IDK, a lot of people claim to need to be able to manage several hundred of open tabs.

I can confirm this use case does exist. My boyfriend (despite my constant disapproval) uses his tabs as essentially a bookmark manager and has around 100+ tabs open at any single time. His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons, but he still manages to find things (more or less). I can not convince him to use tab groups, bookmarks, or sidebar tabs... :)

Speaking as someone who used to have few hundreds if not a thousand tabs opened.

Bookmarks are for long term storage. In some sense it is more like Stared History, something may be we need to return in the far future for reference. If browser have a function where it would record everything I read, bookmark would be stared piece of information where I think it is important.

Tabs Opened are reading list or To-do list. 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy. Another 30 Tab on "each" different items which I planned to buy. 50 Tabs on HN because I haven't had time to read it yet. Sometimes I opened them when I visit HN front page and read it later. I must admit about 200 tabs wouldn't be needed if I am at 200K+ salary I just buy the top range without thinking. But I am frugal. Shopping on Amazon Prime, another 50 tabs.

SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor. But I haven't had the luxury to test it out.

> His tab bar is composed of only barely recognizable icons

I assume he is on Chrome? Because Firefox doesn't squeeze out the Tabs to Fav icons only.

> 30 Tabs on Toothbrush because I haven't decided which one to buy.

I mean, really? A tootbrush is a $2 item. They are all basically the same, some bristles on a handle. Why would you spend the time reading or even opening 30 different pages about this?

Personally I just use the free one I get from the dentist with each cleaning/checkup.

I missed out the word "electric" toothbrush. But after some research I now have a fairly decent understanding of the pros and cons of Oral-B vs Philip SonicCare.

Just want to add. I really wish i am like a lot of my friends who could just pick one up and start using it and care about things less. But I do. I care about many things and in way too much detail.

> SideBar Tabs doesn't work for me. Mostly because the Desktop web isn't designed for squashed layout. I would imagine it would work much better if I am on a 21:9 ultra wide monitor.

... Are you still on an old 4:3 screen? Standard 1080p is wide enough, if a bit short. I tend to do half-width and full-height on a 4k screen, with a tab sidebar.

Another option is the Add-On "Vertical Tabs Reloaded" which I'm still using since before they added vertical tabs in the sidebar. Seems a bit more compact.

i am fully with ksec. the issue with sidebars is that they not only take up space, which feels wasted, but are also a distraction. i have the browser always on fullsceen, the tabbar at the top fades into the background letting me focus on the page i an currently reading. when i want to search for a tab then i use the dropdown which takes more space than the sidebar but also shows more of the title of each tab.

Yeah but the solution to that has been Treestyle tab for ages...

It's just annoying that firefox took away the original tree style tab's ability to hide the main tab bar...

Luckily in the mentioned 140 you can now configure Firefox to show tabs in the sidebar, and then actually use the Tree Style Tabs sidebar instead, not showing the native tabs at all.

The built-in vertical tabs are awful. Hit F11 for full-screen and all of the chrome disappears except for the vertical tabs. Who would want that? I'll try Tree Style instead.

LOL this could have been written by my wife, I'm just as guilty of that. But only on Apple devices... even on a measly 8GB M2 MBA, Chrome can easily deal with 200+ tabs. But an 8GB Lenovo ThinkPad X1 with Windows? Performance goes down the drain at about 15-20 open tabs. It's utterly ridiculous.

I bet you these are the same people who then turn around and complain about how much RAM browsers use.

Does your boyfriend ever put his tools away after finishing a mechanical project?

Is his desk clean?

Is he strong enough to lift a feather duster and whip the vacuum cleaner around?

Having a mountain of tabs open is the equivalent of not putting your tools away, keeping your desk tidy or keeping your house clean.

People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy. Millions of tabs open might give the impression of 'genius at work', but do the deliverables get delivered?

This might not be a popular opinion, however, after having to tidy up my dad's estate (he never put tools away and his computer had billions of tabs open), I have formed my own conclusions on this.

I hat tip your bravery for pointing out an indulgence likely common among readers. Guilty as charged right here. But.

The comparison doesn't really hold. This is not like an untidy workbench. Modern browsers don't incur a significant penalty for having hundreds or even thousands of tabs. There are workflows that benefit from Never Closing, and I'm glad to see browsers now don't turn into a nipple bar to expose me.

Indeed after years and dozens of times where someone looks over my shoulder to see many tabs and abandons our topic to engage in Shame Time, I am fully innoculated to their barbs and feel it says more about the person pointing than myself. I manage to engage in a world with noise. Some people can't. The worst of them reach for grand overarching conclusions, as you have done here.

I also sometimes leave the evening dishes for the morning cleaning session.

Too much tidying up is procrastination, so hat tip for you doing the dishes in the morning, that makes sense.

I have recently learned a lot about highly effective people and tidiness is a common trait, even with browser tabs.

For most of my life I have been working with far too many tabs open, however, I do have this habit of bookmarking all tabs monthly, to then go to about twenty tabs across (the forever tabs) to then 'close all tabs to the right'.

You would be amazed at how few of those 'vital' tabs get reopened.

Each of them is a promise to one's future self to do something or read something, and rarely does one's future self do that.

I can relate to the pursuit of tidiness. It is satisfying to purge. I makes more room for the things that are neglected amongst the distraction. What's left over on my desk from yesterday's adventures is best cleared away. My patch cables on the synthesizer are often best pulled even if I end up putting them back in place.

I just don't see open tabs as burdensome, any more than my Steam backlog. If I get to them I do, if I don't, I don't. I also don't defrag my SSD and when I reboot my RAM starts fresh.

Tidiness and entropy are always at tension, and it's often best to let the balance be.

> People that get stuff done tend to be those that keep things tidy.

Not my experience at all.

In my personal cases, a have multiple windows with each easily having thousand of tabs. I guess I might have around 2k to 10k of them at a single time in my computer.

Depending of the computer and phone, it might be the same thing in Firefox or Chrome.

Even on Android, despite that chrome updates in the last years made it more sluggish and buggy to have lots of tabs than it used to be like 5 years ago.

I can't understand how Google/chrome team might be so incompetent, but often reopening the browser app in android, some times are overwritten or shifted in position. Very annoying.

I can't see why people don't just use their history, maybe some of it is that people have a psychological need not to know their history is there.

Firefox history is one of the most annoying part of the browser. It is impossible to click on a historical page and keep the context of the other visited pages that date/time. As soon you click on it, it will put it on top of the history and remove the old historical position. If you don't use search and manually scroll down, and then click on one (even with middle button), it will then instantly whoosh you back to the top of the history list, forcing you to scroll down and find the other links and repeat the process for each one.

Thunderbird filter function understand what I want when searching old emails. If you search on an email and selects the one you are interested, and then remove the search, it will automatic scroll the navigation to that date and keep the selected email on view.

Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me. They generally represent a train of thought or investigation, but they have less clutter than history, since I do close irrelevant ones as I'm navigating (and AFAIK there's no way in most browsers to show the history as a tree of navigation paths like tree style tabs). Bookmarks I perhaps should use more but they are liable to quickly grow out of control as well, and they require a lot more active thought to organise, in comparison to a tree of tabs. I would absolutely love a browser to properly unify this, I think there's a few smaller ones but they don't seem to be good enough to switch away from firefox and tree style tabs.

Personally I find tabs destroy my productivity completely almost immediately and I have to be aggressive about closing them.

The consistent failure of bookmark managers is notable, doesn't matter if they are pure web-based or implemented as browser extensions the story is always that they're a "roach motel", somebody put in 30,000 bookmarks and realizes a few years later they didn't look back at them once.

A counter-example is my Fraxinus bookmark manager/personal webcrawler/image sorter that I've been running for about 15 months and probably accumulated about 1 million images (was 700k last I looked) I look at images from it every day. The backlog of image galleries in the primary classification queue is about 1000 and I dunno, I could probably put "bigtags" [1] on another 1500 galleries but I don't feel like I have to, it's not like I don't have enough content already.

I wish I had some consistent and simple way to export both bookmarks and history into all my devices so I could feed them into my AI, make them portable, etc.

[1] tags engineered to work with automated classification, namely it is possible for tags to be positive/indeterminate/negative

I strongly recommend using https://markwise.app

>Open tabs are kinda halfway between history and bookmarks, for me.

How do you feel about the fact that the author (of the web page) gets to decide whether a link opens in a new tab?

Point is that I ignore tabs unless I'm alternating between 2 tabs or a need a placeholder for a few minutes. If arbitrary web sites could add to my the list of bookmarks kept by my browser, I'd ignore that list, too.

I do usually have control, via left click or middle click, but it is annoying when this is overridden in one direction or another, yes (and I sometimes do a dance of opening/closing/rearranging tabs to get the result I want)

> I can't see why people

You've discovered the source of many-o-wars throughout human history.

Thankfully Firefox tabs likely won't bring that 'round.

> They introduced a toggle in the address bar to show the window title. Who tf is asking for this?

Actually a lot of people. For example on a Mac you can't see the window title except the first word or two in the tab.

It's actually not that unusual for the browser to run in a system without window controls.

(I know macs are hard to use, but work requires one, so can't be helped.)

gnome too, there is no titlebar. just the tabs. and when you have many tabs you can't see the title unless you move the mouse over the tab. i haven't seen the new feature yet. the fedora or librewolf builds don't seem to have it

> For example on a Mac

The title already addresses individuals with serious personal dysfunction.

Vertical tabs is really great.

But there were already extensions for that, which is a better approach than Firefox developing a feature only a small subset of people will use1.

For years every Firefox discussion I saw would have some person saying "why are they wasting their time on X? I won't use it til they have vertical tabs" with scores of upvotes.

This perfectly encapsulates the Mozilla position. Every possible move makes people complain.

Hard disagree. The extensions were terrible, at least for what I want, and probably can't integrate with the UI in the same way.

And buying and killing pro-consumer and public utility apps.