We all have many open windows and tabs. How do you control that?

I think everyone is different, but for me bookmarks don't work (I just don't do it) and history rarely works (too much noise there).

Really, most of the time I can just close the tabs, and I will "re-discover" them when needed. But I don't do that: there is a fair amount of tabs that I don't dare closing because I feel like they contain something useful or I may need them.

I found an extension that I use as a "tab cemetery": a place where I can just store all the open tabs once in a while and start from fresh. And the two times a year I actually need to find one of them, I can open the cemetery and search there (it's organised by "dump date").

This extension is called "OneTab" (I have no interest in promoting it, that's just what I use). Works well for me.

I close my browsers with prejudice. If it mattered I would have put it into an issue or committed it to SCM before I wandered away from the tab. Also, history exists. If the reason we are keeping our tabs open is because we've disabled browsing history, then I have a simple suggestion to make.

Walking up to my workstation in the morning and seeing all the trash from yesterday's efforts causes me meaningful loss in motivation. I get down to a blank desktop at the end of each day now.

3 monitors: 2K laptop on a stand, 4K rotated, 2K rotated & sometimes scaled to 4K. Lots of screen space.

Windows in strategic positions, sized small to fit the content. I removed maximize. I never maximize. I full screen a single game or video to one of the monitors when desirable. I rarely minimize. A dock on the bottom of the laptop with windows grouped by program -- very manageable. Placement and size of windows. Being able to see everything at a glance. I wish XFCE could save window positions and sizes.

No tabs. My default is new window. When desirable, I only create new tabs in a web browser window. Programs get separate windows, no tabs. I have custom CSS to hide the tab bar when there is only one tab. No tab bar is my default. I manually save URLs if important and close web browser tabs if I've gone down a rabbit hole. Destroy all tabs. My browser clears all history. Starting the browser opens a single custom web page window, no tabs, with recent URLs that I saved.

No tabs.

My usual response once I'm doing looking things up to write/build something, and look up to see more than 5 tabs, is to go "ARRRGGGHHHH" and declare tab bankruptcy, just closing the browser completely.

There's always history, and bookmarks if you need to really keep something.

Currently I have 3 tabs open, Braid Solitare, HN Active threads, this edit window. I'll probably put on an HFY story from youtube for background noise in a minute, after I post this edit.

3 is a good number of tabs. Sproutlet, the kid, usually has many dozens, and if there's going to likely be a power interruption, I warn them to save their work, just in case.

In my web browser I have an extension that close them: https://addons.mozilla.org/fr/firefox/addon/dustman/

My IDE, previously VsCode and now Zen, has a max tabs option to close the oldest ones too.

Tree Style Tab https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

RAM/OOM does this for me very effectively. For example, I have opened several dozens of books right now, because when it happens to be a reading time I hate to look for any books in Downloads I am interested to read. I feel better to have opened all the books I am interested in right now. Maybe my reading session will be 5 minutes only, or maybe I want to see what I have read before leaving the reading with as little of digging in interfaces as possible.

I remember the times when 3GB computer could have 300 tabs hanging per months of everyday heavy using of the machine, but now a regular 1000$ computer can not open 300 tabs of modern webpages, so there is none of that problem any more.

I use the Tab Wrangler extension and have it nuke everything after like 8 hours or so. If I need it again, I can search for it in that extension. I've probably gone back to search for a tab two or three times in the last five years. That 8 hour window is almost always plenty for anything I actually care about.

I save them to https://histre.com/ [1] using the browser extension. This can save all tabs in a browser window into a collection, or even multiple windows each into their own collection. This also makes everything searchable.

[1] I created it fwiw

I treat tabs as temporary, not storage: if I won’t use one within the next hour, it gets bookmarked, turned into a task, or closed.

I don't have more than 15 at once. Only when selecting hn posts to read at once. If they linger much (or anything at all) I will put the "important" ones at my raindrop with the false intent to read some day

I usually make tab groups to sort the frequently visited tabs properly but still most of the times, I am opening a lot of tabs outside the groups then I keep closing all the tabs outside the groups.

If I start to feel it’s too much, I take some time to go through it all and reset back to just what I’m actively looking to working on.

I'm using Notion Web Clipper (as a replacement for Evernote Web Clipper) to save promising links for future reference. Then I close these tabs.

I don't really control them, it just when I feel the system response becomes slow, I close every tab I don't need anymore.

Limit the number of tabs to 10. Or if you want to ignore it completely add more ram and memory.

I use the Arc browser -- it has a different way of organizing tabs into spaces in a quite intuitive and easy way.

I try to keep my tab count to a reasonable number, and close tabs I'm not using on a regular basis.

Tab stacks to keep them in collapsible groups, and closing the tabs I'm not using anymore

I close them when they get to be too many, like 15 or so

You close them.

Pruning. When I feel that I have too many, I go through them (or maybe just a subgroup of them) and close the ones that no longer are relevant or interesting.

This requires a threshold of feeling that they're "too many" while they're still a manageable number...

By closing them.

21k from around one year

I use the extension 'Tree Style Tab', with some settings changed, and 'Auto Tab Reaper' to unload old tabs. Or Sidebery

Eventually I will probably just bookmark them Ctrl-Shift-D, which was what I was doing before, at the end of the day for all tabs open

So later I can tell the llm to go mine something forgotten

once a month sort them into groups and then journal about them is how I do it. for instance if I have 5 tabs on braid groups or learning chaldean for my wife mary then it goes into my journal where I paste the 5 links together and share what I learned.

I just wait till I feel I have too many and just nuke them all at one lol.