Please help: 133 open tabs and counting
Update: Thank you. I wasn’t expecting so many comments, let alone so much excellent advice! I’m working out a better workflow and will reply to individual comments when I have the time.
It would seem that I have 133 tabs open in Firefox (Aurora), and that number was obtained after an intensive tab-closing session. There are no duplicates in the list, as I use Pentadactyl to switch tabs by searching titles.
I need your help.
The problem: Firefox is starting to slow, but I can’t just call a tabocalypse – most of the tabs contain unread information that I need now or will need in the next few days. Bookmarking has helped me avert similar crisises in the past, but it just isn’t fast enough. I have 2564 bookmarks in delicous and at least a hundred important bookmarks in org-mode, but tagging and sorting unread links takes way too long.
So: How do you deal with information overload? If you rely on Google to find all old information, is that sufficient? Are org-mode capture templates a fast solution? And, most importantly, are there Firefox extensions that transparently offload old tabs to disk, or do away altogether with the distinction between open tabs and recently visited sites?
Please help. Thanks, Natan.
About Me
20 year old undergrad in CS & Physics, co-founder of Freeversation, faux CEO of Politician Market, and former software developer at Check Point.
I am interested in social startups, information security, and robotics. Read more about me
Contact
Email aantny [at] gmail [dot] com. If it's interesting, I can code it.
If it were me, I’d be running either a VM or a sandbox (sandboxing would be simpler for what I’m thinking about). Each instance of browser’s tabs could all be bookmarked and then all those bookmarks exported into their own HTML file/category, then recover only the exported bookmarks. That way you don’t blow FF apart with so many bookmarks. Just load what you need for the time being.
Just a thought.
I typically have around 200.
I use BarTab 2.0 to prevent tabs from loading until clicked. That way, you can restart your browser and it will restore the tab list, but the tabs will be greyed out and not have actually loaded until you click them. It’s nice.
The second thing I use is Tree Style Tab which allows me to do a vertical list of tabs with a tree view: descendants of a tab can be hidden with an expander.
One problem with BarTab 2.0 is that it hasn’t been updated to explicitly support Firefox 7 yet, so the solution is to download the .xpi and edit the max version field. Or, if you trust other users, you can use BarTab 3.0 which is linked from the following in the comments:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab/
I was also used to open new tabs for feature reading. I worked around this by writing a simple reading-queue extension: I’m simple pressing on “Add link to queue” instead of “Open link in new tap” to add it to a toolbar-entry called “Queue”. They are organized by “Today”, “Yesterday”, “Week”. Entries older than 7 days are removed (but loged) from the queue.
Works quite good for me. However, the plugin is not working with newer browser versions right now. :/
Normally I find that I really don’t need that information. Oh sure some part of my brain says that if I just had that one bit I didn’t have before it would be useful.. but it is mostly circuits built around if I know where the predator is I will live longer.
I had close to 10000 bookmarks of things I thought I needed.. most of them never visited again and for the most part haven’t killed me yet not knowing
. The reason I know this is I lost them all on purpose 2 years ago and really have only had to go and find about a couple hundred (of which I don’t really visit all that many).
The best advice I have is learning to keep a queue of X things you can deal with and everything else goes on a stack. Then you set aside Y time to take stuff off the stack. If it stays on the stack too long just toss it.
Anyway good luck
Instead of keeping all that state in tabs, just mark them as “read it later” in a service such as Pinboard.in.
Instapaper is a great service and has bookmarklet options. You send it to instapaper and read later..if you like you retain..if not discard.
Excellent service and will help overcome the tab overload.
133 tabs open?
“I need your help.” Yup, I guess you do.
Seriously. Go outside. Look at the sunshine. Play with a kitten/puppy (steal someone else’s kitten/puppy if this is not an option). Listen to some hip-hop, flirt with a girl. Have a drink. (Steal someone else’s girl/drink if money is a problem. Steal someone’s Eminem CD/download it illegally if you can.) For Chrissakes, look at Richard Stallman, you can admire his achievements without wanting to emulate his lifestyle. ’19 year old Technion undergrad in CS and Physics’? You’re 19. And worrying about how many Firefox tabs you have open? Life is worth a lot more than worrying about how many tabs you have open. In short: who cares.
N.B. I finished that last sentence with . instead of ? for a reason.
P.S. “Hey, it’s me, Versace, Whoops, somebody shot me!”
P.P.S. http://btjunkie.org/torrent/Eminem-The-Marshall-Mathers-LP/4432d0149b20263dfb2a18c4879678ff754da2523cc1
I use a combination of Evernote and Read It Later. RIL is great at saving these items that you don’t necessarily need to bookmark forever, but just read once. Then you can sync them from your account across all your devices and OSes, so they are available even when your offline.
Forbes
I have lost all of my tabs before dozens of times, sometimes with hundreds open like you. It hurts for a minute, and then I find again the information I need when I need it and stop stressing when I don’t need it.
Having that many tabs is just another form of guilt, the idea that you need to learn everything and use everything. Life’s too short for guilt. If you need to cite the page academically, just write the bibliography entry and worry about it later. If you need to reference it for programming, close it and find it later. If it’s an article for pleasure reading, put it in Instapaper and forget about it til you have time. Leaving them open is just unnecessary weight.
Also, as someone who used to be in the same boat, Harvey has a point. Just stop worrying about it, and go out instead.
Seriously wow.
I primarily use epiphany, and I have about 20 tabs open at a time. It’s always painful when it crashes because when you start it again and restore all your old tabs, it takes a few minutes to load them all.
I can’t imagine if i had 133. I’m sure epiphany would some how segfault before then. You should probably not have so many open. it’s not all really that important.
listen to the sunshine advice!
ps: I would love gedit and terminal to restore all my old sessions after a logout/login,
Write an extension that closes tabs that weren’t looked at after two days. See if you notice.
And if you really need something: Ctrl-H can help. Especially if you’ve set your history to infinite.
Oh, and you might have lots of fun with the Inbox zero approach to tabs, too. Though I do have the suspicion that that only helps temporarily and it’s a good idea to change your behavior. Psychotherapy ftw!
From the Firefox 8 release notes:
“Added a preference to load tabs on demand, improving start-up time when windows are restored”
You could have multiple browser profiles (see the -no-remote and -profile commandline options) to keep your tabs more compartmentalized. Or you could browse with additional browsers to spread the load that way.
Then again, this may be why my main Firefox profile has 160 tabs open, a secondary one has 130, a tertiary one has 50, and a Chrome profile has 89. (I use lots of browsers because, working for a browser company, Mozilla, I feel I should know what’s out there.) My name is Jeff, and I have a problem.
Seriously, though. Is everything in those tabs so important, or is anything frivolous enough to just discard? Take a sickle to it, you probably can get rid of a bunch. I’ve done this before and knocked out dozens at a time, of things I planned to get to eventually but really didn’t need to.
I use the scrapebook extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/scrapbook/) to archive pages I want to keep or read later. It has some small drawbacks:
* You can export/import them, but you cannot sync them like bookmarks, which is not too bad if you have several hundret megabyte of archived web pages.
* If the page relies on javascript to view the content, it might not work.
* Previews versions slowed down with lot’s of archived pages. Seems to be fixed.
* You cannot tag items.
Some of the pretty things are:
* Also available offline.
* You can archive page fragments.
* You can archive page trees or linked files like pdfs or archives.
My solution to the information overload is to periodically “suspend” lots of open tabs to a text file.
In the end, most of the tabs belong to some “project” – they show reference docs, howtos, Stackoverflow pages, forum pages and all that stuff that rapidly accumulates when working on a programming project. I tend to have lots of projects running in parallel (my personal deficiency), so I use a two-step process:
- first check for each project which tabs are still relevant. Often there are doc pages and forum entries which refer to problems that were solved long ago (if it’s checked in, the problem is solved – move on). These tabs can go. Also, if there are like 10 tabs of PyGTK doc open (for different topics), reduce it to one tab.
- then, decide which projects are still worth having open. Some projects have been idle for way too long, so they should be “suspended”. I do this by making an entry in a global text file listing the project and the current state (also describing what works and what doesn’t work yet and what needs to be done next), and all _important_ URLs – like the main reference doc, and the page which kicked off the project, and important articles for the project. This should allow to unfreeze it at a later time, if the need every arises; and it helps to really get the thing out of my head. Because that’s the real point: any open tab also takes some space on my mind, for remembering why I opened it and what to do with it. That’s the actual toll which I periodically try to reduce.
So maybe it would be helpful for you if you wouldn’t worry about “tabs” so much but would think about the projects or reasons behind the tabs.
Btw. apart from project-related tabs there are of course lots of “misc” tabs with daily web comics and funny pics and insightful articles and whatever I stumble upon on PGO
Of these, the best 2 or 3 web comics earn the right of a permanent tab. Funny pics usually get closed during a periodical cleanup (another funny page will come up tomorrow anyway). Insightful articles either get read or get skimmed or get turned into (or assigned to) a project 
For the technical side (Firefox starting too slow with so many tabs), my own solution was to write a minimal browser with Webkit and Python. It has one process per window (to be more crash-resistant) and also saves window state to disk, so crashed or closed windows can be restored quickly. It has no bookmarks but is perfect as doc viewer etc. I don’t know of any public browser which supports such a model, though.
Just close all of them.
Let it go.
What about a plugin that allows you to save the session as a named file, then you could reload the session later?
Every time you take focus away from a tab, you need to have a clear idea of what purpose that tab has served or will serve.
* TO READ: If it’s something you want to read later, put it in something like Pinboard, Instapaper, Readability, or Read It Later. Then forget about it. If you read it, you read it. If you don’t, you don’t. If you remember it specifically and decide to read it, it’ll be saved and easy to find. Close the tab.
* REFERENCE: If it’s something you need as reference for a current project, put the relevant text/code and the URL in Tomboy, Evernote, a Firefox bookmark folder, or a text file in that project’s folder/notebook. Close the tab.
* TO SHARE: If it’s something you want to post to Twitter or Facebook or your blog, do the easiest one first (say, a simple link on Twitter). If it merits a full blog post, you’ll remember it later. Close the tab.
* OTHER: If it is none of the above, but you just “like it” for some reason, or can’t remember why you had it open, or have only a vague sense that it is something you will need later, use an online bookmarking plugin/bookmarklet, give it a tag or two, and forget about it. Ideally your online bookmarking service shows you suggested tags (Pinboard and Delicious do), and you can just mindlessly use the ones other people have already used. Close the tab.
If you honestly can’t remember what most of the tabs even have on them, Ctrl+W them out of orbit.
Also, start asking yourself those questions as soon as your tabs require horizontal scrolling.
And take note of Denis’s comment, that Firefox 8 can prevent restored tabs from loading at startup until you click on them.
Similar to what Forbes has suggested, I use a very simple method:
1. Interesting/informative read –> ReadItLater
2. Reference information that I might need later –> Evernote
This keeps the information I need handy, even when offline, and searchable.
So I have 4 or 5 tabs open at most [most of the time
].
My friends used to make fun of how many tabs I had open and I had the same problem even when I had both FF and Chrome open.
The extension that has helped me a lot is ironically called TooManyTabs,
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toomanytabs-saves-your-memory/?src=search
It stores in another row your tabs but eliminates them from memory, and you can have as many rows of tabs as you want, and on the fly organization.
Give it a try!
Don’t use tabs.
As to how to implement that, I leave that to you to figure out.