Learning good habits to cure tab bloat

[Mæstro]

This is the first post of at least two I plan about maintaining neater digital habits, now that I have achieved my greatest IT goal of the decade beside switching to Linux. As the title says, I run with too many tabs sometimes. Too many should be understood strictly in the sense that, with too many tabs open, the thumbnails in the tab display become too small and text snippets too short for navigating comfortably. Currently, with twenty-four tabs (down from a high of thirty-nine earlier tonight), Pale Moon is using only 400 MB store, and since giving up Discord, I no longer need to worry about the RAM burden that running two browsers at once at all times caused. My current tab count is near my comfortable limit for navigating. At present, my tabs comprise the following:

• three pages representing childhood artefacts, of which two are from the Internet Archive,
• six pages of natural history articles,
• two pages of history articles and films,
• three pages of fumo, of which two contain albums I would like to save,
• eight pages of manga and anime thingies,
• an article I have been waiting to discuss with a friend for a while and
• this board, where I am typing this now.

This I would consider about typical, if above average in the absolute figures, when I have not got any outstanding business to address. All the pages are of personal, current interest to me. Dealing in short-term bookmarking would seem more headache than it is worth. Conceivably, the sidebar, in which I keep my history displayed at all times, could be used for accessing topics of recent interest, but building proper habits about this is a matter where I think others’ guidance could help me. Is there anyone here who uses the sidebar (set to history, not bookmarks) to keep a low tab count? I would be happy to learn any secrets you have to share, whether using the sidebar or otherwise, in how to keep a smaller tab count. Although burning everything down and starting over can work for up to a few weeks, my tab count always slowly builds back. I was almost considering such razing today until I could cut down to ordinary, not to say ideal, level.

[RealityRipple]

I literally just use the address bar to go back to pages. I rarely have to type more than two letters to re-visit any site I visit with any recent frequency _{(for example, if i type the letter B right now, it goes to the list of internationalization bugzilla bugs i'm working on as part of the ICU update)}. It does a decent job adjusting to my activity as my projects and researches change focus. I close every page as soon as I'm done with it, even if I plan to come back to it in "fifteen minutes", because typing the first few letters of its title or address brings it right back up, and I close my browser without worry constantly throughout the day. I don't have any tab restorations or extensions related to history or tabs or bookmarks other than liveclick for rss. Very, very rarely, I use the history sidebar to see where I left off if it's a multi-page thing (curse you korean webtoons), and it's always set to the simple "By Last Visited". I think the last time I lost a page was before covid, and that was finding a stackexchange question in a... stack... of stackexchange questions.

I struggle to understand the tab thing people deal with... I can't tell if it's a term of memory, a familiarity with the interface tools or lack thereof, an understanding or distrust of the history system, a fear of clicking the close button, a mix of them, or something else entirely. So I can't really granularize any suggestions into specifics.

[vannilla]

Using many tabs is fine. When I read on stuff I often need to open many pages and cross-check them, or maybe I'm planning to look up many things sequentially and I might as well open all of them since I would do that anyway.
The issue is keeping many tabs open. Once you're done with the contents of a tab close it. If you think you might need to reference it again tomorrow or something, close it anyway and use history or bookmarks to re-open it when you need to.
Another thing you could do is using multiple windows. I always (or nearly always) have one window opened with a couple "social" places I visit which auto-update when there is a new post, so while those sites keep up with messages I use another window for other stuff (like I'm doing as I type this: I have the forum in a second window).
Looking at your list, you could use a window for articles, one window for entertainment and one window for socials, for example.

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I have almost everything...

• three windows restored from previous session
• one with 6 tabs on my work machine, related to a project, always ready to be shown to collaborators
• one with 5 tabs related to map projects
• my main working window with a dozen tabs, three forums, one blog, a meteo (weather) site, my router, and local or work pages
• then I have the bookmark toolbar with half a dozen menus of menus
• then I have the bookmark menu with some items on top (search engines, maps, etc. then 8 menus by topic (transport, health, foryums, wikis, bank etc.) and a few misc items on bottom
• paradoxically I have remove the search engine from the navigation toolbar, and I invoke some news sites each time calling DDG from the bookmark menu
• I do not use any sidebar
• I do not keep history (deleted at exit, and no more than two days)

[RealityRipple]

The categorization by windows is another good one. Once you're done with a line of inquiry, you can close the entire window at once without losing any unrelated tabs.

[Moonchild]

The categorization by windows is another good one. Once you're done with a line of inquiry, you can close the entire window at once without losing any unrelated tabs.

This is what I do every time I audit sec bugs.
New window, make sure it's active, so any links from e-mail open in that window, open new tabs as needed for each bug, keeping everything open for quick reference. once the audit is over with, close the window and bam, 1 click cleanup for everything I no longer need outside the audit.

[Mæstro]

Thank you for your evaluations and suggestions! I have tried them out, as somebody who does not use any extensions, and here is what I can report.

Because maintaining separate windows for different topics is encouraged, I have split the eighteen tabs I have open at present into two categories: one for research topics, another for everything else. (All the history tabs, and all but one of the fumo tabs had been closed in the natural course of things before doing this.) Hence, the windows have now got six and twelve tabs, acceptable figures both. For me, the hazard is that this should require me to close Pale Moon with Control-Q or the File menu; I am used to clicking the cross in the corner, which means that I can end up easily discarding one of my windows by accident.

Shifting other topics into new windows can, in this way, incidentally help to clear away old strata,* and for this, I should consider the advice to rely on the address bar and history to access topics. For me, this is perhaps complicated in a few ways. For one, anime pages often appear in Japanese, which I cannot read. Even if an anime’s Japanese title is given in the Latin alphabet, actually recovering it is another matter. Reality Ripple is also correct that this is also, in part, a matter of memory. For research matters, I tend to remember wordless concepts instead of specific words. I can recall all the fine details communicated in a discussion without being able to quote a line verbatim with any reliability. To apply this with a present example, how am I to remember if a given page I found on the youngest pre-Cambrian system is listed under the name Vendian, variants like Wend or the German Vendium or Wendium, or Eocambrian, Infracambrian or their German equivalents? I could, of course, search for all of these in turn, although the chance of misremembering the right keyword in a given case lingers. I have occasionally lost articles in tabs I closed and wanted again a few weeks later like this. In short, I am open to it, but suspect accidental problems along the way which require their own remedies.

My browsing habits tend to resemble Vannilla’s. Research, of course, must be in a language I understand, so closing tabs and searching out to help in this case. Fossils are easier to dig back up than anime girls. Bookmarking pages which happened to catch my interest in the moment about any subject which caught my fancy was how I had accumulated half a myriad bookmarks when I first migrated to Pale Moon. Boiling this sap down to a syrup of thirty bookmarks is my original triumph in the genre which this post and its successor hope to advance. Knowing myself, it would be unwise to revive this thankfully dead habit.

Indeed, about 15′ after originally posting this, I ended up closing the six natural history tabs as a body. It would seem more natural for me to cut off a limb planning to dispose of it than keep more than one window open at a time for normal browsing. I could then use Scrapbook X, as Andy Prough had taught me a few months ago, to preserve and discharge one of the childhood tabs I had been keeping open. Altogether, this advice has brought me down within a few hours to an easily managed eight tabs, where the way further down is clear. Razing is not the only way. Thank you for teaching me some of your methods to control tabs!

[jobbautista9]

If you deal with multiple windows you might find the Window Menu extension useful if you're using the menu bar (though it has a toolbar button too). Another way of dealing with tab bloat is using Tab Groups aka Panorama (also known nowadays in other browsers like Floorp and Vivaldi as "workspaces"), though it could interfere with tab-related extensions like Tab Mix Plus. Not to mention that it's best used with session restored on the next start (which this extension will automatically configure in your preferences on install, but you can manually revert it), but if you find yourself doing 6 windows regularly then it's probably likely you already save and restore your session anyway...

[jobbautista9]

I struggle to understand the tab thing people deal with... I can't tell if it's [...] distrust of the history system

This could be a factor. I don't have concrete evidence for this hypothesis of mine but I'd imagine the people who regularly clear their history (probably because of some random privacy guide recommending it) also tend to hoard a lot of tabs. They'd use the address bar to query through the hundreds of tabs they have opened.

[Mæstro]

If it offers some light on my position, I have always kept, never cleared, my browser history, for this computer is mine and it would be impossible for anybody else to access. At present, my browser history as early as 14 Ⅴ 24 has been retained. Earlier entries were cleared by the browser with its default settings respecting how far back the chronicle goes. My browser always opens the tabs which I have had last open, and since I normally keep only one window open, this suffices to preserve everything.

[RealityRipple]

The tab memory thing may be a minor crutch, but I understand it. However, if you want to be more restrictive, there is the "recently closed tabs/windows" menu that would let you choose the individual tabs or whole windows to restore, manually, in the History menu. This takes a little more getting used to, as it can be forgotten if you open your browser for another thing real quick, then close it again, without restoring something you might have wanted, but on the plus side, it does help keep an "inbox" from building up. This can be a big step though, and cause teething pains and anger. For that reason, I would consider it a "minimalist" method, not a general suggestion, no matter how much I might personally feel about it being a simplification. It takes a kind of muscle memory to get used to.

I also have a small... I guess mnemonic rule, in a way. If my tabs start to shrink to fit, I know it's time to close tabs (or get more specific in the window splitting). Part of that is for tab readability, which won't be so useful for Japanese titles unless they include characters you'd recognize, which they like to do, but isn't the best to rely on. The good news, is, usually if you know the domain of a page and start typing that domain, the address bar will start suggesting the specific page the more you visit it, especially when you type the same characters (i think?).

[Falna]

You could also check out the Tabs To Portfolio extension. If I've temporarily stopped working on a topic I save it as a portfolio & close the tabs, then reload them from the portfolio at a later date, sometimes months later.