> Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting?

Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time.

Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages etc. Once I'm done with the purchase, I'll close them all.

I sometimes use sideberry's ability to have tab groups, but not much.

To be honest, it's a not a great system in that stuff falls off my radar. Most of the tabs at the bottom of my sideberry tab list are ones I have not visited in many months. There's very little point having them there. However the cognitive cost and computational costs are close to zero.

Every now and then, I declare tab bankruptcy, mass bookmark them (to get over the feeling that I'll be closing something important), and close them all.

I've never, ever, once, in 15ish years of operating this way, looked at any of the bookmarks.

[EDIT] I guess the main issue is that deciding to close tabs I'm not currently looking at takes time, because I have to evaluate each one, and when I'm down to just favicons on the tab itself, that means actually looking at each page. Just periodically mass-bookmarking and closing is less work. It's a UI issue. Plus, if I'm looking at my browser, it's because I'm doing something, and that something is basically never "playing tab-gardener". My very first action is gonna be "new tab" and go from there.

I think tabs are just the better user interface.

It's not that I'm afraid I won't find the page in my history and bookmarks, it's that I don't want to have to do that because it's painful. History is full of irrelevant pages. Bookmarks make me lose my flow constantly wondering if I should bookmark a page or it's not needed (and in which directory!).

Tabs have a very simple workflow with low cognitive overhead. Everything is preserved by default (middle click/ctrl click is my default click in a browser), unless I'm clearly in a linear workflow where I don't want to keep the page (left click). Self-organizing due to the way they open, but very easy to manually reorder (or close) if needed. Kept in memory so going back to a (recent) tab is instantaneous.

They just... get out of the way and let me work. Tabs make browsing feel like one continuous task, where history/bookmarks feel like constant interruptions.

Now imagine every night while you're asleep, a cleaning crew comes into your building and tidies up. But they don't just sweep the floor and take out the garbage, they also put away all the tools, pick up any open books and put them back on the bookshelf, re-assemble the motorcycle, and put the music equipment back in its retail boxes.

When you come back in the morning, you have to dedicate minutes to hours just getting things back to where they were when you left. And because you're ADHD as fuck, you probably don't remember exactly where you left off and frequently end up skipping some major step or accidentally redoing work that you did before.

That is what my life feels like without tab groups.

Also, some sites, and especially app-like sites, are terrible at preserving your state if you close and navigate back. This could be something as simple as highlighted text in a document, or as advanced as the settings for the piano practice app session I'm in.

Because book marking sucks as there's no associated metadata on the site behind the link. You have to insert that data yourself by changing the page description. How do I search my links for battery charging if the link that leads to battery charging is joe6pack.com/foo?bla=foiuewyrocv9yetn75y9087wn7y9ewsygbatmobile? History is similar and something I dont want to bother with.

It's easier to just leave the tabs open and come back to them later. I do this all the time with sites like bandcamp, shopping sites, and so on - open a bunch of tabs and slowly work through them. I might have upwards of 50+ tabs open at times but they are mostly short lived, lasting a few days until I get frustrated and go on a tab nuking spree.

These days I manually maintain my own bookmarks in flat text files arranged by subject with my own metadata and just use grep. The link goes on one line, the next lines are "meta data" followed by a blank line. The list is mainly filled with stuff I really want to find again in the future so I put in the effort.

Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your choice.

And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).

For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.

Logically if your task income is greater than your available time, this pattern occurs.

Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation, and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.

Note that learning or researching is one of the most common tasks, is an active task, and usually requires multiple concurrent tabs. I.e. it's not simply one article you want to read later.

Why are you qualifying "normal" there? I have thousands of tabs open because I have infinite curiosity and a psychological deficit of attention span.

An open tab is earnest expression of a curiosity one is unlikely to actualize in this short life.

> "A man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?"

At work and at home, I always have multiple projects ongoing at the same time. I use one tab group per project. I typically have my notes for that project in the first tab and then other tabs contain documentation, reference material, forum threads, search engine queries, and whatever else that I want OPEN and AVAILABLE while I'm working so that I'm not always wasting time closing and opening tabs that I keep coming back to.

This way, when I switch between projects, I just select the tab group for that project and everything is exactly the way I left it last time. Didn't have to remember to manually save anything beforehand last time, or manually restore a folder of bookmarks or whatever.

Why not use bookmarks? For me, bookmarks are only ever used for links that I go to semi-regularly to regularly. I will NEVER add a bookmark to a site that I visit once, or might want to go back to again, because eventually you have to dedicate time to sorting, cleaning up, reorganizing, deleting them. And I HATE curating things.

Why not use browser history? Because it's full of all kinds of garbage which can hard to sort through and because my browser history only goes back about 6 months. I don't need (or want) to keep my history forever because it just needlessly fills up the disk and becomes a liability if my computer ever gets compromised. And sometimes my projects go longer than that.

remember where the term "bookmark" came from. a strip of paper or string that you lay in the pages of a book to remember where you are reading. when you read further you move the bookmark to the new position.

browser bookmarks don't do that. instead every time you remember a location you get a new bookmark. and then you have to go around and search for the old one to remove it.

a tab always remembers the latest state and gets updated automatically as i move forward or backward. the state is also cached as long as the tab is open. that matters for hackernews for example which tells me which messages are new since i last loaded the page. when i go to a tab the page doesn't get automatically reloaded so i get back to the old state, whereas with bookmarks that state is lost.

if bookmarks could keep the state (that means permanently cache the old version until i force a reload) and allow me to update them when that state changes while using the page, then i could use them instead of tabs.

I've always wondered if this kind of thing is just embarassing to talk about.

Sort of like admitting "the trunk of my car is full of unresolved stuff" or "my refrigerator is where things go to die"

it's just recently that lots of tabs has become normalized and people talk about it.

Maybe telemetry normalized it ("lots of people use 100's of tabs")

I use bookmarks for infrequently used items that I know I will come back to at some point, the tab groups are more transient.

1. Organizing threads of research into context groups. Usually doing heavy deep dives where it’s uncertain if I need to revisit a previous branch, so rather than closing, it’s much more beneficial to group and collapse. It’s also easier to reopen and glance at the topics you looked at.

2. Similarly, grouping tabs by purpose while developing. It lets me organize tabs in a way that makes it so they I don’t need multiple browser windows open. It makes for a much more zen-like development environment.

3. Testing across dev, staging, and prod. Want the same tabs open but grouped so that I don’t accidentally do something destructive on prod that I meant to do locally. Now that this is in Firefox, I can also combine it with multi-account containers for more workflows.

Using bookmarks would not fit here, because I have no intention to access the tabs in future (e.g. a year from now) again.

I can imagine that other people who have different contexts, and some web apps like mail, im and socials, that can easily make use of tab groups. Grouping and coloring them makes it really easy to not get lost in the bunch that is open at the same time.

I had previously used the Pin Tab feature to collapse them, but Tab Groups allows you to have essentially unlimited videos that only take up a single favicon-sized space when collapsed.

I typically am working on 4-5 projects at a time with some other non-project work categories like status reporting. A lot of my work involves reading and editing multiple web pages or writing updates on web pages based on communications in other channels. I reuse the same web pages multiple times a day and it is not feasible to close and reopen them constantly. Tab groups let me switch between the web pages for projects, read or update the pages, and then switch to another project. If nothing else, it means that I can actually see the titles of most tabs within a project rather than having them all collapse into identical icons. Tab groups helps keep this sane.

I am currently using Firefox-based Zen because its Tab Workspaces gives me the project separation I need. Chrome's tab groups don't offer enough separate between groups for me. I'll have to checkout this Firefox implementation but from what I saw earlier they may be adopting Chrome's minimal separation method of grouping so that may not work. I was using Arc for a while as they have a similar grouping to what Zen does.

I wish browsers had better APIs to get history and bookmarks out, so if I did decide I had to find one of out 100 images I looked at on a particular site yesterday I could write some script to download those images and show all of them on one page.

I've got 113 tabs on that machine (about:telemetry#scalars-tab_search=tab). I'm using 5 virtual desktop, 2 for me and one for each of my customers. One Firefox window per desktop (maybe my workaround for tab groups), one editor window per desktop, one terminal per desktop. The Slack app on the desktop I'm currently using. My password manager on all desktops. I switch using an hotkey, Windows + the first letter of the customer. No animations, no Activities, nothing. I was OK with Gnome 2.

It's nice to have 32 GB of RAM. 113

I could use windows the same way, but my personal preference is to use tab groups so I can keep fewer windows open.

Right now I also have several tab groups that are each a collection of current documentation and historical context for a particular internal system at my company. I always intend to turn a tab group like that into a list of links in a note, and sometimes I do, but a lot of them are still sitting around. Chrome is reliable enough at restoring them that I have tab groups I've kept for over a year.

I also have groups of documents I intend to read and digest better. They are 90% aspirational, but they serve a psychological purpose. I frequently scan through them, so anything that gets ignored for very long probably isn't important.

Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or Firebase, or anything like that.

Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning history should be a task for heuristics.

I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now. Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated process, then attacking it like a video game and getting rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they aren't visible.

I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider computers today as running thousands of times slower than they should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better, because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond economic systems and think they're fundamental.

"Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?" is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs open?

Think of it like organizing papers on your desk vs putting them in the filing cabinet.

Maybe that's not typical tab use though, idk

*Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox everytime I have too many tabs.

Reading queue. Unfortunately, every app becomes its own sort of todo list: email, browser tabs, social feeds, RSS feed.

Maybe someone will be smart enough to make an AI agent that collects, cleans (ad removal, de-sensationalizing, summarization), and prioritizes information from disparate sources.

In some cases, I'll have 6 or so tabs open about different steps of a woodworking project, for example. Not bookmarked, because it's unlikely I'll need those tabs again; either for never working on a similar project, or for being outdated by the time I need to circle back. So I just leave the tabs open, and when I finish the project, I go through and close all the tabs.

In my head, it's understood as: this is my garage/workbench/workspace; it'll be messy DURING project work, and it'll get cleaned up as much as I can as I go, but it'll be a bit unruly until the project is done. Then it'll get wound down.

Multiply that by the 3-6 projects I'm working on at any given time, and then add in the utility tabs (task manager, email, note app, git repos, npm, cloudflare, etc), the social tabs (only bluesky, discord, and soundcloud), the news tabs (a tab for "news" like CNN/Fox/NBC/etc that I cycle through, and then others like HackerNews and hobbyist news sites like video gaming or hunting or whatever), and the experiment tabs (searches and likely dead-ends that I'm using to try and figure stuff out), and you've already got dozens of tabs. But on top of that, I also tend to curate "entertainment" tabs, like YouTube videos that I'll probably find interesting, or whatever. Things that I will consume and then close the tab.

I've been told it's a lot of tabs to have open, but it's always between around 10 and 100. I've definitely seen worse. /shrug

ETA: regarding the thread topic, I would find groups useful because I can dump all of the project tabs into a single group and that would help me navigate faster. But, I'm not really happy with Mozilla and I don't find Firefox to be particularly good (pages with custom elements are too slow for my taste; too slow on web standards, too - it's well past time for WebGPU to be working), so I doubt I'll use the feature much because I'm jumping ship to the next best thing as soon as anyone puts something out (looking forward to Servo for this; still not sold on the mac-focused Ladybird and everything else - Chrome, Brave, Arc, etc - are either badly built or badly managed). If I'm going to have to go back to non-grouping, anyway, I'm not sure I'll be keen to start doing it in the first place.

I often wonder how other people read their RSS feeds. I open them as new tab for all my interested links. My Subscribed list mostly generate about 400 - 500 links per day. Most of them are news. And scanning through all of them I mostly open about 30 - 40 tabs. Sometimes it could be up to 100s depending on topics. Then I just run through them one by one. The same goes with HN. Normally I get about 10 - 20 tabs opened on HN per day. All Together this could be 50 - 60 Tabs opened. And if you dont have time to read through them all they stayed there. Another day another reading cycle.

Another category which happens to have lots of tabs is Shopping and comparing. Trying to look for the best tools for the best price and where I could buy them. This normally includes opening 5 - 10 Tabs form the like of Reddit or some other specific forums.

Or Researching about a Topic where it leads to 5 other sub topic and every sub topic has 5 - 8 tabs.

I currently have different "Groups" of tabs, MBA, Jobs Searching, People I follow, Surgery operation comparison, Insurance, Youtube [1], AI, Electric Toothbrush and Water and Water Floss ( Any Recommendation from HN ? ), HN, Twitter.

I used to do 1000s of tabs but Nowadays I tend to limit to within a few hundred at most. Although that is also partly because Safari is the worst browser for multiple tabs and Firefox on iOS dont work as well.

[1] I increasingly think Youtube should have a Desktop App because the web simply does not provide good enough experience.

Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).

Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.

>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?

History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.

>Not judging or anything,

It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.

PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.

Basically, though, it's a sign of toxic multitasking, as some others have said. I'm not happy that this feature was useful but it was useful.

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.

To me a browser tab is like an Emacs buffer: although I need the ability to have more than one Emacs buffer open at a time and to switch between them, if some process ran at random times and deleted all the buffers I haven't looked at in the last 2 minutes, I probably wouldn't be significantly annoyed or hindered.

Some context, for starters, I have about 10 tabs pinned, discord, 3 slack instances, my fastmail, my gmail, my work mail, spotify, my task list.

Then, there is the things I left open because I am going to read it, a stack of documentation I'm working on. A few random products I'm researching as procrastination. Any search I'm on, and a tree of tabs from different results that I'm working through.

There are the various layers of those things for the things I was working on 30 minutes or a day ago, that I haven't worked back to yet.

And most importantly, there are all the tabs that used to fall in the prior categories, that I just forgot to close, or haven't gotten around to closing yet.

Suddenly, meeting was scheduled again, I simply clicked on the group, and got all the tabs open again.

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/firefox-tab-groups/

  > No mention of whether the feature is available now on a stable release

  > Looking at some of the 20 year old bugs that still exist?

  https://gbhackers.com/google-to-patch-23-year-old-chrome-bug/

Firefox actually had a feature like tab groups a long time ago. It was removed for "low usage" and ever since then they have been resisting reimplementing it.

Anyways it still needs improvement but I am very happy to see this finally land. At work we have been moving everyone off of chrome after the manifest v3 shenanigans and the lack of tabs groups was a long standing sticking point for some users.

More than 8 or 10 tabs open and i start cleaning 'em up.

I tried bookmarking everything in a dated folder "just in case" blabla but I always ended up either forgetting the site or if I really need it find and reopen it the normal way.

Since I transitioned to Obsidian recently I wrote a few simple macros to put the link into my "daily note". Add a few tags or even a comment if I am so inclined and boom, so far when I really want to find sth back I can actually search for it in my own notes.

Much better than a bunch of tabs!

(It helps that I´m currently on a really small machine (8 GB RAM) so that gives some discipline)

I like to start the day with a blank slate. Which seems to be such an uncommon thing to do that I couldn't convince FF on my last few Linux installs not to restore tabs when reopening. I've changed the obvious settings for it, I've set the flags in about:config, I've even completely disabled crash recovery and related features. It would still always reopen the last session

Is this just a temporary technical limitation / anybody know if there are plans to fix this? Why should the user need to remember which profile is synced on a given device?

This new feature (which I've already gotten to test), I can almost use the same way, though I'm wary of Mozilla yanking it away from me if I rely on it.

I guess there probably are features that can be trimmed back, that go unnoticed and don't draw attention.

But sometimes I think companies refactor something and just don't want to think about supporting something. Or, they have an unpopular hidden motive.

(I think of apple's target disk mode, and tesla's non-existent dashboard and now turn signal/drive select stalks)

I don't get why vertical tab is not at least an option in all browsers.

[1] https://github.com/projectdelphai/panorama-tab-groups

This was a very important feature to le at the time, as I used to work on multiple projects at the same time, and I had all of those organised in a simple, very visual way. I also had a group for "communication" with all my webmails, forums, etc. And another one with all the webcomics I used to read at the time.

You can either click "list all tabs" button (down arrow to the right of the new tab button) and then "search tabs" or enter "%" as the first character in the address bar followed by your search term.

As far as I know there is no keyboard shortcut for it.

You can also use Right Click->Add Tab To Group

This is what I use as the pull tabs together is very bad UI. It's to easy to move the tab instead and / or open a new window. Hope this improves with time.

https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/

Yes. Firefox.

(it was like that long ago)

> Tab hoarding can lead to stress and information overload, distraction, and reduced computer performance. It can develop into emotional attachment to the set of open tabs, including fear of losing them upon a crash or other reboot, and conversely, relief when tabs are properly restored. Tab hoarders have attributed the behavior to anxiety, fear of missing out, procrastination, and poor personal information management practices.

I agree though, Chrome does a similar implementation where tab groups act like a special class of bookmarks and it's much nicer. You have the same process where you never have to fear losing groups and you can 'hide' tab groups that you aren't actively using and they're potentially accessible from any window.

I have bad news for you my friend.

For years, most of (+90%) Mozilla's revenue was ad partnership based*. Recently this has gotten worse: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43203096

* https://untested.sonnet.io/notes/defaults-matter-dont-assume...

> All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025. [1]

[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups

> Starting in Firefox version 137, you can use tab groups to manage open tabs in Firefox by grouping them together and labelling them. All users should expect to see the feature by May 6, 2025.

Assuming you want to download firefox. It seems to be integrated into the browser, there's no add-on or so for this that you would need to download separately.

I do think it's nice to have as an option for the many people who seem to want it, though.

Go to about:config and then set browser.tabs.groups.enabled to true.