These HN threads with people that have 20K tabs living for years are so wild! I guess I'm the only savage in the world who closes my browser window and quits the browser application whenever I'm done with my computer for the day. I occasionally use tabs to temporarily have one or two web pages open at a time, usually because I need to browse/compare both of them actively, but when I'm not actively reading a page, I see no reason to keep a tab around.
I tried bookmarking everything in a dated folder "just in case" blabla but I always ended up either forgetting the site or if I really need it find and reopen it the normal way.
Since I transitioned to Obsidian recently I wrote a few simple macros to put the link into my "daily note". Add a few tags or even a comment if I am so inclined and boom, so far when I really want to find sth back I can actually search for it in my own notes.
Much better than a bunch of tabs!
(It helps that I´m currently on a really small machine (8 GB RAM) so that gives some discipline)
I use the profile manager and have dedicated (and isolated) profiles for some sticky web apps that I need to keep open through a work shift, e.g. Slack and G-Suite. My G-Suite one might even have a dozen tabs that I'll have it keep and restore on restart, holding documents that are part of a weeks or months long project. The Slack one would just be one tab per Slack org at the times when I've had to juggle a few, as I found that easier than using the Slack UI's internal way of switching orgs.
I guess it's my old school way to have isolated containers for these 1st party sites I am forced to use. I'll even cut and paste 3rd party URLs from those back into a general profile, rather than browse off to other content from those "apps".
In the general browsing profile, I don't really leave anything logged in or open in tabs for more than an hour or two, often much less. When I get up to take a break, I generally have exited the browser too. So, I may close it tens of times per day, and have it set to clear history and cookies on exit.
It's partly my defiant personality wanting to throw a monkeywrench into the tracking and personalization miasma. But it is also just more comfortable for my mind to be coming back to a cleanly reset workspace than some sedimentary remains of the past.
There's a manager I've worked with and someone had a great description of her:
"She operates like a phone that hasn't been rebooted in too long"
My (admittedly unapologetically judgemental) view is that people that need more than a couple of tabs open from one day to the next are either too disorganised to bookmark the pages or are trying to juggle an obviously unreasonable and unsustainable number of topics. I find everything interesting, so I want to read and re-visit a LOT, but because of that it's become obvious to me that 99.9% of the time I'm never going to get back to that interesting thing (and if it's ends up being worthwhile enough then I'm sure I'll come across it again or be able to find it if and when I have the time).
I'm like you in that I almost make a point of closing all the tabs when I close the browser - and I often close the browser on a daily basis.
There's someone else I know who has multiple browser windows each with multiple tabs, and they just don't shutdown their computer because it's "state" represents where they are in their overall workflow. To me, that indicates a number of problems.
Caveat: I occasionally rely on the browser, upon start-up, re-opening the same tab/tabs (usually a maximum of two tabs) that were open when I closed the browser the previous day.
if you're used to opening new links in a new tab (or if it's a target link anyway), it can quickly add up to a dozen+. It can be nice to organize important ones that you need in the short term.
I have no clue how people are managing tabs in the thousands, though. I only have a few hundred bookmarks after spending 20+ years gathering them. I don't need every page I visit to be archived in organizers like that.
I do tend to let tabs accumulate, but then I turn off my PC at the end of the day and let all tabs fall into the void.
I like to start the day with a blank slate. Which seems to be such an uncommon thing to do that I couldn't convince FF on my last few Linux installs not to restore tabs when reopening. I've changed the obvious settings for it, I've set the flags in about:config, I've even completely disabled crash recovery and related features. It would still always reopen the last session
