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[1] 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!
I’d also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you’re working on while you’re at it! ↩︎
Since I asked to be added, I had opened another 10 tabs, but now have successfully taken my tabs from 1460 to 1390
Damn makes my 100 something tabs look small
Nice! I’m down 60 tabs today (1545 -> 1485). It’s actually been a pretty pleasant process so far, since a lot of it is reading interesting articles that I never got around to. Much better use of my time than doomscrolling!
deleted by creator
Tagging @PartysPuppyGirl@hexbear.net since you mentioned you were interested!
Bruv just close the browser, this can all be over in two seconds
This is interesting! I could see myself doing this when my depression is bad, but I usually get frustrated when I’m more manic and close everything lol. I wouldn’t be surprised if my bookmarks have a few hundred tabs I’ll likely never look at again, though.
I’d also encourage you to post any other self-improvement things you’re working on while you’re at it!
Starting day 2 nicotine free. Smiling through it though so people know I’m actually feeling great rn
I definitely have a lot of bookmarks that I’ll never look at even for the first time. I think that’s part of the reason I allow the tabs to build up; I explained my reasoning here, but the succinct version is probably “If I bookmark this I may never actually read it, so instead I’ll leave it open which will force me to look at it…surely, I’ll look at it soon…”
Starting day 2 nicotine free.
Hell yeah!!
Hahaha that’s the same reason I bookmark! Plus then it pops up in the recommendations when I inevitably become the interested in the topic again and search the same terms!
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:
- You could try this simple extension (can’t vouch for it thoroughly, but it seems simple enough):
https://github.com/DaAwesomeP/tab-counter
- In Firefox, you can also try this method:
Right-click on a tab → “Select All Tabs” → Right-click on a tab again → there will be a “Close n Tabs” option which will give you the count of tabs in that window
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.
- A third option is a non-dedicated extension that incidentally keeps track of tab counts (e.g. Tab Session Manager on Firefox). If you’re a tab hoarder, there’s a good chance you have one of these already!
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:
- Tap the ♾️ tab icon (because if this is relevant, you don’t have a number)
- Tap ⋮ , then “Share all tabs”
- Pick your poison: I ended up saving it to disk using Solid Explorer’s “Save to…”, which saves it as a text document, but you could also copy to clipboard and then paste into a text editor. The format of the output is a single line with the titles of all the tabs (comma-separated) followed by the URLS, the latter of which are each separated by two newlines. Weird format, but it’ll work for our purposes.
- Depending on how much of a nerd you are, you could either use Termux and run
grep '^http' name-of-file.txt | wc -l[1] 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.
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 ↩︎
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
do you all never turn your computer off or something?
most browsers have the option to restore the previous session on start up, so closing the browser doesn’t lose all the tabs
why would I turn my computer off? sleep is fine. Uptime can be years without problems
You can use the onetab extension to move everything to a saved list and close them. When my tab hoarding gets bad I’ll do that and just keep a few of my most frequently used tabs open. You aren’t really cleaning it out, just moving it to a list out of the way that’s less important.
I’ve done that before, but from experience, I know I’ll never look at those tabs again if I just save them in a session and start a fresh one. If I really get stuck on this process, it’s probably what I’ll end up doing, but I want to give whittling them down a try—not only because I know there’s some good stuff in there, but also because it’ll help build up the impulse to clean them out daily and prevent the tab count from ballooning so much in the future.
I only have like 5 tabs opened at most. How the hell can you keep track of 1500 opened tabs? I use old school bookmarks when I need to change websites
How the hell can you keep track of 1500 opened tabs?
Short answer: I can’t.
Long answer: On desktop, it’s pretty trivial to search through your open tabs even without extensions[1], 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:
- Tabs that I was about to look at but didn’t for whatever reason and I never got around to
- Aspirational tabs that I opened with the explicit intention of looking at later (these tend to be long-form reporting and academic papers)
- Loosely grouped tabs related to projects in various stages (documentation, forum posts, tutorials, etc.)
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.
Firefox: in the address bar, type
followed by a space; Chrome: Ctrl+Shift+A ↩︎
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)?
