@Edent
Onetab works for me.
one-tab.com

@Edent I don't really use more than 3 or 4 tabs at any time, and then I gets rid of them all. Am I weird? 😂

@Edent Revisting your post here and wondering if you found a good solution?

@Edent Vivaldi has workspaces, and tab stacks. Very useful.

@Edent I use a tab groups extension in Firefox to group by subject. I generally have a bunch of tabs related to a problem I'm trying to solve but not right now. At any one time, I have a ff window with the tab groups I'm currently using plusa couple of scratch windows for ephemeral stuff. It's organised chaos but works for me.

@Edent I use OneTab https://www.one-tab.com/ to save my tab sanity in Firefox. Free but not open source. Should I be worried? They go out of their way to insist it is designed for privacy unless you use the share a web page feature (which I never have.) 👀 Thanks for asking the question, I now know about some alternatives I'd not heard of.

@Edent I close all my tabs. All of them, every time. Life is good.

@Edent I have my firefoxes set to erase all history when they are closed so if I'm interested in a particular tab, I either must read it now or I send myself a slack message with the link on and a bit of context to read later.

I think I'll have a go with wallabag as slack is not great.

@Edent Jen uses a Chrome extension that uses "save for later" functionality, so it closes it for now, but makes it easy to get back to.

If that sounds useful, I could ask her which it is?

@Edent I've been looking for something similar to replace Pocket, after it was bought and killed off. I especially liked the fact that it saved a crap-free copy of each page.

For now, I just have a "Saved for later" folder on the bookmark bar, which at least syncs across my devices. (FWIW, I'm also looking to try out Wallabag, now that I have RPi that I can use for hosting.)

@Edent I use Firefox Sync to pick up tabs found while on mobile that I want to look at in more detail later on desktop.

I use the OneTab plugin to create lists of tabs I don’t want to lose and don’t have time to deal with right now. It’s just the right amount of object permanence for me. Not as ephemeral as an open tab; not cached forever in some write-only medium like a database I’ll never look in again.

@Edent i'm trying a firefox plugin called Tab Stash that turns tabs to bookmarks.

@Edent personal system:

nextcloud is at the base of it

- nextcloud talk chat for
- music
- movies / tv series

kinda like a note to self, but separate to give some structure.

and for "to read" I use a nextcloud bookmarks folder

This helps me mostly to have "phone finds" to be revisited when I go over these lists.

@Edent I use https://codeberg.org/readeck/readeck for this on my own local server, you also can deploy it to any hosting service you trust.

- one binary
- data easy exportable (I moved my service already around)
- self defined categories (add on the fly)
- searchable
- active community
- no GenAI

@Edent I'm using share-links, a small self-hostable service I created. Here's my own instance: https://links.l3m.in :)

@Edent David Allen's "Getting Things Done" is helpful in this regard:

1) if it can be done in 2 minutes, just do it

2) If not, record it in a system you trust, and that you review regularly

I have a to-do list app (well, a vibe-coded clone of Cultured Code's Things, which is sadly not available on Linux) where I save the link, then move it to one of the projects ("Learning", "Software to build", etc). Tabs can get lost after a browser crash or bug.

@Edent A self-hosted Linkding instance at https://github.com/sissbruecker/linkding is running inside my VPN. I save bookmarks using tags with priorities (tr1, tr2, tr=to read). Additionally Hister at https://hister.org helps with recall.

@Edent
I browse using Vivaldi and can pin regularly used tabs, group sets of tabs on a topic and rename groups but probably more interesting to you is the use of Workspaces - save a workspace of tabs, say for open benches and then whenever you want to work on that activate the appropriate workspace. Works really well for me - well done @Vivaldi !

@Edent I'm pretty happy with @wallabag or using bookmarks in Mastodon. Do I always come back to read things? No, of course not but at least I know where to look at when I remember something weeks later. And it keeps my browser clean because as soon as I can't read the titles in the tabs any more there are too many.

@Edent about 2 years ago I just gave up… now I just … close them. The overwhelming feeling of relief is incredible. And yet a hint of betrayal and even loss lingers.

@Edent This thread is interesting. I'll keep its tab open and come back to it later. 😅

(Thanks for asking this question. 574 open tabs here at the moment. On one device.)

@Edent I use a browser shortcut I wrote (for iOS) that extracts the page title and URL and appends them to a specific text file. Very basic but sort of works for me.

@Edent
I am here waiting patiently for a solution. Those people closing all tabs don't share the same kind of mind. For me, all those tabs resemble the many parallel thoughts in my head and if there are only a few, I feel bored somehow.
As I can forget what interested me a few days ago and delete my history, a search would not help.

@Edent following replies with interest!

@Edent tab islands on opera are quite useful to me

@Edent Honestly? I can't cope with more than about 7 open. It does my head in!

@Edent I use a plugin that dumps the page as markdown into Obsidian (not o/s unfortunately) Frontmatter includes link to the original

@Edent I'm in the same boat. I plan on exploring Hister (https://hister.org/) as an alternative to the behavior.

My theory: if I can trust that the page has been indexed and saved by a better engine than Firefox's history search, maybe I'll change behaviors?

@Edent I wrote an extension that dumps all open tabs into my Readeck tagged by date. I can still retrieve everything, but it doesn't clutter anymore and anything I don't need can be silently forgotten. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabs-to-readeck/

@Edent I use the bookmarks toolbar for that. Tabs are unlikely to survive for me, and thus need something more durable, but also easy to remove...

@Edent You need an app that closes 'will look at that soon' tabs that are open for more than half a day.
Seriously.
If you have more open tabs than hours in a day... you need longer days.

@Edent I use wallabag for read-later stuff, and linkding for saving useful stuff. I also have a middle ground for “useful thing I want to try/use/set up, but not now” (e.g. wrong device) of saving to linkding and marking it unread there (I don’t otherwise use the read/unread status).

I had to practice putting stuff in those and closing the tab instead of leaving it open to “read later”, and that has now become habit :)

@Edent I have learned I don't return for the open tabs. So if they are related to some thing important or interestimg to me, I create Joplin note about the topic, and save the link along short wording why I need to check it. Then collect relevant other info into note as well. And immediately get rid of the tab. #Joplin is my choise, any note taking app will do.

I also enabled the kanban module of it, so I can add thr most relevant notes to my todo priority list.

Give it a try, this helps me in the info/task overload. Endless open tabs just add tto stress.

@Edent Every now and then I go to "Tab Zero": select all tabs, create bookmarks folder [<current date>] and close all tabs. (Usually this is over multiple windows, so the folders are [<date> 1], [<date> 2], etc.)

@Edent I run a local linkwarden (basically fancy Wallabag) and have a separate collection for “surely one day I’ll take a look”.

Not a perfect solution but it gets the job done for me.