How do you stop yourself from opening too many tabs? Or keep them sufficiently pruned? How do you figure out which ones are safe to close without losing track of the task at hand? I have tried many things and so far nothing really seems to have worked for me. - ThreadSky

weeble.bsky.social • 46 days ago

How do you stop yourself from opening too many tabs? Or keep them sufficiently pruned? How do you figure out which ones are safe to close without losing track of the task at hand? I have tried many things and so far nothing really seems to have worked for me.

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sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

This feels like a symptom of misusing tabs. Generally if I have a tab open for an extended period of time, then it should become a bookmark. I have organised folders on my bookmark bar for everything I might need to look at in an instant.

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

If I'm keeping it open to read later, then it's surely better served in a "read later" bookmark folder.

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

Having lots of tabs open just feels like bookmarks but shitter

bsky.cigazze.com•45 days ago

Yeah, the only exception to this for me really is that I'll often have a couple tabs pinned that I know I'm gonna keep referring back to over the course of a day. Anything else I just bookmark. I definitely need to clean up my bookmarks though lol, some folders are full of stuff 10+ years old

weeble.bsky.social•46 days ago

Izzy, you are lucky I love you because I would fight most people that replied with "just stop using it wrong dumbass".
💥🥊😡
❤️

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

Ha! I don't think I did just say that tho! I tried to explain a reframing. WHY are you using tabs for these things? Why aren't you using bookmarks?

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

Like, a tab should be there if you need to quickly jump between windows, or expect to close it very soon and keep the state of the previous site. Or expect some sort of notification perhaps?

But you're not jumping between 300 tabs really, SURELY

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

I feel like I see this a lot where people are treating tabs like bookmarks, but doing that is basically just bookmarks but much worse, yknow?

sciuromorpha.bsky.social•46 days ago

So you asked:

How do you stop yourself from opening too many tabs? Or keep them sufficiently pruned? How do you figure out which ones are safe to close without losing track of the task at hand?

The answer is bookmarks. Tabs have a different purpose

juliascythe.net•46 days ago

I usually use tree-style tabs and divide them into rough categories of 'globally important', 'task-specific important' and 'ephemerally important', in that order, then whenever I finish something or the list becomes too overwhelming I close all tabs below a certain point, indiscriminately.

juliascythe.net•46 days ago

If something is important that gets closed, it's important enough to stick in my mind and be found again when needed. But even just having the tabs in a vertical tree rather than a horizontal bar helps so much!

bagenzos.house•46 days ago

i'm so scared

bagenzos.house•46 days ago

in truth i don't know. like for people who don't do this it isn't a conscious problem we have to solve. what's the need of having more than ~5 tabs or so, outside of very specific situations (e.g. clicking a bunch of thumbnails while looking for images)

katef.bsky.social•46 days ago

i split visual desktops by kind of task. development, stuff to consider buying, life chores, music, etc. and i dump browser windows there to deal with them later

katef.bsky.social•46 days ago

(critically, with a "banish this window to desktop 2" shortcut)

palouse-dust.bsky.social•45 days ago

Tab groups + OneTab, both of which you've probably tried already. 🤷‍♂️

bsky.cigazze.com•45 days ago

Once I get to like 10+ tabs I just close a bunch that I'm not using anymore. If I have more than 10 tabs open that means there's at least like 5 I haven't looked at in a while - I'm never, like, needing to look at 20 docs pages at once. It's not hard to get back to a page once I've closed it anyway

bsky.cigazze.com•45 days ago

If I really need to save things for later I either bookmark them or maybe put them in a note if it's not long-term enough to warrant a bookmark. But if I ever close something and realize I need to refer back to it I just command-shift-T, find it in "recently closed tabs", or just navigate back to it

kamaroyl.bsky.social•45 days ago

I have embraced that I will lose track and clear the whole thing regularly 😔

ravind.ooo•46 days ago

ehehe i do this too

i use new tabs to separate "contexts" 🤭. when i'm done with the current tabs, i shift-select up to the nearest new tabs, scanning their tooltips for context/anything i'd wanna retain, and press ctrl+w to close

new tabs have the firefox icon so they're easy to identify 😅

ravind.ooo•46 days ago

if i wanna revisit a tab later, i move it leftward, separating with more new tabs if they're unrelated to the preceding tabs 😆

if it's something i wanna revisit when i find some free time (meaning, never 😭), i move it all the way to the start

sedm0784.bsky.social•43 days ago

iOS Safari doesn’t let you go over 500 and will overwrite existing tabs with new ones if you’re not paying attention: I try to limit my tabs there to 498 so I have a buffer. Generally the thing that works best for culling tabs is when a browser bug loses them all. Occasionally I buy a new computer.

davemck.bsky.social•46 days ago

How did you get a screenshot of my desktop 😜
The answer is I don't keep them pruned. I rarely go back and look at the beginning. It's honestly probably worth just me closing them, I'll probably find them again. I have occasionally grouped and bookmarked the whole lot under the date, just in case.

un.lobi.to•46 days ago

I’m not sure I’d manage without https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-manager-plus-for-firefox/ and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/foxytab/

The former is great for bulk managing tabs (grouping them into windows), latter is great for sorting tabs by URL / closing duplicate tabs

Beyond those, I trust things are in my browser history

un.lobi.to•46 days ago

I guess it helps I keep a running “journal” of my work?

so anything super important gets copied into my journal as a bullet point (and probably gets referenced in a PR/design doc)

weeble.bsky.social•46 days ago

Those English Language & Usage tabs, if you were desperately curious: one on alternatives to the term "sanity check", and two on the origins of the term "bog standard".
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/282282/near-universally-applicable-alternative-to-sanity-check
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/321172/j-olivers-usage-of-the-word-bog/321186#321186
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/553115/origin-of-bog-standard

weeble.bsky.social•45 days ago

To all the people saying "simply close the tabs"... like, that is the whole question. I feel like we're having a fundamentally different experience here.

bagenzos.house•45 days ago

at the very least you should be using "cleanup mode" with that many tabs (it helps the browsers memory management). you can activate it with alt+f4 on windows or command+w on mac!

sera.bsky.social•45 days ago

It takes me a month or two to gather the mental distance from the person who opened the tabs in the first place so that i can dispassionately close the whole window with no second thoughts

davemck.bsky.social•45 days ago

Oh yeah, that's it.
Past me wasn't helping or sane. I'm a totally different person now and have permission to close that junk.

farawaytimes.bsky.social•45 days ago

I close all applications and fully turn off my computer at the end of the day, and I tell my browser not to remember what I had opened. clean start every day!

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