When it completely bogs down the browser so that opening a new window stakes 5s and other normal actions are extremely laggy, no other features matter. This can happen even on my 64GB workstation when Firefox hasn’t consumed all the available memory yet. Performance is a feature.
(That said I continue to use Firefox exclusively b/c 1) Firefox is really good now, 2) best addon/extension support, 3) Google’s leadership is Evil now, and 4) I don’t want a rendering engine monoculture).
It's weird, I keep seeing people complain about the memory usage and it being slow, but I've literally never experienced any of these kinds of issues, and I have 80 tabs open right now. Are you using some weird plugin or what?
Having multiple tabs (or "too many tabs") is a neat and very visible way to keep track of what's to be read and processed. It does result in keeping things for far too long sometimes, but there is no better interface that surfaces all the different sites/URLs to be processed. It's very useful when you're troubleshooting or researching something (could be some tech stuff in general, some software development/debugging stuff or anything else you're researching).
I used to do something similar too with Opera (the original one with Presto engine) but with their "Speed Dial" feature. I miss Presto Opera - it was light-weight, fast and wasn't bogged down by even with 100's of open tabs and had fantastic browser features that nearly all their competitors copied.
It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way (unless the tab has been unloaded manually or through another extension), and it also stores history (you can go back and forward in each of those tabs). Bookmarks and "Speed Dial" (which is available on Firefox) do not support tab history. I do not know how Opera's Speed Dial worked though.
> It's actually way better than bookmarks because it stores the content in a quickly accessible way
I am skeptical about this part. If you tag your bookmark's, it then becomes easy to look it up right from the address bar by just typing a tag name. That is actually much easier and faster than searching through 100's or 1000's of tabs.
> ... and it also stores history
That's a very good point that I hadn't considered.
"read it later" window, sites for research, Slack in the browser, podcasts or music in the background, etc.
I usually don't close my research tabs until I've completed the task I was working on. Not having to worry about memory means I don't have to worry about finding useful webpages again.
Inbox, rather than bookmarks. Bookmarks suggest repeated visits; an open tab is something to be visited at least once, but not known to be worth keeping a link to.
Open tabs = bookmarks for unread stuff, basically. Once I’m done, optionally bookmark it if necessary and close the tab.
The problem with bookmarks is my list of bookmarks eventually grows even larger than my open tabs, far larger, and stuff just gets lost in there. Once out of site, then out of mind. Leaving it open in a tab I’m more likely to go back and read it when I have time.
What exactly is the thought process behind having so many tabs open? For example, I close tabs when I am done with a site and / or when I can't read the site title on the tabs any more.
What’s the thought process behind closing them? Using tree style tabs I have a forest of tabs. I am working with lots of ‘web apps’ (currently mainly the AWS console) and closing tabs would mean having to go and find the particular resources every time I want to work with them. I probably hit each of around 50 tabs - across two or three windows - an average of 20 times today. Then there were dozens of ephemeral tabs too.
Not the person you're replying to, but may as well answer since I also use tree-style tabs similarly.
> - Why keep a site open when you are done with it?
Why assume you're done with it? I have a number of tabs just for Grafana dashboards I'm monitoring. Re-finding the particular configuration from the home page every time would be annoying, bookmarks would require reloading the page (and thus re-running the slow queries that happen on load instead of on data update), etc.
> - Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.
That's what tree-style tabs solves. Tabs are a hierarchy, just like bookmarks or folders normally are. It's much easier to navigate.
> - Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.
I've got email, calendar, a bunch of Grafana tabs, plus a few datasheets, a schematic, Jira, Confluence, and Github.
And that's just for work, for news I tend to open articles in tabs with HN comments in child tabs and then go through & read them in sequence, but I keep work & non-work in different windows.
Another Tree Style Tabs user here, I'm not really satisfied with the other explanations, so: With TST and Auto Tab Discard, tabs have become self-organized bookmarks for me. I simply don't use actual bookmarks anymore, and have open tabs for each site I regularly visit, with subtrees for any stray thought.
I'm up to around 500 tabs across 3 windows. Maybe a dozen root trees. Youtube, Android docs, HN, Reddit, etc, for example. Because opening links in a new tab creates a child tab in the tree, they're automatically well-organized in a way that follows my thoughts, collapsible when I'm done with one for the moment, and rearrangeable if I don't like where they were put in the tree.
I don't do any bookmarking or tagging, so either it's an open tab or something I can dig up in the history. So I tend to keep tabs open if I think there's a chance I might need to refer to it soonish. Or I just forget them after my focus moves on to something else.
"Bookmark, tag, and close" loses active state and requires a full page refresh. It also loses the history (where it was opened from). Bookmarks are useful, but they're not the same thing as tabs.
My wife leaves all of her tabs open, but it's not for any specific reason. If she opens a new tab and goes to a website, the browser will just switch to the tab that's already on that website instead of fetching the website again.
For some they're something that I check daily so I just focus then refresh, and for some I keep them open thinking it's something I am going to revisit and read some day.
I'm a front end and back end developer that uses multiple libraries and tech stacks and need to find answers to stuff immediately. I leave them open as a resource while I'm working, which may be on multiple things at once. In addition, I have mail, messaging, music, and other work-related things open in the browser.
It's really one of the only features that matters.
Is that really the only feature people care about?