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!
Short answer: I can't.
Long answer: On desktop, it's pretty trivial to search through your open tabs even without extensions^[Firefox: in the address bar, type
%followed by a space; Chrome: Ctrl+Shift+A], so I have no trouble finding the stuff that I know is there and I need on a day-to-day basis (email inbox, messenger app, API documentation, etc.). Realistically, that represents a tiny percentage of of the total tabs, though, and even on my first day I found two or three pairs of duplicates that were in different windows.Speaking of which, having multiple windows + multiple virtual desktops is helpful for organization. Truthfully, the majority of tabs are on my main desktop, but in the task-specific desktops the tabs are usually related to the task at hand.
That all said, a full two-thirds of the tabs are on my phone. It's a lot easier to build them up there, since they're out of sight, out of mind. It's also harder to manage them, since (at least on my phone) Firefox really doesn't like having ~1000 tabs open, so even though there is technically a way to do tab search it doesn't really work, and navigating to old tabs is not very responsive. It'll probably go smoothest if I go in reverse chronological order and be as thorough as possible so I don't have to deal with the old tabs until I've really narrowed the field.
There's also some implicit questions here (explicit in some other comments), namely: How? What?? Why???
I think the tab build-up consists of three primary categories:
I'm not great at organization or time management, so it's easy for these things to pile up. One thing I'm looking forward to by actually taking on the tabs instead of just hitting the big red button
and starting over is reading some more thought-provoking material during the time that I'd usually be scrolling mindlessly. I'm sure there will also be a lot of times that I go, "You know what, I don't really want to read this article," and that's also valuable. Going forward, I think it'll be important to put the #3 tabs (project-related) into tab groups so that they don't get lost and I'm more likely to engage with them. Aspirational articles should also go into their own tab group and work on a first-in, first-out system with some kind of time limit to prevent them from building up.
How do bookmarks factor in here? Wouldn't it be equally as useful for some of those categories to simply create a folder to bookmark that content and then open it later? Does the searching of open tabs have simply better functionality than searching bookmarks (I've never actually tried searching tabs)?
Sorry I'm replying so late! For me (maybe because of my ADHD), it's a lot easier for me to deal with things in the moment—if I think of something I need to do, it's usually best if I do it at that very instant 1. I'll have some momentum and 2. if I don't do it then I'm extremely likely to forget. I rely heavily on reminders that I set in my phone for tasks throughout the day as well as appointments—if it weren't for those, I'd be a total mess. To give an example, whenever I have a regularly scheduled appointment that is canceled for whatever reason, instead of just deleting it from the calendar I will add "APPOINTMENT CANCELED" to the title because I will inevitably forget by the time the appointment rolls around, so I rely on the extra warnings that pop up a few hours in advance so I don't end up showing up for no reason.
With tabs, I think it's a similar situation. Some people might be able to bookmark it and say "I'll look at that later when I have some time," but I know myself, and if I do that I'm going to forget it ever existed and never read the damn thing. As for searching open tabs vs. bookmarks, I usually use bookmarks for things I've already read or for tools^[This is actually a problem I still need to solve. A fair bit of the open tabs are various software tools that could be very useful for me in the future, but if I just bookmark them I am likely to forget about them to the point where I won't even remember to look them up and instead waste time on doing something manually or rolling my own solution. I need to figure out a way to organize them in such a way that if I'm working on a task I can easily search and find tools I've earmarked for said task.] and homepages and things like that. If I'm searching my tabs, I know that anything I find is a to-do item, whereas the bookmarks will be a mix of the two. I do think that, once I get all these tabs cleared up, I might be able to institute something like a plan-to-read tag/folder that I regularly clear out, but I think that could easily balloon to the point of insurmountability if I'm not careful. I do think it's worth trying, though—perhaps I'll have developed enough discipline to make such a scheme viable.
Also, I'm happy to report that I'm making great progress! You can see this comment for more details, but the top line figure is that I started at 1545 tabs and am now down to 893 tabs after 19 days—in other words, I've eliminated 652 tabs at a rate of 34 tabs/day, and am down to 57.8% of the original total.