I don’t need to know which is which, they’re more or less sorted by recency. So I go through the most recent tabs and get the info I need or do the task associated, then close them, until I get back to the previous task or subject.
Sometimes I get interrupted with a new thing to look up or do, and more tabs get made and the cycle begins anew, regardless of how many already exist.
Some projects last days or weeks, and tabs related to them end up being longer-lived. If I get on one of those tabs and don’t want to work on the project right then, I’ll continue going back (leftwards) til I find something I can do or read in the time I have available. So I definitely have tabs that have been open for months but I do need to get to eventually.
Also, sometimes when I need to look at something I know I have (or had) open in a tab, I’ll just search for it (literally, i.e. Google) again in a new tab and handle it there. Then if I do come across the old tab, it gets closed quickly.
I’m “done” when I’m back at my inbox or calendar (first or 2nd tabs, pinned). This rarely happens and when it does I’m sure there is a something in my email or a new ticket in JIRA for me to start on…
So overall it’s not about knowing what’s in each tab, but having a system to navigate them that works for you.
After closing a dozen left over from looking up various topics over the last few days, 164 tabs, some of which are probably 5 years old. I swear I’ll look at them someday!
Agreed. My rule of thumb is: if it takes enough more than a second to figure out why I had the tab open, then I might as well just close it and re-open it if the need to have it available reemerges. It takes a lot of effort (several seconds and a lot of mental energy) to create the mental context that I need to make use of the tab. On the other hand, opening it takes a few seconds and requires little to no thought whatsoever.
So I just close them. In fact, having too many tabs open just makes it take longer to find the open tabs that I’m actually currently using.
A few hundred. At the end of a “project/idea/thing” I’ll bookmark the entire set, dated, described, and close them all at once, things always come back in need later. It’s very satisfying.
For normal day to day browsing I have a window with about 15 pinned tabs that I just cycle through in the morning catching up on stuff and then close that window.
Basically just an evolution of the same way I used my desktop 20 years ago. Always had this concept of an Internet-connected computer as a dynamic newspaper, windows were individual columns arranged around the page/screen. Used to be a bunch of IRC windows along the bottom of my screen, maybe a couple of MSN windows up the side, and one or two browser windows (substitute one browser window with an email client or RSS reader) taking up the rest of the screen.
Well now everything is javascript. Google had the same idea with Google Wave a few years later, they abandoned it, but the javascript future happened anyway. Bunch of tiny browser windows along the bottom of the screen for discord, two large ones across the top for everything else (webmail, content aggregators like lemmy have largely replaced RSS), and a couple more on a second monitor.
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