How Best to Manage Large Numbers of Tabs?
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I often have 1000-3000 tabs open at the same time (most in "discarded", or unloaded, state). The problem with saving as bookmarks is that you lose the forward/backward history and comments/replies you are writing on forums/reddit/github issues. When too many tabs are open you also risk your browser being unresponsive or crashing (data won't usually be lost though, fortunately), and when you restart the browser you immediately start the most imminent work and don't have time to close unused tabs.
I think arranging tabs in the same group vertically and arranging groups horizontally on top, with the ability to move multiple tabs as a whole to another group, would be a perfect solution. This can be achieved with TabGroups Manager, but it's an old add-on without updates for a long time, no longer supported by Firefox Quantum, and new versions of Pale Moon has some issues with it as well. I've been using an old version for a long while but this old version recently has some issues with Github (and you can't move multiple tabs to another group in it). I just installed Vivaldi a few hours ago, and I don't know how well it can support tab discard to handle thousands of tabs without excessive memory consumption.
In my experience, Firefox Quantum seems to consume more memory and be slower than the old version of Pale Moon when a lot of tabs are open (possibly discarded), although it's advertised as being faster; also all session managers I used work poorly.
Below is a screenshot of my browser workspace:
Any suggestions will be appreciated.
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@alreadydone I moved your post to its own topic in All Platforms because the Feature Requests forum is not the right place for a general discussion like this. If you're using Windows, Linux or Mac, let me know and I will move it again.
- If you save set of related tabs as Sessions (from the file menu), their individual browsing history, zoom level, etc., will be saved with them.
- Also look at using separate windows for distinct tasks, and save the tabs in the current window only when saving the sessions.
- Currently, the best way to manage tabs, moving them between tab stacks, etc., is to use Drag and Drop in the Window Panel.
- Vote for the Sessions Panel to improve the management of sessions, which is currently rudimentary.
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@alreadydone said in How Best to Manage Large Numbers of Tabs?:
I often have 1000-3000 tabs open at the same time
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Any suggestions will be appreciated.
This may not be what you want to hear, but... Have you considered starting fresh? If you have that many tabs open I can guarantee that you have forgotten what many of them have in them, and I don't think it's necessary to keep them hanging around.
If you still want to keep them for future reference, a better idea would just be to bookmark them. In vivaldi, you can do this:
- Right click a tab
- Select "Bookmark all open pages"
Once the bookmarks are created (this may take a while), you can safely close all the tabs. In vivaldi, you do this by:
- Right click a tab
- Select "Close other tabs"
Browsers can easily handle thousands of bookmarks. Thousands of tabs is too many for it to easily handle (and indeed for the UI to display, which is kind of the whole point of tabs).
