Yes, that number is correct. And itâs awesome! This wouldnât be possible just a short few years ago.
Everybody that heard that inevitably ask me, âBut why do you have that many tabs open?â. Well, letâs start from the beginning.
A Little Background
Iâve been on the internet for as long as I can remember. Maybe around 16 years? Thatâs probably less compared to many of you. But for me, thatâs more than 2/3 of my life.
In that period, I went from using IE, then Chrome, to Firefox, back to Chrome, and now Iâve settled with Firefox. The reason why is tightly related to why I have so many tabs open at any given time.
Browser Tabs Changed the Game
By the time I started to browse regularly, tabs were already commonplace. I hated the times I had to use Internet explorer and open multiple windows. It was always messy and hard to navigate around.
Now, you only need to move the location of your cursor and click, to change pages. Instead of clicking on the bottom of the screen, you click on the top instead. Meanwhile, windows allow you to place your pages wherever you want. So why are tabs so popular then?
I believe the smallest of changes can make a big difference in workflow and user experience. Itâs similar to why I use i3, a tiling window manager. More constraint and scoping can be very helpful. I might write a separate article about it in the future.
No matter the reason, I think most will agree that tabs made people open more pages compared to window navigation.
Opening Many Tabs Would Lag My PC
By this point, I was regularly opening tens of tabs. Specific activities also increase that number by a lot â like researching a topic.
You know where this is going. My PC would lag. It would freeze randomly. Pages also started taking longer to load. Whoops, Iâve run out of memory.
Itâs Hard to Find the Tabs You Want
Another issue is the lack of horizontal space. As you open more tabs, each tab continues to decrease in size. This is annoying to deal with. What if youâre doing some research and you open a bunch of random websites? You donât know what their favicon looks like. Now you have to open them one by one to find the one you were looking for.
A New Way of Viewing Tabs
One day, I found the Tree Style Tab extension. It displays your tabs as a tree but more importantly, itâs vertical. Not a big deal right?
Turns out this entirely changed the game for me. Just like the change from windows to tabs enabled more tabs to be open, tree tabs did the same. Horizontal tabs are awful to manage after 15 tabs. With tree styles, you can easily manage more than 60 tabs with little to no issue.
In tree tabs, the titles are always visible no matter how many tabs you have open. When you open a link in a new tab, it will be nested within the previous tab indicating how you reached that page
Navigation Is King
Around the same time, I also found the Vimium extension. It enables vim-like navigation in your browser. You can practically do any action you want with just your keyboard. The best way to show you is to demo it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r7G2B8JgFFg
All of those actions were done with a keyboard. At the 20s mark, I used a shortcut to go back to the previous tab (basically alt-tab). And at 15s & 22s, you can see the ability to search for a tab. Combined with Tree style tabs, managing many tabs becomes a breeze.
âBut Wouldnât Your PC Lag All the Time?â
Thankfully Mooreâs law is in full effect. While each web page keeps increasing in size, hardware increased its performance even more! CPU keeps increasing their core count and RAM gets cheaper each year (well, letâs ignore the chip shortage đ). At the moment, I have 48GB of RAM to handle all my needs.
Even More Tabs!
You mightâve noticed a theme here. I found another extension! Itâs called Sideberry.
Sideberry looks very similar to Tree style tabs. However, it introduced a concept called panels. Each panel has its own list of tabs. It allows you to compartmentalize your tabs into separate buckets.
On a typical day, I usually work on several projects. I would use a panel for each long-running project. One for entertainment and another for rabbit holes I happen to stumble upon. Each panel have about 50 tabs on average.
So you can imagine how I get to 200+ tabs very easily. I believe I even reached 300 tabs once or twice before. Once Iâm used to having about 70 tabs, I started to have more open from 100, 150, 200, and eventually 300. It doesnât make that much of a difference.
It does depend on what Iâm doing. Itâs currently a less busy time. And at this time of writing, I âonlyâ have 151 tabs open. Not too bad!
Just Because Itâs There Doesnât Mean Itâs Open
If youâre still not convinced that this works, thereâs more! Sideberry also allows you to unload a page. An unloaded page doesnât consume resources. When you open it, it will load the page from scratch. This means that you can have as many tabs open without having performance issues! Just make sure you unload some of them.
âSure, the Technology Allows You to Do It. But Just Because You Can Doesnât Mean You Should!â
To that I say: Why shouldnât I? Having these tabs gives me 2 huge benefits:
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I can see how I got to the pages I did when researching. From there I can easily close the tree when it doesnât lead to good content.
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The tabs act as a reminder of things I want or need to work on.
Imagine browsing Hacker News and you stumble upon a gold mine. It had so many good resources that you canât help but open all the links. Half of them turn out to be useless and you close them. Now youâre left with 4 things you want to know more about. So you decide to leave them open. Then you go through each of them, opening links and reading them.
When youâre done, you can easily close the whole tree since theyâre sorted as such. Now the other 2 pages are products you want to try. But you donât have time for that right now. So you leave them open and continue with work on a separate Sideberry panel. When youâre free, you go back to the other panel and try the product. Turns out it was awesome and everyone lived happily ever after.
âWhy Not Use Bookmarks?â
I have 280 bookmarks. A good dozen for quick access links. Most are resources and cool things I might want to check again in the future. Maybe itâs an early access product and I want to check back once itâs more stable.
Itâs simply a different use case. I use bookmarks for long-term things. Theyâre curated and I rarely open them until I need something to refer to. For example, I have a folder containing websites that provide quality SVG arts.
When I leave something as a tab, they are either:
- Things I use often â So I donât see the point in closing them
- Things I want to continue researching
Itâs Part of a Workflow
Tabs that are left open go into a workflow that helps me sort out relevant pages. Naturally, I would consume the most relevant pages from the list. Those tabs are then closed in due time.
Less relevant pages will be left in the list. Eventually, they automatically turn into an unloaded tab. And if they keep being not relevant, I will then close them.
So perhaps I was extremely excited about the wonders of Vidalia onions when I first saw them. But over time, the workflow proved that I donât actually care about it all that much.
Try It Out
And thatâs it! Now I can share this post with anyone that questions my workflow. While Iâm not necessarily saying you should have that many tabs open, I would recommend you to try Sideberry if youâre on Firefox. On Chrome, your options would be to try Tree Style Tabs. Who knows it might change your life too.