Limiting tab count and pruning tabs

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Mæstro
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Limiting tab count and pruning tabs

Unread post by Mæstro » 2022-07-13, 14:36

When browsing, I have two bad habits:
  • I can leave an academic article for reference, a story I plan vaguely to read someday or a picture I see once and like, open for many weeks as a tab without returning to it.
  • After researching a theme, I can move onto the next in which I am curious while leaving many of the last topic’s tabs open.
These together mean that I can go through times when my tab count inflates to some dozens, broken into layers like geological strata by my browsing interests over the last few months. I only purge if the tabs become so many that my computer’s store is full, and these purges can be slow and fitful themselves: bringing myself slowly to delete one theme at a time. Notwithstanding this, I can sometimes go for prolonged times with only one tab open at all, and having few tabs is what I would prefer, for I can become overwhelmed by so many choices, but it is hard for me to keep it that way.

I should think that an extension could let me limit how many tabs I have open: five or twelve seem candidate thresholds. I could not see any such extension in Pale Moon’s library that would do this. (I have seen one that counts the tabs, but I want a hard limit, not a mere gauge. I can count and think ‘ha, I have 36 tabs’ using View Tabs.) Automatic tab closing if a tab goes a set time (three days?) without being accessed again would help to tame this mess also. (The closest I have seen to this is Suspender, but this does not close the tabs.) Which extensions would let me tame this hydra?
Browser: Pale Moon (Pusser’s repository for Debian)
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Formerly user TheRealMaestro: æsc is the best letter.

vannilla
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Re: Limiting tab count and pruning tabs

Unread post by vannilla » 2022-07-13, 15:51

I believe such extension does not exist, but given the existing ones it should be relatively easy to write it by also copying code from said existing extensions (license permitting).
For example if you take the tab-counting extension you can e.g. show an alert window when the counter goes above a configurable value.

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