It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)

I’m working on Amna which tackles the too many tabs problem, and this is a huge generalization. I can have 22 tabs open just for single task. For example opening two HN articles in new tabs will bring the total to 3. Seeing what’s open all the time is overwhelming to most users. I’m a fan of the new tab groups and unlike chrome which puts a bunch of dots, Safari neatly sends tabs away to work with less clutter and a blank slate.

It wouldn't be for me. I tend to keep hundreds of tabs open for various reasons. And when I reboot and Chrome screws up reloading my session, it's super frustrating. Do I _need_ those tabs open? No. Does having them open save me a 5-10 seconds a hundred times a day? Sure does.

Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.

On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.

how about multiple layer tabs

I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.

That's a completely emotional response. "It makes the tab bar completely unusable" -- maybe the problem is with the tab bar, not the user. What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? Perhaps if effort was put into it, we could come up with some good solutions. I would bet that there's a not-insignificant number of users who have heaps of tabs open.

I can’t but think of https://xkcd.com/1172

Products are designed with a certain workflow in mind. Back when people would open a website at a time, nobody needed tabs. Now everyone uses tabs, but relatively no one needs to organize their tabs. It’s acceptable that browser don’t make their UI extra complex for a vocal minority.

You can definitely use a browser that accommodates for this.

If I may ask, could another option be to try and find the root cause of why you have 40 tabs open?

Maybe the vanilla browsers out there can be sufficient for you if you solved the problem of having to many tabs open; keeping tabs to a minimum?

Interesting, I see your point of view, but I guess my browsing habits are different.

Tabs are ephemeral in my opinion and can be closed without a trace at any moment. I can't rely on them being there, so I don't keep hundreds of them open with chains of context.

I have a tiny amount of reliance on the browser history to search and re-open pages if needed, or if I actually care about the URL's I'll add bookmarks, or URL's to a document/note.

My anecdotal observations are that this often causes extreme number of tabs. I've seen multiple examples from social media in the last month of people scrolling through their mom's (/little brother's/etc) phone, showing hundreds of tabs, but usually all duplicates of the same dozen or so. I remember seeing similar things firsthand (but not to as great an extent) when the first generation iPad came out. And I've also witnessed the same in offices, where doing something in an app or an existing page will arbitrarily open a new window or tab, leading to an explosion of windows and tabs all hidden beneath the IE11 icon in the Windows taskbar.

By all signs, it seems true that (a) average people don't know what tabs are, and (b) they have a lot of them. So it makes me wonder about your methodology. I used to be a Mozillian, and I remember the less-than-rigorous excuses that Firefox UX folks reached for when backfilling justifications for their design whims.

I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_(card_game)

I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs?

Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.

Two weeks ago I had a major cleanup after I reached over 1800 open tabs(with few duplicates). A few years ago I though 100 tabs were excessive. Turns out they're just better bookmarks than actual bookmarks.

Luckily Firefox can handle it without any issues or slowdowns.

I am not "gatekeeping," I just think that you aren't using the "power" of the browser if you have <10 tabs open and limited tab name space. What's your definition of browser "power user?"

On my MBP, I have 10 windows (each with a title representing general category). In each, I have: up to 24 pinned tabs that take up three tab slots up to 30 regular tabs open that I can see without scrolling each of my tabs has 40 characters of name space, which is plenty to know exactly what the tab is

I'm sorry if my post came off as acerbic. I will admit that I am annoyed as hell that:

1. Chrome has such market share when it doesn't have a descent vertical tab solution

2. Safari's vertical tabs are a total joke and Brave's are barely better

3. Firefox doesn't have native vertical tabs so I have to rely on an extension and they make it a total pain to get rid of the horizontal tabs

Maybe this could be a clue as to what's happening: What if other people have different use cases and needs?

Even between work and personal browsing I use my browsers quite differently. At work, tabs are more of a to-do list (things I need to review/sign off etc.); for personal, tabs are a largely a reading list.

I'd never just remember all things people want me to take a look at and type them in the search history, so tabs solve that nicely for me.

from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose context of the previous ones...

from my own personal experience, i like to reuse them as much as i can, but it gets harder as more and more get added, its easier to start from scratch and get a new tab open and go where i want to go...

i think browsers could be doing much more than just tabs and bookmarks to help people organize, because right now it seems like the equivalent of a desk with lots of papers strewn around where someone grabs yet another blank peice to start writing on...

In my case, I feel the opposite. Having the tabs on the side interrupts the browsing experience and annoys me. I personally do two things that probably makes it easier to live with horizontal tabs:

1. I habitually close tabs. If I'm at 10+, I'll quickly scan them and throw any that I might need later into the bookmark bar (if they aren't in a folder, it triggers me to check them again soon-ish). Then I just purge all tabs because having more than 10 is just a cluttered mess. This is also true in JetBrains, iTerm, Sublime, Finder, etc.

2. I don't fullscreen my browser. It usually only uses about 80% of my screen width, sometimes less. That provides much less incentive to use side tabs

I agree that the human brain doesn't task switch effectively, but that is exactly why I want to have many tabs open. In the case of reading Hacker News, I will go through the main page once, opening each article and comment page in a new tab, then will use that as a to-read list. If I am researching how to do a task, I will open have several pages open for documentation, stack overflow posts, bug reports, etc. These are open not for the sake of multitasking, but in order to reduce the amount of working memory I need. For example, if a post mentions that a particular workaround may be required, then I want to keep that tab open until I have verified that that workaround is not needed in my case.

Don't most people? I basically always do. And yes, I'm a techie, but anecdotally I see many non-techies with zillions of browser tabs open because they barely notice that tabs are even a feature and so they continually allow new ones to be opened without going back and closing anything.