaded tab are functionally not that different from bookmarks so opening and leaving an effective and universal "watch later" function. I usually keep a dozen or two sorted from least to most interesting. Communications - I usually have email, discord, calendar, work email, slack, jira open and pinned at all times. Plus a few (container) tabs where I'm signed under different roles in a system that Im working on so that i dont have to relog all the time. Wikipedia rabbitholes on something like theoretical physics, research projects and shopping for something highly specific like car parts or niche hobby products can easily explode into 50-100 tabs where it's easier to have a ton of tabs for cross referencing rather than going back and forth every time.
But that's just my flow, others might have different needs and solutions
Well, I used to think like you too, having only active tabs I needed and bookmarking important stuff.
But now I have tabs, which are important, but not as important to bookmark them permanently. So I persist tabs across sessions now, because else my bookmarks are way too cluttered for my tastes.
ctrl-shift-t
If I want to save something, I bookmark it.
Sending this to my wife. She flips her shit when she loses her tab prison.
I'm always surprised people hoard tabs. The explanation is always some crazy shit and they're basically bookmarks to some
I view bookmarks as being for sites that I intend to visit regularly enough to warrant making a handy link. A tab is for a place I plan to visit once, probably soon, but not right now, so I want to remember it, but not to the point where I'll make a dedicated bookmark link to it. Usually it's a video I want to watch at some point when I have more time, or a recipe I think I'll try making in a few days. The issue is when I don't get the motivation to do what I kept the tab open to do, so I start getting a backlog of tabs that I simultaneously don't want to lose because I kept them open for a reason, but I don't want to visit because there are too many of them to parse through.
I just use bookmarks for that. If it isn't worth bookmarking I'm just not gonna bother. I'll find it in the history if I want to for whatever reason (almost never happens)
if i bookmark something i might as well have deleted it (my object permanence is bad). when it's a tab i can at least see it there at all times
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If I bookmark it I will forget about it and never visit it again.
And you would remember to visit them again when they are in your 800 tabs?
Could put it in the bookmarks toolbar I guess. But sounds like many people hoard the toolbars because they want to visit the sites but never actually do
Yeah it kind of makes me irrationally angry when people try to defend it lol
Laughs nervously
Do it
How? Why?
it opens another level of "why" when you realize according to those stats, they have 5 other windows that have a cumulative 474 tabs. the 863 is just that window
I can delete them any time. I am not addicted. I definitely need them again at some point
leet
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Insanity. Those are all things I want to look at later.
When troubleshooting a problem I'll often end up with 10-20 tabs open. I realize many people end up with hundreds or more and, if that works for them, fine; however, I find even what I open stressful. As a result, I've occasionally found it helpful to fully close my browser and relaunch without any of the old stuff.
I also do a lot of searching in private mode, but that's mostly because I'm embarrassed about some of the simple things I have to look up. Supposedly the company doesn't actively track what sites we visit and now there's no local evidence of how stupid I am. Well, at least not via my web searches.
This is why I have different broswer profiles for different things with links to them in my start menu. Helps me maintain order amidst the chaos that is my broswer tabs/bookmarks.
I close all tabs before I close the browser.
I only have more than two or three open if I'm researching something.
I use bookmarks, I have maybe 75 bookmarks.
I use the Singlefile extension to save full pages if I think I'll want to reference something in the future, but don't want to use a bookmark.
Funnily enough, on firefox on my PC I have an entire extension called "no tabs" which does exactly what it says and disables tabs. On my phone just never open any tho :3
Disables tabs? Like you have to close one site to look at another? I am envious that you can make that work.
Well, if any site attempts to open a new tab, it'll just automatically pull it to a new browser window instead :3. Otherwise in general I would have to close the site im looking at if I wanted to open something else in the same window, rather than launching a new one
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Maybe it's just me but I've never had a problem with building up too many tabs. Like I can't stand having more than like four.
Bookmarks, however, I have a lot of bookmarks.
Tabs are ephemeral
I've honestly started doing that at least once a week and it really feels good for my mind to let that go. I can find whatever site it was later on when I actually need it again
Have you heard of bookmarks? There's even a bookmark bar that is right up there near the tabs. You can even edit the bookmark and delete the name so it's just a tiny icon on the bookmarks bar.
But I don’t like bookmarks, they’re way more work. Sure, if I’m trying to get the best performance possible, I’ll close my browser (all tabs will reopen when I start the browser again), but I mostly need a fuckload of tabs and a word processor, so it doesn’t normally impact my usage to have a bunch of tabs open.
I just find it really laborious to organize bookmarks properly when you get into the hundreds, and it’s more work to delete and easier to forget which in practice just means I still have decades old bookmarks I’m not interested in anymore. Tabs at least are in the way so I can remember to close them. I do use a few extensions to make it all a little easier to manage when I do deep dives into something and “need” ~50 new tabs for a little while.
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On Monday morning turn on the extension “tabs2text”
Export to markdown and paste into an Emacs org-file under a new date.
Close all tabs and turn off the extension.
Now you are clear to start another week without fear of losing a link and without the burden of any open tabs.
But I like when my tab counter says ∞ or :) …
I lost 5 years worth of restaurants and travel places I'd been secretly saving to do retirement trips with my wife someday (lol, retirement...)
They got moved to "archived" and then apparently they get removed from archived after 30 days unless you disable that "feature"
I went to add a restaurant one day and the entire set of tabs was gone. No idea how long it had been gone for, and browsing through my history of closed tabs on my cell phone was neigh impossible.
I'm still incredibly salty about that.
This is what bookmarks are for. I have folders of bookmarks.
I'm screwed - I use Linux.
Firefox on Kubuntu always offers to restore tabs for me, like some kind of crack dealer.
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It honestly pisses me off that restoring tabs is default behavior. If I closed the browser I meant too and if I didn't mean to oh fucking well. If I wanted to save that shit for later it would have been a bookmark.
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