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Firefox Power User Keeps 7,400+ Browser Tabs Open for 2 Years
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this post was submitted on 04 May 2024
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Once you realize that you don’t sort or ever even revisit them, you can start using the browsing history to serve the same purpose.
Then you realize bookmarks and history are worse than keeping the tabs
That's where I finally arrived at. I used to use browser bookmarks a lot, but I realized I either never used them or spent way too much time sorting them (so searching the Internet became faster). I tried history, but that sucks when I have like 100/day.
Tabs work, and Firefox can point to an open tab in the omni-bar, so why not use it? So I often have 100-200 tabs open on an average day, and occasionally clean that down to 10-ish (I'm often back up to 50 by the end of the day). Vanilla Firefox has pretty good tab management features (shift+click to select a range, close to the right, the drop down menu on the right, tab pinning, tabs open across devices, etc).
That’s an interesting way to use that feature. Must be because we use the same app in very different ways.
For me, the tabs contain only the things that I need today. Having a tab older than 3 days is very rare. Bookmarks contain only a few links, but I actually visit them frequently, so they sit in the bookmark bar. History contains everything else, and I don’t visit that place very often. When I need to dig through the history, I just sort it by last visited and use a search word to filter out the irrelevant stuff.
It wasn’t always like this, but here’s what works for me these days. In the past I had a list of curated bookmarks, but eventually I realized I don’t really need them for anything.
The thing is, I use something like 30+ new tabs every day. Half of them are temporary, so I close most of them, but the other half need to stick around for 2-3 days (sometimes longer) because they're relevant to what I'm working on.
After a project, I rarely need to refer back to them, so there's no sense bookmarking them. So I usually only need tabs for 5-10 days. So I just leave them open until the project is done, and then close everything en masse. Usually that's 50+, but sometimes around 200, depending on the project.