I feel a bit silly posting something this trivial in this comm, but I know I'm not the only one with an absurd number of browser tabs open—in my case, the figure is around 1500 tabs open across all my devices, and it's constantly growing. Every once in a blue moon I'll go and close like 50 of them in one day, but it's not frequent enough to reverse the trend. It's to the point where it's a coin flip whether a new tab in my mobile browser will actually work, and I have genuinely run into out-of-memory issues on my fairly beefy PC where stuff will straight-up crash. Beyond the technical issues, it's overwhelming, especially on the PC where I'm actually confronted with the staggering quantity of the tabs whenever I'm actually using it and I have to sift through them to find the few tabs I use frequently (idk what I'd do without the tab search function on modern browsers).
I thought it might be neat for other people with the same issue to congregate and work together to make incremental net reductions in our tab counts (so you can't just close 10 tabs and then open 15 more!). I was thinking that 10 tabs per day might be a reasonable figure—small enough to be manageable, but big enough that even with a few thousand tabs you could still make significant progress. Everyone is free to set a goal that fits their parameters, although I'd err on the side of caution. If you set a goal that's too ambitious, you could quickly miss your target and get frustrated. Slow and steady wins the race! Of course, with this sort of thing it will tend to get harder as you go along, since you'll go for the low hanging fruit first and then need to either make tougher decisions or have tabs that take longer to resolve (e.g. "am I gonna spend 15 minutes reading this article or just close it?"), so adjustments may be necessary later in the process. And if you do miss a day or a target, don't beat yourself up about it—it's a marathon, not a sprint, and sometimes you need to a take a breather. Just make sure to get back in there.
We could each make posts in the weekly self-improvement thread^[I'd also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you're working on while you're at it!] and edit them daily, posting our new totals as we go. For instance:
Monday: 1500 (-10/10, -10 total)
Tuesday: 1490 (-10/10, -20 total)
Wednesday: 1475 (-15/10, -35 total)
and so on. It doesn't have to be in that precise format, but it's important to keep track of your total open tabs to ensure you're really making a net reduction, and I think it would be nice to show your accumulating reduction to show the progress you've made as the weeks go on.
Anyway, I'd love to hear from anyone who's interested in participating and get feedback on how this idea could be improved!
One thing that's important is to have a way to actually get the count of tabs for whatever browser you have!
Methods inside
For desktop browsers:https://github.com/DaAwesomeP/tab-counter
Note that there seems to be a slight discrepancy between the extension and this method, with the right-click method seemingly underreporting. An even greater flaw with this method is that you'd have to repeat this across every window and add them up...not ideal if you have many windows.
For mobile browsers:
This is a bit trickier, since both Chrome and Firefox "helpfully" hide your tab count once it gets over 100.
In Chrome, you can go to the tab group view, ⋮, "Select tabs", ⋮ again, "Select all". This will give you the total number of active tabs, which you can then add to your inactive tabs, if applicable.
I don't think there is a simple equivalent for Firefox on Android, unfortunately. There's this suggestion leveraging Firefox Sync, but personally I don't use it, so that doesn't work for me. What I ended up doing was this:
grep '^http' name-of-file.txt | wc -l^[Yeah, I guess you could technically do a broader search to capture non-HTTP protocols, but you probably don't need my help if that's your situation] or just do Ctrl+F for "http" in a text editor that will give you a readout like "1 of n matches". If you know of a better way, let me know!I don't use iOS, so I'm not well-versed in Safari, but apparently, you can do a long press on the tab icon in the lower-right (or wherever it is) and you'll get a "Close n tabs" option.
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