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Ask HN: Do you successfully manage the browser tabs? If so, how?

by pedrodelfino on 8/15/23, 6:26 PM with 9 comments

• by spansoa on 8/15/23, 6:47 PM

  The only time I have multiple tabs open is if I'm researching a subject. Typically Wikipedia binges. I'm a minimalist, so I keep open tabs to a minimum. Then you have types who treat their tabs like their browsing history which is neurotic IMHO.

• by mindwork on 8/16/23, 3:18 PM

  Every day I use 4-10 tabs at max. For things that I'm working on or reading currently. I lever leave tab "for later". Instead I use bookmarks extensively. Most recent export showed that I have 672 bookmarks at this moment. I use it for everything from personal sites, to programming resource link storage, homelab ideas, shopping and especially "To read later". I often go to this bookmark folder and pick something from there, and delete if after reading or working through article. Works like a charm.

• by simonblack on 8/15/23, 11:23 PM

  When I do my 'daily reading', I open all the tabs, could be as many as ten, in a browser section named something like 'daily'. I then go through those sites, tab by tab. If I find something interesting I will open that other page in a separate tab, if I don't find anything I will close the top-level tab for the site.

  Having gone through the 'daily' group's tabs, I now have a bunch of new unread tabs and have got rid of those tabs that didn't have anything interesting to read. This might leave me with, say, six tabs.

  As I read those tabs, I close the tabs. Eventually I might end up with no tabs and close the browser, or I might leave that last tab open so that the browser itself remains open.

  Depending on time available, or my own inclination, I might open another section called (say) 'Tech News' which has about half a dozen sites and repeat the above procedure.

  Tabs only remain open if there is something not yet read in them, or if I using that page for reference. As soon as the tab is 'used up' it is closed.

• by jauntywundrkind on 8/16/23, 1:44 AM

  I started writing snss-re to read the Chrome session store file, to extract out all my browsing history.

  This comes a bit over 10 years after writing an extension that capture tab activity into an rss feed, which i wrote for a Mozilla Design Challenge for 2009. I've wanted to do a lot more, but haven't returned to the problem space until recently. https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2009/05/introducing-the-design...

  Ideally I create a separate webapp that lets me browse old windows, & figure out out to ex-post save/file/tag pages.

• by raptorraver on 8/16/23, 10:25 AM

  After each workday I close all my tabs. If there's some valuable stuff that I'll be missing I can dig it from the browse history but that happens very seldom.

• by IronWolve on 8/16/23, 5:28 AM

  Tab groups, work group, daily use group, and I keep my video watching in a different browser. For python notebooks I use a dedicated browser.

  But normally, browsers just resume my tabs, so been rocking the same'ish tabs groups forever.

• by zzo38computer on 8/16/23, 5:20 AM

  I usually do not open many tabs at once (sometimes only one, and often none at all) so it is not much of a problem. I usually have more xterms open than browser tabs.

• by jaredsohn on 8/16/23, 6:45 AM

  xTab extension automatically closes all but the most recent n (mine is set to 20) tabs. If I pin a tab it won't close it.

  https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xtab/amddgdnlkmoha...

  If I have more open tabs than that, I likely won't be able to find them anyway.

• by cercatrova on 8/16/23, 2:36 AM

  Yes, I close all of my browser tabs once I'm done for the day.