As you open them. I consider it an abysmal practice to collect hundreds of open tabs in the first place.
Declare tab bankruptcy and start a new tab life
I miss my old phone and my old PC, with their limited memory. Every so often, my browser would crash under the weight of the tabs, and refuse to re-open unless I agreed to discard them all …
I don’t keep tabs open. I close them as soon as I’m done
Make a mental commitment to spend at least 30 minutes going through tabs.
Scroll through all of them. If any are news articles and that news has been moved on from or it just makes me angry, close the tab. If it’s a news article but it’s more of an “interesting read” thing and I’m still interested, keep it.
Keep scrolling. If you find several tabs relating to the same or similar concepts, move them next to each other; that gives more weight to following through on that group.
If it was a “yes, I’d like to buy this but my card isn’t convenient” tab, if I’m still interested in it, get my card and order it. (I deliberately don’t store my card, to impede impulse buying.)
If it’s something I was researching (usually something I’m interested in buying) and I have the energy, keep researching. Once I’ve completed research, either buy the item immediately, or add it to my “things to buy” bookmark folder. I go through the folder a couple times a year and decide if the item still interests me. If it doesn’t, I delete the bookmark. If it does, I may or may not buy it then.
If it’s a video, download it and put it into my ‘watch these’ folder for later.
If it’s something I was thinking of for a friend (a meme, news article, something to buy), I’ll send them a text about it. If it’s after hours, I’ll prep a text, save it as a draft, then send it the next day.
If it’s a piece of fiction, I’ll group those together as well, then leave them for the moment: I’m interested in clearing tabs right now, not getting distracted.
If it’s a piece of reference material, I’ll either bookmark it or add it to a collection so I can come back to it later.
If it’s a recipe, I’ll copy it to Word, format it to my tastes, print it out and move it to the kitchen.
If it’s a thread that I wanted to read through, I’ll stop and read through it, then either discard it or bookmark it if I may need to reference it again.
If it’s a quick curiosity thing, I’ll give it a quick read to satisfy my curiosity and close the tab.
Eventually I run out of energy and browse the internet, opening up a few new tabs in the process.
- Articles: I save them to my wallabag instance
- Videos: I use HTTP Shortcuts to share the links to metube to download them so I can watch them later
- Interesting sites, projects, etc: bookmark them using tags so I can easily find them later (“if” I ever need them); use floccus to sync them to linkwarden so they’re also archived and searcheable
- The rest are more or less leftovers from tasks I’ve probably stopped working on, so I try to close them (btw tree tabs help detect such groups of tabs)
- (I still end up with many tabs, but at least it’s not as bad as before I did the above 😅)
Is tree tabs a plugin? Would you mind sharing which one it is?
Threw a bunch of Youtube tabs into a bookmark folder with the month and the year, then closed them all. Did the same about 6 months ago, haven’t really touched any of those and probably won’t touch any of the new ones either. But they’re out of the way now.
If you haven’t needed them for such a long time, they probably weren’t all that important anyway.
Same goes for all the physical items in my home. If I haven’t needed something in a long time, there’s a good chance I never will. This is how I reduce digital and physical clutter in my life.
Right click, ‘close all’. If they were important you would have looked at them already.
When I asked this question, I found out about raindrop.io. BTW, in that discussion you’ll find all the people with 500 tabs open. In this new one, you’ll also find lots of people who just close tabs regularly.
Anyway, randrop is a service where you can dump links and go through them when you feel like it. The idea is, that if you know you won’t be checking a specific tab today, you can just save it in raindrop and cost the tab. I don’t like to have lots of tabs open anyway, but there are some sites I like to save for later. Stuff like vacation planning can produce twenty tabs just like that, and I’ll just throw them all into raindrop.
Most of them are sorted into logical categories, and I’ll go through them when I remember to. For example, vacation planning will be useful later. When that time comes, I’ll start opening all those links I’ve accumulated over the months.
For each tab, I find the project(s) associated with it, find my notes for that project, save the URL for that page in the appropriate place in my notes, then close the tab.
If it’s something that isn’t for a specific project (e.g. reading something because it looks interesting), then I just close it. It’s not important. There’s plenty of entertainment to be found without those.
I bookmark them and close them so at least they’re out of sight.
Okay, then how do you “process” hundreds of bookmarks you haven’t gotten a chance to look through?
A topic comes up and I remember that I have a bookmark about that topic and that’s usually the only way I get back to it.
Occasionally I block off time, like 15 minutes, where I scroll through and delete the ones that I no longer care about. Kind of the same thing I do with emails and photos.
I just close them. All open tabs go away when I turn the computer off for the night.
Lol
I have like 250 tabs on my phone, I don’t wanna close them… Fear of Missing Out…
If they were actually important, you’dve remembered and dealt with them already. Go ahead and close them. You might be suprised when the FoMo goes away after.
I have Vivaldi set to close any tabs older than 3 days.
Well, I don’t have those.
Close them. Hoarding tabs is still hoarding.
I would call myself a tab hoarder. FOMO. But I started using the browser setting to automatically close the tabs which have not been active in the past 7/30 days. If I have read the tab content, they should come up again in the history/search suggestions when I type in the URL/search bar. If I’m really sure I want to reference it later, I bookmark it or write it on my notes.
Also just learn to let go. I’m still having quite a number of tabs and windows open. But this auto cleanup has helped a lot.
The only ones I keep open are those I want to revisit without keeping. The ones I want to keep I’ll bookmark, or save a local copy of if I suspect it’s going to not be there later. The rest just get closed. My open tabs count doesn’t even approach hundred let alone hundreds.
