We have plenty of these here

[Mæstro]

Bookmark them in a folder?

I have tried that approach before:

I had experimented once, about two years ago, with keeping fan-fiction I have meant someday to read in a queue folder, but they had languished there for months and I had deleted the folder without over (should be ever) reading it.

Once bookmarks are hidden away in a folder, I forget they exist.
When I had still had hundreds of bookmarks, I would sort them into folders: natural science, history, linguistics… The result was that entries in such folders were rather more likely to have no views within the last year than the unsorted. It made the purge easier, but cements in my mind that stuffing something into a folder is a death sentence.
Keeping them as tabs means that they appear often enough in the ‘show tabs’ menu (and hence my short-term memory).
But there must be a better way…
Pinning to the bookmarks bar, where I have some pages I visit regularly, might work.
But it can only hold one topic, or set of tabs, at a time. This could be a problem if I need several research articles at hand, but have also got also lots of anime fan-fiction to read…

[Moonchild]

But if you're searching anyway, then it doesn't matter where the bookmarks are sorted
(and you can't tell me you "see" every of the hundreds of tabs that are hidden out of view unless you explicitly either scroll to it or search for it)

[moonbat]

I used to have a Delicious account back when it was popular, and their official extension synced bookmarks between it and Firefox, including tags. When the service started to get spotty, I imported them all here into a separate folder; I have around 1500 of them over a decade from around 2006 when the service started. Thanks to the tagging and folder system, I can easily type in the addressbar to bring up any of them, or just use the library and browse by tag. Some of the useful ones have broken over the years, so RecordRewind (link in my signature) to the rescue.

Bookmaking means work, not much, but more than zero. Additionally, out of sight, out of mind, which again means extra work for finding the stuff later in tons of bookmarks. Convenience of just keeping open tabs is unbeatable, even if it's abuse.

Reminder that your addressbar by default searches everything across bookmarks and history, as does the Library window. You can also organize by tag as I did above.

To be able to continue where I left off last time (last exact url like https://site/page/10/). If I leave it as open tab, that's all I need to do. If I'd want to use bookmark, I'd have to update it all the time (https://site/page/15/, https://site/page/37/, ...).

Browser history to the rescue, again typing in the addressbar should fetch all pages from that site in the drop down and you can select whichever one you want.

[Mæstro]

But if you're searching anyway, then it doesn't matter where the bookmarks are sorted
(and you can't tell me you "see" every of the hundreds of tabs that are hidden out of view unless you explicitly either scroll to it or search for it)

I think my all-time high was about sixty: still few enough one can see them all in the same menu without any searches needed.
At present, I have ten such temporary bookmarks open. Sometimes, in an unrelated phenomenon (except as it inflates my tab count), I begin interested in a topic, open several tabs for it and do not bother to close them after I have moved on. If this happens more than once, my tabs stratify like fossil beds by topic until I get around to weathering them.

[Moonchild]

well 60 isn't really an issue. if you're talking about hundreds, it is, and that is what I had the impression we were talking about here

[Mæstro]

Yay, my tab habits are still somewhere within the pale of sanity!
What do I win?

[Sob__]

Reminder that your addressbar by default searches everything across bookmarks and history, as does the Library window. You can also organize by tag as I did above.

History rarely works for me. It's mostly good only for coloring visited links. I often research different things. So when I search for <something>, I end up with five to ten pages where each has part of what I'm looking for. But in order to find these, I went though other fifty useless ones. So when I search history for <something>, it will find everything, inluding all those useless pages. There's no way I can remember which were the good ones.

Or I find five interesting articles, open them in tabs, but only have time to read one, so I keep remaining four for later. They are not important, if I close them, I won't remember them. History won't help at all, because I wouldn't know what I'm looking for.

But doh, I could simply bookmark these things, right? Yes and no. I could, but it's not the same. It's like putting a sheet of paper on my desk vs filling it in some bottomless cabinet. If it's on my desk (= tab), it's in my face, I won't forget it. And when there's too many, I'm motivated to do some cleanup. In cabinet (= bookmarks) it will be buried under tons of others. And it won't bother me that much, because it's somewhere else and doesn't immediately get in the way.

And then there's the non-zero work with organizing it. I don't want to do that. Well, sometimes I do, but that's something different, long-term storage for something I may want to find a year or two later. But these things are often only for short and one time. The idea is that I'm working with them right now, I will close them tomorrow and won't ever need them again. Or maybe day after tomorrow, week at most, unless it gets out of hand, because I need to do something else and won't get back to the original thing, ... yeah. So this queue of open tabs starts to grow.

Browser history to the rescue, again typing in the addressbar should fetch all pages from that site in the drop down and you can select whichever one you want.

Again, not exactly what I meant. Imagine that this forum didn't require registration for offtopic section and I'm random unregistered visitor who somehow found the long Your Theme Song today thread and out of everything else on the forum I'm only interested in that. And since I'm not planning to participate and hate registering, I'd like to follow it as unregistered user. Visit it once a week or two. Let's say I found it when it had 20 pages, so I can either keep page 20 open in tab, or bookmark it. Next time I visit, there will be 22 pages. So in open tab I just check rest of 20, then 21 and 22 and keep the tab open on that. And next time I visit, I'll be on page 22 and just continue from there. Nice and simple, I'll always continue from the last page I saw before, no extra effort required.

But with bookmarks? First time it's fine, last I saw was page 20, I bookmarked it, bookmark brought me back there, no problem. But at that time there were 22 pages. If I don't do anything, and use original bookmark next time, I'll go again to page 20. But I already saw that, I want 22. So I have to update the bookmark. Either edit existing one, or add new one and delete old one. And repeat that every time there are new pages in thread. Meh.

Using history wouldn't be great either. First, it's completely different thing, why should I need it when I already have nice bookmark that I use for access? Oh well, let's try history. But it won't necessarily work well anyway. If I just visit pages in order, it would, I'd simply open the last visited. But what if I went back few pages to check something older? Then the last visited page won't be the last page in thread. So I'd have to scan history for highest page number (that's hopefully included in title). That's not user friendly.

It's not something I do often, but there are few sites I follow this way. And using open tabs is so nice, straightforward, effortless.

[Falna]

What I meant is any random page without RSS.

Update Alert?

[Mæstro]

I wish I had known about Update Alert months ago. I have been worried for years that, whether from a trade agreement with the USA or Canada, a certain malformed bill or some other nonsense, the UK would cease to label GM food. (Having struggled to find edible food in the US before, I feel rather strongly about this.) I had kept the Government page with the relevant labelling regulations bookmarked and would check it regularly to confirm nothing stupid has happened. I had used an alias, since removed, to subscribe to a website (I forget which) that would monitor the site for changes for me. This extension should have worked, and I could have kept that alias’s pseudonym.

History rarely works for me. It's mostly good only for coloring visited links… Or I find five interesting articles, open them in tabs, but only have time to read one, so I keep remaining four for later. They are not important, if I close them, I won't remember them. History won't help at all, because I wouldn't know what I'm looking for.
But doh, I could simply bookmark these things, right? Yes and no. I could, but it's not the same. It's like putting a sheet of paper on my desk vs filling it in some bottomless cabinet. If it's on my desk (= tab), it's in my face, I won't forget it. And when there's too many, I'm motivated to do some cleanup. In cabinet (= bookmarks) it will be buried under tons of others.
…The idea is that I'm working with them right now, I will close them tomorrow and won't ever need them again. Or maybe day after tomorrow, week at most, unless it gets out of hand, because I need to do something else and won't get back to the original thing, ... yeah. So this queue of open tabs starts to grow.

Yes. You know my struggle. This is exactly the trap into which I fall so often, and which I have tried to describe in my previous posts.

[Sob__]

If I'm counting correctly, I'm (mis)using tabs in at least four ways (from most to least used):

- queue of pages I want to read
- quick access to pages I visit every day (and yes, it's more convenient than bookmarks, thanks to the thing with thumbnails)
- keeping some page in sight, because I'm waiting for update
- keeping position on some page-based site/forum, as described before

Update Alert could be better for #3.

[jangdonggun1234]

Bookmark them in a folder?

I have tried that approach before:

I had experimented once, about two years ago, with keeping fan-fiction I have meant someday to read in a queue folder, but they had languished there for months and I had deleted the folder without over (should be ever) reading it.

Once bookmarks are hidden away in a folder, I forget they exist.
When I had still had hundreds of bookmarks, I would sort them into folders: natural science, history, linguistics… The result was that entries in such folders were rather more likely to have no views within the last year than the unsorted. It made the purge easier, but cements in my mind that stuffing something into a folder is a death sentence.
Keeping them as tabs means that they appear often enough in the ‘show tabs’ menu (and hence my short-term memory).
But there must be a better way…
Pinning to the bookmarks bar, where I have some pages I visit regularly, might work.
But it can only hold one topic, or set of tabs, at a time. This could be a problem if I need several research articles at hand, but have also got also lots of anime fan-fiction to read…

And always try to use % search keyword to search through all tabs, this feature is the best for tab hoarder, it literally omits the uses of Google because usually opened tabs have a lot of good articles, topics that you spent a lot of time to find, at least in my cases 6000 tabs have their uses. Not just to open and let them be like people assuming, at all. For example I want to find information about shitty Manifest V3 right, just do a % manifest v3 and I can just comeback to my old tabs about Manifest V3 to copy and share with other users, pretty neat.
Guide: https://www.howtogeek.com/722570/how-to ... n-firefox/

[Moonchild]

try to use % search keyword to search through all tabs

And you can do the same for history with ^
and bookmarks with *
if you use tags in bookmarks, you can even use +
or if you only want to search URLs you've actually entered (not navigated to) by typing or pasting, use ~

Honestly, getting access to past visited URLs from bookmarks or history isn't any more difficult than using tabs. Bonus is that in that case you're using features in the browser in the way they were intended at design time.

[Mæstro]

If I'm counting correctly, I'm (mis)using tabs in at least four ways (from most to least used):
- queue of pages I want to read
- quick access to pages I visit every day (and yes, it's more convenient than bookmarks, thanks to the thing with thumbnails)
- keeping some page in sight, because I'm waiting for update
- keeping position on some page-based site/forum, as described before

I suffer only the first of these problems. For the next, I find that the bookmarks bar works well; I have DeepL, the Wayback Machine, Archive.is, Fanbox and other boorus) I consult often. Sites have favicons to make their identity clear as thumbnails would, and they do not appear among the unsorted boomarks or feature in the figure of 78 I had given above. For historical reasons, I keep a redundant, partial list of these same bookmarks under the bookmarks menu.

Oddly enough, I do not put every site I visit often here; I consult XKCD and the Nitter pages for some artists I like through the address bar, by typing the relevant proper name. These sites are always the first or other in my frequent and recent addresses. I have never bothered to tag these sites; the only time I have ever used tags was for my Tutanota inbox, when I still had one and that site worked in Pale Moon.

Years ago, when I still used Discord in Pale Moon, I would pin it, and would sometimes pin other queued pages for a time, but I have long forsaken this practise. Replacing broad, oblong tabs with short, square ones does not strike me as a proper solution.

[Sob__]

Bookmarks bar for often visited sites is not bad. Reaching something that's there is just one click instead of two when I keep it as open tab. Downside is that it's taking screen space all the time. Plus, I'm already misusing it for something else. I stuck it between address field and search field and put some bookmarklets in there (increase/decrease page number in url, reload failed images on page, etc).

[Mæstro]

Yay, things are getting better for us hopeless tab abusers!
Now, if we could find some way to queue things we would like to read soon enough, all should be well…

[Lucio Chiappetti]

If I'm counting correctly, I'm (mis)using tabs in at least four ways (from most to least used):
- queue of pages I want to read
- quick access to pages I visit every day (and yes, it's more convenient than bookmarks, thanks to the thing with thumbnails)

Why do you call that mis-use ? Tabs and bookmarks are possibilities offered by the browser (as well as saving entire sessions, at least with an extension like Session Manager), so why not let one use them as one considers them useful ? After all it is "your browser your way", isn't it ?

I was never keen instead of history and searches (I have actually removed the search box from my navigation toolbar, and when I want to call DDG I go ... through a bookmark ). Possibly for some misunderstood sense of privacy I always avoided keeping age-long history (of place I visited by chance and deemed not worth to be remembered in a bookmark) ... as I said, in the time I kept the computer and the browser running for weeks, I kept history for "today and yesterday". Now that I switch off often, I've lost this possibility so far (going back to something I closed by mistake) ... a workaround is on the to-do list, but appaerently it is not high priority. Session Manager gives enough protection in case of crashes, and anyhow crashes may happen, and it's not a drama. Incidentally, I never had a browser crash because of too many tabs (because I don't use too many ), I would say occasional browser killing because of a bad site freezing it, or OS freezing outside of the browser, or occasional blackouts, but all of this rather rare.

[Moonchild]

why not let one use them as one considers them useful ? After all it is "your browser your way", isn't it ?

Nobody is saying that you can't or are somehow prohibited from using tabs for that. If you want to, use tabs all you want! -- just understand that it comes with inevitable drawbacks because tabs are volatile, and that when you end up going outside of what the features are technically designed for, then you can run into trouble and lose data.
I'd say "queueing to visit later" is a good use case for bookmarks. It's literally what bookmarks are traditionally used for in books.
Quick access to pages you visit every day? Tabs and sessionrestore are designed for that use. Heck that's where pinned tabs come from so they are always there regardless of session state (and always load when you open the browser).

[Lucio Chiappetti]

1. drawbacks because tabs are volatile ....
2. I'd say "queueing to visit later" is a good use case for bookmarks. It's literally what bookmarks are traditionally used for in books.
3. Quick access to pages you visit every day? Tabs and sessionrestore are designed for that use.

1. it's a strength not a drawback (like the old motto of a popular canned meat here ) ... a bookmark for a page "waiting to be read" may end up staying there unused, and requiring a cleanup. A tab stays there visible, and after a few days, if I haven't read it I may conclude it was not so important after all, and delete it.
2. I make other uses of bookmarks in books. One bookmark to remind me where I stopped reading (better than folding a corner of the page, I do not like "damaging" books. Two bookmarks if I read the main text and the end notes (I'm of the kind of person who actually reads the notes). Very rarely more (I've just surrendered a book on PCA where I inserted a lot of scribbled bookmarks).
3. Fully agree.

[Moonchild]

re: 2 -- if you think about reference books (and not a novel/novella) you don't sequentially read those. Bookmarks will be used differently there, to mark passages, pages or chapters that deal with specific questions you need the reference material for.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

Sure, that was the case for the PCA reference book. For the rest I do not read many novels, more essays ... which often have notes collected at the end (of the book or of each chapter), so I need two bookmarks. Having a definite preference to read paper books vs computer books, this is the only case I could miss ... hypertextual notes