I'm always surprised people hoard tabs. The explanation is always some crazy shit and they're basically bookmarks to some
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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I view bookmarks as being for sites that I intend to visit regularly enough to warrant making a handy link. A tab is for a place I plan to visit once, probably soon, but not right now, so I want to remember it, but not to the point where I'll make a dedicated bookmark link to it. Usually it's a video I want to watch at some point when I have more time, or a recipe I think I'll try making in a few days. The issue is when I don't get the motivation to do what I kept the tab open to do, so I start getting a backlog of tabs that I simultaneously don't want to lose because I kept them open for a reason, but I don't want to visit because there are too many of them to parse through.
I just use bookmarks for that. If it isn't worth bookmarking I'm just not gonna bother. I'll find it in the history if I want to for whatever reason (almost never happens)
if i bookmark something i might as well have deleted it (my object permanence is bad). when it's a tab i can at least see it there at all times
There's the bookmarks bar. I use it mostly for most used stuff but if you have space there you could just save stuff there. It is visible but not as a tab
But if tabs work for you, no reason to change that tbh
I use my bookmark bar for nostolgia. All those sites from middle/high school that I am never clicking again and likely don't exist anymore. But seeing the names of the sites bring me joy at times.
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Yeah it kind of makes me irrationally angry when people try to defend it lol
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Laughs nervously
How? Why?
I can delete them any time. I am not addicted. I definitely need them again at some point
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leet
Bro, every one of those websites has now seen everything you've done online with the cookies. I think. I have firefox set up to clear on exit, and do so multiple times a day if using it a lot. Obviously after porn, but other stuff too.
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Funnily enough, on firefox on my PC I have an entire extension called "no tabs" which does exactly what it says and disables tabs. On my phone just never open any tho :3
Disables tabs? Like you have to close one site to look at another? I am envious that you can make that work.
Well, if any site attempts to open a new tab, it'll just automatically pull it to a new browser window instead :3. Otherwise in general I would have to close the site im looking at if I wanted to open something else in the same window, rather than launching a new one
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Maybe it's just me but I've never had a problem with building up too many tabs. Like I can't stand having more than like four.
Bookmarks, however, I have a lot of bookmarks.
I've honestly started doing that at least once a week and it really feels good for my mind to let that go. I can find whatever site it was later on when I actually need it again
Have you heard of bookmarks? There's even a bookmark bar that is right up there near the tabs. You can even edit the bookmark and delete the name so it's just a tiny icon on the bookmarks bar.
But I don’t like bookmarks, they’re way more work. Sure, if I’m trying to get the best performance possible, I’ll close my browser (all tabs will reopen when I start the browser again), but I mostly need a fuckload of tabs and a word processor, so it doesn’t normally impact my usage to have a bunch of tabs open.
People who have a hard time wrangling tabs will just have the same problem with bookmarks.
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I just find it really laborious to organize bookmarks properly when you get into the hundreds, and it’s more work to delete and easier to forget which in practice just means I still have decades old bookmarks I’m not interested in anymore. Tabs at least are in the way so I can remember to close them. I do use a few extensions to make it all a little easier to manage when I do deep dives into something and “need” ~50 new tabs for a little while.
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I will open 15 tabs, forget why, and just close my browser. I keep history off. Writing a commemt? Doesn't matter. Email? There's probably a draft. Half finished video? The algorithm will guide it back to me if it was meant to be.
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Insanity. Those are all things I want to look at later.
Tabs are ephemeral
I don’t even save history
Sometimes I’ll declare tab bankruptcy and just close the whole window. If it’s important I’ll find it again
It honestly pisses me off that restoring tabs is default behavior. If I closed the browser I meant too and if I didn't mean to oh fucking well. If I wanted to save that shit for later it would have been a bookmark.
Set them free. If they come back it's meant to be.
For all y'all thinking closing 800 tabs is bad, that's a habit exploited by session stealing attacks to take your money, socials, and email.
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I prefer to just have one tab open unless I'm copying or pasting or have to reference something from another site at the same time.
My goldfish memory makes me forget about the other open tabs after a while anyway, so they become useless xD
I switched to vertical tabs and started using tab groups so I never lose anything I don't mean to (I treat non-grouped tabs as ephemeral)
But that's just because I always have the same stuff open (LAN services, but also videos and music because I use tabs like a pseudo playlist)
If you love something, set it free. If it comes back, it is yours. If it doesn't, it never was.
I lost 5 years worth of restaurants and travel places I'd been secretly saving to do retirement trips with my wife someday (lol, retirement...)
They got moved to "archived" and then apparently they get removed from archived after 30 days unless you disable that "feature"
I went to add a restaurant one day and the entire set of tabs was gone. No idea how long it had been gone for, and browsing through my history of closed tabs on my cell phone was neigh impossible.
I'm still incredibly salty about that.
This is what bookmarks are for. I have folders of bookmarks.
I do not understand people who have dozens of tabs open at once. i have three, maybe four at max. Most the time i have only two. what is even the point of having a dozen or more tavs open, you aren't using them all, are you?
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But I like when my tab counter says ∞ or :) …
I close all tabs before I close the browser.
I only have more than two or three open if I'm researching something.
I use bookmarks, I have maybe 75 bookmarks.
I use the Singlefile extension to save full pages if I think I'll want to reference something in the future, but don't want to use a bookmark.
I'm screwed - I use Linux.
Firefox on Kubuntu always offers to restore tabs for me, like some kind of crack dealer.
Your OS use so little RAM so you can open too many tabs and since you never restart you hoard them like a dragon?
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Fucking philospher over here. Fuck restoring tabs though. It's bad luck, there might be a reason it crashed that has to do with evil spirits.
Sending this to my wife. She flips her shit when she loses her tab prison.
When troubleshooting a problem I'll often end up with 10-20 tabs open. I realize many people end up with hundreds or more and, if that works for them, fine; however, I find even what I open stressful. As a result, I've occasionally found it helpful to fully close my browser and relaunch without any of the old stuff.
I also do a lot of searching in private mode, but that's mostly because I'm embarrassed about some of the simple things I have to look up. Supposedly the company doesn't actively track what sites we visit and now there's no local evidence of how stupid I am. Well, at least not via my web searches.
The fun of being a supervillain
If I want to save something, I bookmark it.
I have like 50 tabs across various groups. A lot are things I want to read but haven't gotten to yet, a few are just work (email, slack, onedrive). Some are for job apps. I do restore my tabs lol.
Bookmarks are messier because the papers aren't necessary all the time and their citations are in endnote. But if I bookmarked all the papers I'd have some thousands which is too messy in a browser.
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