The lighter side of ADHD
This is one thing that makes me think mine is AuDHD, not just ADHD (waiting for an autism assessment now).
I occasionally pin important tabs, or use Tab Groups, but mostly I obsessively sort everything into Collections and start fresh every time. I can't stand digital clutter. Messy Desktops drive me mad, too.
And yet my IRL world is disorganisation and chaos. π¬
I hate digital clutter and regularly clear out old data I don't want anymore. My browser is set to clear everything when I close it. If I find something useful, I bookmark it. Once in a while I'll sort out any unsorted saved bookmarks and make a backup of the cleaned up list.
I'm also similar in real life though. I'm quite minimal and prefer only to have what is useful or meaningful to me.
My digital life and personal life are very similar.
Glad to see someone like me. If it's important it gets bookmarked or noted down. Browser clears tabs and history on close (used to clear all cookies as well, but that got too cumbersome, now just clears most of them). I also turn off my PC at the end of the day and turn it back on the next day (and not just because I couldn't get hibernation to work), so I always have a clean slate
Iβm starting to come around to this thought about myself as well. Not only do I also don this instead of a million stressful open tabs, when itβs work adjacent stuff that Iβll probably need to reference back again I take my own notes on the content in Obsidian, snip and paste in screenshots I might want to reference from the web page, and include command examples or code block snippets verbatim, and save the hyperlink in a yaml header parameter. Iβve gone to reference stuff just to find it completely scoured off the internet and The Internet Archive having it being hit or miss.
Everyone is all hype for local LLMβs ingesting and referencing internal/personal knowledge bases in their responses, and Iβm over here like βuh Iβll just hit cmd+shift+f thxβ.
Same, clean slate looks so good. I look things up and sort them into order before they grow into unholy mess.
Why don't y'all just use bookmarks or even just go back thru the homepage sometimes? Managing tons of stale tabs can't be that much easier?
bookmarks are for repeated access, tabs are for one-time things that you're going to get to any day now
Loading up the same tab each day is not repeated use? And you can also have folders in bookmarks. Ctrl+B Ctrl+W Bookmark added to last save location and tab closed.
if you don't click them, they don't load. and if i can't see the thing i'll forget about it.
How many can you see even? 20 or maybe 30 if only the icons load?
Keeping this many of anything in working memory is also not possible without forgetting.
Definitely not hundreds so the point about visibility is kind of mute.
The lengths people will go to not use bookmarks...
These are bookmarks with extra steps!
no, fewer steps. these auto-arrange themselves into hierarchies based on browsing history, meaning you always have context for why a page was opened.
If it is important and you don't need it right now, use a bookmark and close that tab. Bookmarks have been around for literal decades now in browsers.
In my experience the bookmark button is essentially the, 'This is interesting and I'll check this out later but never really will' button.
Now, I have a thousand unsorted bookmarks that I am ashamed to look at and half of them are decade old dead links.
Everyone is different, though. A sane person could categorize different bookmarks into relevant sub folders and review/clean them out monthly.
I'm not that person.
How is it any different than a tab, other than the fact that it isn't loaded into your RAM or whatever? Do you really believe this person needs tab # 6546?
Just use a bookmarks bar, and it even looks almost identical.
There should be a 404 checker built into bookmarks. Once a year run a quick scan.
The semi-logical reason that I leave so many tabs open, is that I do need/want the tab now, or in the near future, and keeping it in a tab is sort of like a sticky note to remind myself to do it. It rarely works though and just contributes to a growing sense of anxiety as I'm constantly stared down by a huge row of "to-dos"
So bookmark it in a check back later folder to switch your anxiety to the folder, at least its safe if you back it up.
Oh she might be me.
It is with great grievance that I had to put an end to this and install a plugin that closes the oldest one when I get over 15 (Limit Tabs). (Actually, that is only great, unless I'm in a shopping decision frenzy and actually need this.)
Jesus, save that shit to disk and release your browser from this cache hell.
People should look into tab groups. Firefox has a tab grouping feature built-in now but this is a plugin that is a bit more feature-full.
So I have tab groups for different dev projects, games, podcasts, shows, music, etc. It reduces the size of each tab group which makes it easier to actually return to the important stuff and close the stuff that doesn't matter.
I'd recommend using bookmarks instead. There is absolutely no way where you need thousands at the same time. Save them in a logical folder structure instead!
The best of both worlds is the tree style tabs plug in. Though I do wish it was a core feature so I could get tab grouping and hide the top tab bar.
You can, but I find that if I have the tabs there, I use them or close them. I don't use bookmarks after I make them, so they just acrue. You're right I don't need 7000 open tabs, just like I don't need 7000 bookmarks. Part of the point of tab groups is you can more easily determine what tabs aren't relevant and get rid of them, so you don't wind up with thousands to start with.
If they're open as tabs, even in groups, I'm incentivised to close them when they're no longer relevant. For longer term notes I use a note-taking app that doesn't rely on my browser or computer staying the same. I don't like using a browser for that because it's just not a good tool for it.
once i get more tabs than i can easily see on my screen, i start getting stressed out...
I yeet tabs all the time. Figure I will find it again if xenu wills it.
Closing a tab requires that I apply immediate effort in deciding that I'm never going down this path ever again till the end of time, and yet I risk future regret if I ever want to reference a closed tab. So much effort for so little gain - tidiness for the sake of it. If you become cool with clutter, then these open tabs are different pieces that help understand and solve bigger picture problems.
Across all my machines and browsers, I think I might have over 10k tabs that I've opened but never closed.
What I can say for sure is that I have not seen 7500 pages on the internet in the past two years that I want to visit again.
This is relatable even if I don't have this specific issue, but I am curious what people are saving.on their emotional support tab groups.
Why do these people not use bookmarks?
I sometimes have like 20 tabs open, but half of them are pinned which I use most of the time, and the rest is current stuff that I close when I am done with them.
My browser deletes open tabs when closing. Otherwise I would drown in chaos.
I have 3 firefox windows open at all times each with 30 to 50 tabs and i save them regularly in the tabs library so that i can re-open them whenever i want. There's a re-open all tabs button when clicking on a tabs folder.
I don't think I have ADHD but oftentimes I forget that the tab I need is already open. There is that feature that switches you to a tab if it matches your search query in the browser bar, but somehow I keep searching in ways that circumvent that feature Β―_(γ)_/Β―
Best I got is 1k.
My Firefox starts to get grumpy once I get to over 1000 tabs
There is an extension to automatically backup open tabs and restore them for the hardcore tabbers.
Remember the 3-2-1 rule for backups of record breaking sessions.
And here I was worried about my 70ish tabs
If that's in your workflow just use sessionmanager extension (but don't hoard them, it changes your fingerprint)
Now there is an actually good use for AI. Have a program that bookmarks your tabs and sorts them into subfolders automatically.
This is me with unsaved files in VS Code. Every so often I'd go through and try to clean them up but it stayed around 150 files. I got a new laptop a couple of weeks ago and I've slowly crawled back up to about 15-20.
Export Tab URLs for occasional plaintext backups.
It was too much of a mess and I had to resort to using different windows in the end (but I have to be careful when I have to close Firefox and select quit from the menu instead of using the title bar button)