Do You Use It? Browser Tab Management
Tab overload in traditional Web browsers prompted many people to try Arc, The Browser Company’s innovative browser that completely rethinks how tabs work (see “Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web,” 1 May 2023):
- Arc positions tabs in a left-hand sidebar, which enables users with more than a handful of open tabs to read their names. Other browsers are increasingly following suit (see “A Roundup of Vertical Tab Support in Mac Web Browsers,” 5 June 2023).
- Arc replaces bookmarks with a unique and more sensible concept: pinned tabs. These pinned tabs remember their designated URLs, open in place rather than creating new tab entries each time you click them, remain in the sidebar even when closed, and can be organized into easily accessible folders, much like the Finder’s List view. This behavior differs from Safari’s pinned tabs, which automatically update to reflect the last page loaded. It also contrasts with Google Chrome’s easily closed pinned tabs, which are essentially just left-aligned regular tabs.
- Arc can automatically archive unpinned tabs (“Today tabs” in its parlance), ensuring that tabs you haven’t used in hours or days no longer clutter the interface.
- Arc defaults to opening external links in standalone Little Arc windows. Since Little Arc windows don’t support multiple tabs, when you’re done with one, you either close it or convert it into a Today tab in one of your workspaces. Little Arc windows make it easy to avoid building up random tabs when you click links in other apps.
Unfortunately, The Browser Company claimed that portions of this approach were too high of a “novelty tax” and prevented many people from switching to Arc, so it took a different direction with its new Dia browser. Although Dia retains Arc’s approach to pinned tabs as persistent pages rather than sticky but changeable (Safari) or ephemeral (Chrome) pages, it gives up on the sidebar.
Dia reverts to positioning tabs at the top of the window, similar to Chrome. Unlike Chrome, which allows you to open so many tabs that their favicons overlap, Dia prevents its icons from becoming too small. After a certain point, remaining tabs become accessible through a drop-down menu on the left side of the tab bar. When you switch to those tabs, Dia provides no visual indication of your location in the tab stack, which can be disorienting.
Personally, I think allowing an arbitrary number of top-mounted tabs is poor interface design. It works in a dashboard with a small, fixed number of tabs, each with enough space for a readable name. But when the number of tabs grows, it quickly becomes unmanageable. I’ve been using Dia for only a few weeks, and I’ve organically ended up with 58 open tabs. Many point to different pages on the same sites, and most can and should be closed, of course, but nothing in Dia’s usage model automates or even encourages that.
While I hope I’ve helped you think more about how tabs and bookmarks can and should work, my real goal here is to determine if tab overload is actually a problem. If most people open only a few tabs at a time and close them when finished, then maybe The Browser Company was off-base with Arc’s approach, even if it made me vastly more productive. But if many people have more tabs than can easily fit in a top-mounted tab bar and find it easier to open a new one than to locate an old one pointing to the same site, then persistent pinned tabs might be the direction we should be going.
So, I ask: How many tabs do you currently have open across all windows in the browsers you use regularly? As you’ll see, the questions distinguish between pinned tabs and standard tabs, partly to see how common pinned tab usage is. (Feel free to fudge if something has caused the number to deviate significantly from your norm.)
For the pinned tabs, it’s zero for me. I’ve tried but never liked pinned tabs.
As I write this, I have 6 pinned tabs and another 20 tabs open. The pinned tabs are all for websites that provide daily updates on legal issues. Many of the open tabs are for YouTube or other similar sites that update content; I refuse to give my identity to YouTube to subscribe. Those are for current interests, eventually those interests are fulfilled and the tabs are closed. As an example, I have a tab open on IMDB for the current episode of a series we’ve been watching, tonight after watching that episode, I’ll click on “next” so the next episode is ready for tomorrow’s review.
At one point, I had a pinned tab for each case I was tracking, but that got way out of control. So now there are a few open tabs for the most active cases, a tab for the summary of cases (JustSecurity’s running update on opposition to Trump Executive orders), and LawFare and JustSecurity itself.
Apparently not.
I have zero pinned tabs; only a few regular tabs (for the pages I am really using currently); and lots and lots of bookmarks that are hierarchically organized on the bookmark bar. Keyboard shortcuts are assigned to frequently-used bookmarks.
Most days I have 1–3 standard tabs and 0 pinned tabs.
My number fluctuates quite a bit, because I make heavy use of the middle mouse button, which opens a link in a new tab. When I’m reading a page, every link I will want to follow, I mid-click it. Then I go to those tabs and read them, while mid-clicking more. (Command-click does the same thing.)
But none of this is permanent. I close each tab when I’m done.
So, right this minute, I have 7 TidBITS tabs open because I mid-clicked all the forum topics that I wanted to read the new updates on. In a few minutes all those tabs will be closed.
I might pin Safari tabs as I’m working so I don’t lose them, but I don’t use tab pinning to retain persistent pages. Instead I’ve tried to approximate the Arc model in Safari by using the latter’s tab groups as topical workspaces.
As you noted, Safari’s pinned tabs retain the last page you browsed with them; however, since each tab group has its own Favorites page of bookmarks, that’s where I put specific topical web locations that I want to return to again.
For example, my Finance tab group has favorites for the login pages for my bank, my retirement account, and my financial advisor. Regardless of how many tabs I open while in that group, those bookmarks are only a new tab away.
I think there’s a divide between people who curate bookmarks, vs. people who just keep “persistent tabs” of the places they want to revisit. Not necessarily pinned tabs; just tabs.
And I bet there’s also a divide between level of technical savvy. This is speculation:
On the other hand, I know that my senior aunt just creates bookmarks for everything. Her bookmark menu will have hundreds of entries, most of which are duplicates of the same site.
This reminds me of a story my Dad told me, of an admin/secretary in their office who put all of her word processing memos and documents she created in one file. She’d just go down to page 592 and start a new memo on that page.
I was going to use Arc for that reason but they changed their privacy policy IIRC (or some other policy that became objectionable) which made me abandon it.
I tend to stick to Safari, and I don’t use Tabs much: I prefer separate windows for everything. I use command-tilde to flip between open browser windows, which can be freely resized and arranged to my needs. I use bookmarks in folders on the “bookmarks bar” which is as close to pinned tabs as I get. Some of those I use regularly.
Many people tend to keep tons of tabs open, and may be oblivious as to the memory impact that has on the computer; the browser can eat up all available memory in extreme cases.
I suspect that I would use pinned tabs, but years ago I built a home page with drop-down menus with links to all the webpages I frequently access. Anytime I find myself going to a site frequently that is not already listed on my home page, it is an easy task to add it. About once every six months or so I review and clean up the links, removing those that are no longer relevant.
0 pinned tabs. I generally open tabs from links as I read my emails (especially those from publications). There are also a few publications where I will open tabs from the publication’s home page, linked to interesting articles. I will also open multiple YouTube links from the Home and Subscription tabs.
My goal is to have zero tabs open when I finish a computer session.
Brave browser: 0 pinned, currently 6 tabs, usually 7-8, never more than about 10.
A friend created this https://tabomagic.com/ to clean up tabs. I don’t use it but my wife needs it with dozens of tabs in Chrome.
Wonderful! You know? When you think about it, she was just emulating Jeff Raskin’s Canon Cat. . . .
My story isn’t as out there as that one but there was an executive secretary in our office (early 2000s) tasked with keeping the sales contact database up-to-date. I was there on a different support issue when her boss asked her for contact information so she opened her drawer, searched a bit, and handed it to him. I looked carefully and discovered that every time she added or updated an entry she printed it out. There were thousands of pages.
Dave
I tend to have 2-5 tabs open across multiple windows depending what I’m doing and at the end of the task I likely have zero tabs in zero windows. Tend to use new windows over tabs because tabs hide stuff and are hard to find again.
Never really understood the keeping tabs open for days, life is too short, got the task done and close the window.
Like a couple of respondents above, I stick with Safari, displaying separate windows (using Command-tilde to switch).
I keep about 50 bookmarks displayed in a convenient order. As you can tell, I dislike tabs, to put it mildly.
Like apparently many others, I can’t answer the pinned tab question because there’s no “zero” option. I’d never even heard of them before this, and after reading the full OP I’m still not clear on what they are.
Count me as another Zero for pinned. I said 1-5 only because zero wasn’t an option.
I keep a couple of pinned tabs in Safari but otherwise open and close most tabs as needed. There are some that I keep around without pinning but may eventually decide to pin. I’ll be honest and say that there is no particular logic in the distinction but I am more likely to pin the websites where I pay to support them. On Windows (my gaming machine) I use Brave as the browser and follow a very similar setup.
I have looked at Arc but it never stuck. Having retired I don’t see a need to split my tabs into different spaces (e.g. for work/leisure). It felt like a rather opinionated take on a browser which may suit some people but certainly had a very different mindset from other browsers. Perhaps I’m just habituated to the way that those other browsers work but Arc just didn’t give me any functionality that I needed.
I take this a bit further. Not only do I have pinned tabs, and other opened tabs that I don’t close until I’ve done with them (turns out normally between ½ and 2 dozen at a time), but I also use different browsers for different tasks.
DuckDuckGo for most browsing and YouTube; Firefox for various technical doc pages; Safari for banking pages and various fora;
I used to close tabs as soon as possible to keep the count and memory usage down, but now I don’t bother…I haven’t noticed major slowdowns.
Rob
I do have over 100 tabs open, in several tab groups in my personal Safari profile, plus I have a few Safari profiles with tabs open for the my personal Google account (when I need to connect with Google for something - I stay logged out in my personal profile) and for various other profiles (two for work, one for a charitable board I’m on).
One tab group, for example, is used for the research I’m doing on a new CarPlay receiver I plan to buy this summer from Crutchfield, one tab for each model I’m considering. Once I buy I’ll close the tabs and delete the tab group. I have another group of tabs open with gift ideas for my family as I see them. I suppose I could use a note but I just drag the tab into the group as I find it.
I’m pleased with Safari and I’ll use Firefox if Safari is acting up for some reason, but, unlike others, my tab groups sync well across devices so I can add to a tab group on one device and see it on the others. I really have no desire to try out other browsers.
Interesting Poll Mr. Engst!
I don’t even know what a pinned tab is!
As it’s zero, I couldn’t answer question 2.
Like some others, I personally try to keep as few tabs/windows open as possible, and use Firefox and Orion browsers. I don’t know what kind of ‘Tab Management’ these browsers offer!
My general approach is keeping TTalk in one window in Firefox. Reeder RSS app opens links to stuff I want to read later in that window; I read them when I have time and close them.
In Orion I try to have each window with related topic tabs, usually no more than a few of such windows. That is if I am researching a topic I have the search site in one tab and open links in additional tabs. If research drags on, I open the bookmarks sidebar and create a folder with the open tabs so I can close the window.
Possibly I have Open Browser Window Anxiety… the more open and undealt with tabs, the more guilty I feel.
I use only Arc now. Before Arc, I used Firefox, Chrome and Safari for different purposes, each with its own system of tabs and bookmarks.
In a couple of years, I plan to build my own web browser using AI.
Currently 28 windows open, an average of 6 or 7 tabs per window. Zero pinned tabs. Closed out 4 or 5 windows the other day or else the numbers would be higher. Lots of bookmarks too, 98% of which I’ve probably forgotten I even had. Queue the ADHD comments…
I rarely, if ever, have more than 6–7 tabs open at any one time, and most of the time it’s maybe 3 or four. I’ve tried pinned tabs, and decided they weren’t useful for me. Same with vertical tabs, tab groups/trees and other management systems. Instead, I have bookmarks in the browser (Vivaldi in my case) for the sites I use most often, a reading list (was Vivaldi but now I copy Markdown links to a file in Obsidian with some assistance from Keyboard Maestro
) for stuff I want to (re)read later, and a clippings folder in Obsidian that I put stuff into for reference using the official clipper extension.
I should add that my bookmarks and reading material have migrated several times between browsers, read-later services and apps. (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Evernote, Pocket, DEVONthink plus several more I’ve forgotten the names of.) And yes, I’ve declared bankruptcy a few times over the years, and gotten a lot better at not hoarding links.
This, except sometimes it takes a control-click and Open in a New Tab, because the web page has been written such that command-click does not open a new tab. Why and how?
That reminds me of students who put all files in their home directories—no subdirectory, ever.
Like @TBTdn and others, I don’t know what pinned tabs are. Does Firefox support them?
Ditto. But the answer appears to be yes. See Pinned Tabs - keep favorite websites open and just a click away | Firefox Help.
I used to be Level 2. Now I’m Level 1. Maybe my technical savvy has gone down or maybe bookmarks are too much work. I don’t care enough. I don’t bother to pin tabs either.
After reading other responses I think I will expand upon my answer. The number of tabs/pinned tabs mentioned before is still true.
I have a large collection of bookmarks that are organized into folders and subfolders. I also have ~20 Favorites on the top bar and some of these contain drop down menues with additional folders and subfolders.
Perhaps this system is not so different from tabs/pinned tabs except that none of them are open until I select them. And then they are closed at the end of the session when I quit Safari–which is usually several times/day.
would be interested in the technical guru comparison of:
-just leaving a favorite site open in a window (in view/minimized/own space)
-keeping it as ‘pinned tab’
-keeping it as a bookmark
are there advantages in terms of memory or battery usage or anything else?
In my case as a retiree, my ‘always open’ is Tidbits Talk. If I closed it each time, and reopened from a bookmark, maybe I’d have to re-login.
Hm, fascinating topic! I suppose this also gets to how people are using their browsers. I know a family member who keeps so many sites open in Chrome (independent worker managing several small business ventures), that only a partial site icon is visible even on a broswer full width on a 16" MBP. Some sites require logins with OTPs that go to colleagues’ phones in distant countries so I am always cautioned against closing any windows when handling the MBP as the family IT guy.
I close it each time and reopen from a bookmark, and rarely (but not never) need to re-login (on Firefox, on a laptop).
Similarly, I have about 8 folders in the favourites bar of older bookmarks (which rarely get used), but there’s around 50 sites in Safari’s Top Sites/Favourites page which is my primary way of getting to web sites. Open a page, do stuff, close a page. It’s extremely rare (every few months) I would use any tabs and typically only if I’m comparing like-for-like products when the site doesn’t have a compare option.
@ddmiller - please do a thread on your carplay receiver findings when you’ve worked them out - I’m in the market.
If you do this, the site remains loaded in memory and remains active. If it’s a plain page (like a hand-made page), this probably doesn’t matter, but if there are any scripts (including those that insert ads and the like), they will continue to run, potentially wasting CPU power and network bandwidth.
Also note that most modern browsers will spawn separate threads or processes for each tab. Which can be a big deal, if you have a lot of them and they all are running scripts of some kind.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about what this actually is. If it’s the same as a normal tab that auto-opens at startup, then see above.
I do know that Firefox has the concept of a tab that exists, but is not loaded. For instance, if you quit the app, restart it and then restore the previous session, it will create all the tabs from the previous session, but it will only load each tab’s content when you make it visible for the first time.
I don’t know if pinned tabs work this way when you restart the browser (it’s logical, but I don’t know for sure) or if they work like normal tabs, which start running as soon as they are created.
A bookmark uses no resources until you click on it. It’s just a URL with a name and maybe some other metadata. You can create thousands of bookmarks and they will use almost no system resources until you click on one (loading that URL into a tab).
This depends entirely on the site.
Most web sites will push a cookie to you, containing a token that represents your login session. So closing and restarting the browser will generally not require a re-login.
But some sites use cookies that expire quickly (maybe after only and hour or so) for extra security (so someone else sitting down won’t get access to your session), and if you configure your browser to block (or not save) cookies, that will also prevent automatic re-login.
I’ve found that most social/blogging sites (including Google, Facebook and TidBITS) use cookies that stick around for a long time, or until you explicitly log-out. But banking and corporate-access sites typically auto-expire a session after a few minutes of inactivity, which will easily expire if you close the tab and don’t quickly re-open its URL.
I remember Omniweb. It was, I believe, the first browser to use side tabs (either a list or thumbnails. I preferred the thumbnails, but when I got too many tabs, reverted to the list). It also had a wonderful feature, called Workspaces, where you could group tabs based on purpose. Eventually, it was abandoned, but Firefox gained an extension that allowed side tabs, called Tree-style Tabs, and I switched to that. Later, Edge came out with side tabs, and switched again. I believe I started pinning tabs in earnest then. I put my email and messaging sites in pinned tabs. I don’t like having multiple applications open, so prefer web apps, and pinning works.
When Arc came out, with its own version of Workspaces, I jumped on it. I have four workspaces there, with ones for each of my interests, plus work workspaces. That said, when they announced they were abandoning Arc, I jumped ship to Zen Browser, and that is where I currently am. I tried Firefox for a few days, but I like how Arc/Zen do pinned tabs, etc.
I try to keep the number of tabs to less than the height of my screen. That is the limit I’m willing to suffer with. But I can end up with dozens of tabs open on a busy day. Maybe it’s just my ADHD. I don’t know. ;-)
Excellent! Thank You Very Much!
I’m a huge fan of pinned tabs. I almost always pin a tab if I want to keep it. That enables me to keep more tabs open across the screen.
[Edited to remove my silly confusion with processes from the Arq backup application.
]
I thought I read somewhere that Arc’s pinned tabs were somehow “quieted”–that they didn’t consume as many resources as the one currently being viewed. I’m thinking that is not correct, based on what I’ve read here, and the lack of any corroborating evidence I could find on the Arc help pages (or elsewhere).
So that made me curious about how many resources my six workspaces and 70+ pinned tabs (total) were consuming on my MBP M1 with 16GB of memory. According to Activity Monitor, the main Arc process is currently consuming 784MB of RAM, has 64 threads, and has opened 1,439 ports.
What I miss more from Arc than the tab management is the Mini Arc window. I haven’t seen any other browser implement that as well.
And it is a tab management feature in a way, because using it kept me from having to open some tabs in the first place.
Now I just use Safari and use the pinch gesture to see them in grid layout, because Safari tab management is otherwise not great.
I’m glad to read here that I’m not the only person for whom tabs don’t really serve much of a useful purpose. I feel as though tabs are just another to-do list of which I already have too many. “Pinned tabs” sound like a nightmare in two words.
No pinned tabs. Wasn’t an option. Usually one main tab. Sometimes an “open link in tab” to check something out before closing it. Almost never multiple tabs to do daily work.
For the pinned tabs, it’s zero for me. I’ve never liked them. The most tabs I use is three.
In my experience, Firefox does not re-open Private Windows (and therefore the tabs in non-Private Windows). With much less certainty, I believe Firefox has usually re-opened only one non-Private Window.
No pinned tabs for me.
106 open tabs.
I use a custom extension to keep track of the number of tabs open and when it gets over my set limit (I chose 100) a notification badge appears on it which encourages me to either save all tabs in a group and start a new blank window, or use “view all tabs” and have a clean up. Or just do nothing and let the count go up
Hmm. I don’t think I interact with my old tabs that much?
I also use a portrait display which means I’m not a fan of side bars/tabs.
same here: zero pinned tabs. never tried it cuz it wasn’t compelling. use two browsers, safari and firefox. rarely have more than one tab per browser but that makes two tabs, eh?
Drat! As an Arc user, I work 90% of the time with pinned tabs (I have several hundred), so I completely spaced the possibility that someone might have none at all, which is guaranteed to be the main answer. As much as I dislike doing this, I’ve edited the question to add 0 as an answer, which deletes all the previous data. Here’s what it looked like before I deleted.
It would be great if those who have voted in the pinned tab poll could do so again.
If only it were that easy. For me, tabs often backstop non-trivial amounts of reference or research for articles that may gestate for days and take hours to write.
I’m going to add “normal tabs” to that list
First, all of these work, and technically, they don’t differ much. A modern Mac and browser should manage the memory and CPU usage behind the scenes, though if there bugs in the browser, using windows or normal tabs could result in significant memory use and slowdowns in the browser, possibly even on the Mac.
So here’s my take on the differences:
Using a window for each favorite site: This suffers mostly with scale. As you open more windows, switching between them will become harder, and the screen will get cluttered with lots of overlapping windows, which may make using other apps harder. You can mitigate this by switching using the browser’s Window menu and hiding the app when not in use.
Normal tabs: With normal top-mounted tabs, you have a single window that holds multiple sites and you can switch between them fairly easily. Once again, it gets harder as you open more tabs because it becomes very hard to find any one tab among the mix.
Pinned tabs: What exactly a pinned tab is varies between Arc, Safari, and Chrome.
This is all rough, but I can see that when I write up the results of this poll, I’m going to have to tease out all the differences. I’m extremely familiar and comfortable with how Arc works, and Safari seems to have a decent concept of pinned tabs, but Chrome’s are just from the moon—I have to investigate more to see if I’m missing something.
The Favorites bookmarks serve the same function for me, and they don’t take up any processing or memory resources.
I was thinking the same thing. To me, the pinned tabs in Arc were like easily accessible bookmarks, like what the Favorites bar in Safari provides. (I didn’t even know Safari had pinned tabs until this thread.)
I still use both browsers. I use Arc for the classes I teach. I definitely prefer the way pinned tabs work in Arc compared to Safari, and the ability to switch between profiles in a single window really pays off for me here. I use Safari for most everything else, just out of habit.
Arc is my main browser. I like left hand tabs. I have 10 spaces. I use pinned tabs like I used bookmarks in Safari. In fact my imported Safari bookmarks are one of the pinned folders. We’re planning a trip and I have about ten tabs in my main space. They should get moved to my Travel workspace.
Some opened tabs are things I’m following for a short time or things I want to read and I will or at some point I’ll just close them.
The mess I create in Arc works better for me than Safari or Chrome. I use both of those for pages that seem to have problems in Arc and I move pages to Safari, so I can Cmd-I particularly for sites which I have a subscription and my recipient might not.
I’m not looking forward to giving up on Arc. Although I’ve never quite figured out how to use Arc or Arc Search on my phone.
When I voted, it was 1-5 because I had zero. As a result of this article, I now have ten, all in one window, dedicated to the National Weather Service pages. (They are on probation, and might go away.)
My fear is that I’m only one browser crash away from losing all of those tabs, so anything “being researched” that is important goes in a Obsidian doc for safe keeping. Different research goes into different docs, along with associated notes.
That said, for the last three days I have had a couple of windows open while I plan a 10 day road trip using Google Maps, but of course I have the URL copied for safe keeping. It’s rare for me to keep any windows / tabs open even when researching, but I get why others do it.
Being able to add a URL to a “reading list” for later processing would probably be a better system for me. Safari has this, but it is just a flat list. Multiple reading lists would be really helpful.
Similarly for me. If I’m researching something, I copy the important information elsewhere (a text file or Word document or hand-written notes), and I create a bookmark (in a project-specific folder) so I can get back to it later.
One of the great things about tab groups in Safari is that I have never lost a single saved tab that way. In the personal tab group - yep, that’s happened. But never in a tab group.
So I’m rather meticulous about saving tabs in groups when I want them saved.
For most of my browsing life, I’ve never really used any sort of tab wrangling features. The only organization I would do is pluck tabs off, or slot tabs into, different windows to keep related sets of tabs somewhat organized.
Sometimes I’d lose tabs I’d wanted to keep by carelessly restarting or quitting. Since Safari now restores even private tabs after a restart, it has only reinforced my tab-hoarding habits.
I’ve never bothered with pinned tabs or tab sets.
At work, I use Firefox’s Tab Containers (its equivalent of Profiles in Safari) to keep my personal accounts separate from my work accounts. I had performance problems with Safari Profiles at home, so I gave up on them. That’s really the limit of my sophistication with regards to tabs.
I’ve also toyed with using Firefox’s Tab Grouping feature in the last few weeks, but I can’t say that I’m sold on it.
Have these people who pin 100 tabs never heard of bookmarks?
Safari is my daily-driver browser, although I do keep Firefox and Chromium around.
I tried Arc, and didn’t bond with it, but I thought sidebar tabs were a good idea. To me at least, it seems like they’ve thrown out the baby instead of the bathwater.
People with that many pinned tabs are probably using Arc, where pinned tabs are basically more capable versions of bookmarks.
I have zero pinned tabs.
I rarely have more than 10 tabs open at once. Like my Inbox, I try to keep my browser empty by the end of a workday. If I have something I need to save it either gets bookmarked, saved to PDF (courtesy of Safari’s excellent Export to PDF…), or I save a .webloc to a specific folder.
I am a big fan however of Tab Bookmarks or Bookmark Folder or whatever Safari calls those these days. I usually set them to replace all open tabs. I use that for standard collections of pages I routinely check: open an empty browser window and hit that bookmark (indicated by a little solid rectangle next to the name) and presto all relevant bookmarks open in tabs. Cmd-w as I finish with each one until the browser window goes away and then I know I’m done.
Because I rely so heavily on these Tab Bookmarks, I never got what Tab Groups is supposed to achieve. But perhaps that’s aimed at those folks who have one or multiple browser windows but each with 30+ tabs they somehow always seem to leave open. Never got that myself but to each their own of course.
For the longest time I had the Safari “Tab Overview” icon in my toolbar because I always thought it would help me find a certain tab when I’m looking for it. But since I never have that many tabs open in the first place, I never ended up using it. And because I’m a big fan of minimalism/efficiency and Konmari, I got rid of that button. In practice, I’m fastest just flipping through my tabs via shift-cmd-[ or shift-cmd-] (or shift-cmd-left / shift-cmd-right) until I find the one I’m looking for. I rarely have that many open I can’t read enough of the tab title to make out what I’m looking for anyway.
Totally different for me on iPhone by the way. There I always have the same ~2 tabs open but in addition I tend to open up many more (Open in Background) as I go about my daily reading. Once I’ve closed all but those 2 I always leave up, I know my reading is done.
A man after my own heart! I also like a ‘clean’ environment at days end.
With regards bookmarks, I rarely use them these days. I am however, a heavy user of Notes for saving sites or videos.
For example, for my current car restoration project I have a folder of Notes with things like Body, Suspension, Engine, Interior etc. If I have a web page or video I want to save I simply open the appropriate Note then click the icon to save it directly to the Note.
I love that I get a large preview and can play things like YouTube videos directly in the Note to remind me what it is (far more useful IMHO than a simple text link). I can also write accompanying notes alongside the previews noting particular things of interest.
Notes has basically replaced my need for Bookmarks and I find it far more useful, far better organised, more easily searched, and with much more pertinent information.
I have lots of pinned tabs (in Chrome they are in tab groups so I can easily open and collapse them). I use them mostlu for different kinds of shared task logs, and also server checking.
And I definitely prefer them at the top because tabs on the side (like in Edge) are basically illegible!
Something not questioned is the use of Groups. I currently have three groups of pinned tabs in ungoogled chromium that contain a lot of longer YT videos (30 tabs), synopses of films i want to see (40), and podcasts i occasionally check out (10), and yet i still have 25+ tabs open all the time as well :-(
Firefox. I try to keep number of open tabs to a minimum which saves clutter and resources. The count grows and falls but rarely more than 10. For crying out loud, people, I see so many browsers with the same page open in multiple tabs because they don’t bother to use the one that’s already open, or close one after using.
Don’t really understand the pinned tab concept. Don’t care. Sorry.
Rarely have more than 4 tabs open. Mostly for comparisons. Will close them as soon as I finish.
I stick with Safari because of how it works with iCloud across devices. I bookmark and organize in folders any site that gets repeated visits then use the auto complete function in Safaris location bar to quickly load the page.
I’ve seen colleagues who keep dozens of open tabs. They often can’t find what they want without a lot of clicking. My method seems more efficient.
I have just three pinned Brave Browser tabs, for monitoring my off-grid solar photovoltaic system and detailed weather forecasts that help with energy planning. I also generally have about a dozen tabs holding news articles opened from RSS feeds. For work, I have five dozen open tabs in a dozen Firefox tab containers associated with different online accounts.
Though I use tab containers extensively — mainly to log into the same systems with different identities — I have never had success using tab groups. Instead of groups, i simply use different windows.
I have very few bookmarks. The URLs of websites that i visit regularly are held by my password manager (KeePassXC).
I currently have 149 Safari tabs open, clustered in particular windows, and no I will not get back to them all (probably).
Plus I have 329 BBEdit files open, clustered in particular windows.
I also have NetNewsWire with way too many feeds (so I’m pretty brutal with ⌘+K)
My main productivity goes into the Victoria Folk Music Society website and monthly newsletters.
I pretty much live with my MacBook Pro open on my lap-desk.
Vivaldi offers a wide range of options for tabs. One can position them at the top, bottom, and left or right sidebars. Also supports pinned tabs, tab stacking, and optionally frees up memory from inactive tabs. The number of choices is almost overwhelming!
Re. Vertical tabs, I used to use Omniweb, and for cross-browser bookmark management an app called URL Manager Pro.
Now I’m partial to Chrome, as much as anything because of a few excellent extensions.
For taming Chrome tabs I’ve been using Workona.
Although I have both newer and older machines, almost all of my Web work is done on a Mojave system with Firefox 115.esr. (Safari is rarely used.) That offers me five different ways to reach a known URL. (DuckDuckGo is my primary search engine for unknown URLs.)
With this array of options, I see no need to migrate to a newer browser on my newer machine, where I would have to change my habits. As it is, I do plenty of learning of other things in other ways to keep my brain active.
I do have over 100 tabs open, but (using Edge) they are all set to sleep when inactive, and almost all of them are in Tab Groups which are colour-coded. This means that less than 15 items in all are visible unless I expand one of the Groups. I’ve experimented with tabs on the side of the window and prefer them on the top (where they have been for most of my time using a browser)
When you copy data how do you select it:
click & drag;
screenshot (partial?);
Shortcut: Capture text from screen;
a Quick Keys automation script;
other…?
I use the Duck Duck Go browser more often than not, and I quite enjoy flaming out when I’m done, which closes all tabs and clears cookies and etc. So no, I really don’t need a tab management system.
From the voting results so far, it looks like a better way to organize too many open tabs may be a solution in search of a problem. Of course, Tidbits readers are probably much more organized about their browsing behavior than the average Joe. Personally, I do most of my web browsing on my iPhone—not because it offers the best browsing experience but because it’s always right by my side; but when I have to do anything online that really matters, I always use my computer.
Funnily enough, I use Vivaldi as my primary browser. I do make use of a lot of its customisation features, and yes there are loads of them!
Latest Dia version now includes the side-bar.
At least a step in a good direction, I wonder what else they will port over and end up with Dia being more like Arc in the end?
I absolutely love Arc by the way and I’m still using it. I will continue to do so but I’m keeping an eye on Zen browser which pretty much looks like an open source arc copy.
The old fashioned way. Select text (click/drag). Then copy (CMD-C) and paste (CMD-V).
No, it doesn’t capture the full layout of the page, but it usually captures the important text. If I need to go back later for that, I can revisit the page. (I’ll often copy/paste the URLs into the document I’m using for notes, in order to get back later).
Woo, thanks for letting me know—mine hadn’t updated yet, and they aren’t being transparent about changes like they were with Arc.
Dia getting vertical tabs is a good step in the right direction, and its pinned tabs work properly, but without folders and workspaces, it still doesn’t match up to Arc.
It is very weird how they’re approaching Arc’s features but have never talked about what they’re planning to bring back. If Dia incorporates most of Arc’s features on an optional basis, that will be fine, but if that turns out to be the case, it will be an even more massive marketing fail on The Browser Company’s part, since angering the entire Arc user base will have been completely unnecessary.
Closing open tabs is such an automatic process for me that I don’t need the browser to manage that for me – on MacOS. (I do make liberal use of pinned tabs, and now that Dio has introduced a sidebar, I hope that pinned tabs come next in that browser.)
On the iPhone, I really liked the Arc browser concept of closing tabs after a certain amount of time. Otherwise, it’s back to my practice of occasionally sweeping through and closing all the abandoned tabs that accumulated over time. That’s what I have to do in Safari and the Google app on iPhone.
When it became clear that Arc browser development wasn’t moving forward, I stopped using their iPhone app, but I miss the tab management aspect of it.
My response is specific to Safari on this iPad. Not sure how many tabs are open on my Mac, and I’m not near it right now. Probably the same response, though - I regularly look over my tabs and close obsolete ones. Of course Safari on iPhone doesn’t have tabs, just that “open pages” icon in the lower left (which I often forget to look at for weeks, where it can build up a lot of open pages). The only time I get an overload of tabs is when I’m opening pages on sites that insist on opening every click into a new tab instead of updating the current tab (I hate those sites).
My main browser is Chrome. I have several others for testing websites.
I always have 3 tabs open (work gmail, other gmail, google calendar) but they aren’t specifically pinned. Sometimes I’ll have up to another 10 or 15 tabs open. (A friend/colleague of mine always has 50+ tabs open, which makes gives me anxiety LOL.)
I have my most frequently used bookmarks organized into folders on the bookmarks bar, so they are easily accessible.
I also use Workona for browser management, but not to its full potential. Mainly I have a Workona setup with my emails and calendar, so I can easily reset to just those tabs.
I guess give them time and they’ll rebuild the Ship of Theseus.
I use both bookmarks and tabs. Book marks are for things that look like they might be interesting someday. Book marks are somewhat organized in folders (more or less).
I keep 20-30 tabs open for regularly accessed pages (everyday or at least every week access).
I typically capture 1000+ instances of text from the internet per month, pasting them into a BBEdit text file.
I have been using a Shortcuts automation, triggered by
shift-command-7 [shift-7 = &]
and I have been messing around with ChatGTP to write a script to grab text from Facebook Event pages (unsuccessfully, Facebook pages are monsterous)
And, I’m thinking I will download Keyboard Maestro …
I (almost) always open links in a new tab. I also tend to close tabs as soon as I’m done w/the page, don’t like to have too many tabs open at the same time, I find it confusing & distracting.
Pretty much ditto. Never liked tabs, and fortunately never had the need for more than a few (1 - 4 or so) windows to be up at a time. Since I worked for years with 3:2 displays, I was used to almost entirely hiding windows. In any case, the desktop Dock in macOS makes it easy to access any open app (say, Safari) window, whether open, hidden, or relatively recently closed. Now that is a feature I use regularly.
Just to report it, this is an option on Safari on iPhone and iPad. Settings / Apps / Safari / Close Tabs - the options are manually, after one day, after one week, after one month.
I know what a pinned tab is, I just didn’t know how to create one (or if I wanted to). And never felt compelled to find out. However, I just had a thought, “I bet if I right-click on a tab”. And sure enough. At least in DDG. When in doubt, right-click.
Technically they are tabs, and I believe the default setting is to show them as tabs when you turn the phone landscape. (There is an option to turn that off.)
I have grown very accustomed to Arc’s tab features. My main space is my “work” space and I have 8 favorites pinned at the top, and enough more pinned tabs to fill the sidebar to the bottom of the window on my large screen. Almost all of my work is on a collection of different web apps hosted on different sites, and using the tabs (and “little arc” links) to move between them is incredibly efficient.
Pretty much the same - I dislike tabs, so I open links in new Safari windows until the list becomes unmanageably long, and the computer complains by issuing a work slowdown… Only about 100 Bbedit files open, most of which are text snippets pasted to remove formatting, or generated to include formatting that FaceBook et al discourage. All on two big monitors hovering about 8" above a 6" drift of papers on my desk. Nothing is ever really finished, so any notion of clean desk at end of day, or inbox zero is as absurd as giving up caffeine, or working a regular schedule…
I easily have over 100 open tabs in Firefox and Chrome and no pinned tabs. Chrome is used for a few items and has “only” 56 open tabs right now. Since Firefox has a great auto-suggest of open tabs when I start typing a url, I don’t worry about bookmarks anymore, beyond a few that I check once each day and then close. Since pages don’t load until looked at, I have encountered no memory problems.
I usually have many tabs open, this forced me to count them all:
462 tabs open, spread across 11 windows, in 3 desktops, and 3 different profiles. All of this is in Chrome. Occasional use of Safari and Firefox but not today. Have tried some of the other browsers mentioned in this thread but seem to always return to the familiarity of Chrome. Need to experiment more.
Have been using Notes more as a tool to replace bookmarks because I can add a few notes to jog my memory.
Prior to using Arc, I had a morning routine in which I had saved in Safari all the landing pages where my to-be-consumed media could be found. I’d open the single bookmark in tabs, and then right click links on each of those landing pages to propagate even more tabs.
Frackin’ mess, and sometimes enough to crash my Mac.
When I saw the notice in the latest Chrome update to Arc that Dia is now using a sidebar, and that the notice practically begs Arc users to try the beta, I was beyond amused. Oh, now they’re listening to us for real?
What about Arc’s Spaces? They are a key part of Arc’s tab management. Not only to I rely on dozens of pinned tabs, but I also organize them across separate spaces for Personal, Work, and a Volunteer org. Each workspace has its own set of frequently used pinned tabs.
Missed
“how many browser windows do you have open at any given time”
(me)
15 to 20 on Mac
2 to 4 on iPad
“how do you organize your tabs”
I use Safari, and instead of huge numbers of tabs always open on a window, I use multiple windows, up to 3 or 4, each with a few tabs. Each window is usually for a different topic.
I only have about 120 tabs open because I used Brave’s “Bookmark All Tabs” feature to convert the other 200-300 to bookmarks. Maybe I have a tab problem.
Firefox 4 windows – 1 visible w/ 89 tabs (5 pinned) + 3 minimised windows (34 tabs / 10 tabs / 23 tabs) with website for current/future projects, housing issues, purchases, etc.
Chrome 1 window w/ 13 tabs – Gmail x 4 addresses + Cycle racing websites as SBS (Australia) works best in this browser for me.
Palemoon 1 window, however this program is generally not open. Used for accessing my credit card’s website as Firefox often takes forever to connect. I also use Palemoon with the occasional website that doesn’t want to cooperate with Firefox.
Me, too! I loved Omniweb and its tabs. It took a long time for the other browsers to catch up. Now I’m rocking well over 100 tabs in groups in Safari.
I wouldn’t recommend it as a primary browser, but note that there is a development version of OmniWeb. It last received an update just a few weeks ago.
Like @ddmiller, I also use of Safari’s tab groups to keep collections of tabs together like how I understand @ace uses Arc. So I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer the first question. Initially I submitted
51–100since I currently have 59 tabs (including this one) across 4 windows. However I’ve revised it to 100+ since I easily have that when including all tab groups (in both my Personal and other profiles, though most of my tab groups are in my Personal profile). In my use, the tabs in tab groups are sort of ‘pinned’ but they are not proper pinned tabs and I use them a bit more dynamically so I excluded them from my answer to the second question.As I’m sure Adam knows by now, there is absolutely no survey question he can ask that will have a simple answer for everyone.
Thanks, Doug! That’s good to know. I checked and the Google app also has this option.
I’m chagrined to realize that I do have seven pinned tabs on Safari for iPhone, which I use for various daily puzzles I do usually at the beginning of the day. I guess I didn’t think of them as pins - but that’s what they are.
But still no pinned tabs on MacOS or iPadOS. I did when I used the Gmail web app almost exclusively, but now I do all my mail from the mail app.
I do have some web apps set as individual app icons on all of my platforms - but these are generally thought of to me as apps rather than safari windows or tabs.
I mostly use Arc. My laptop is still on Sierra and I’ve blown up just about every browser there (Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Brave)
I picked 101+ tabs AND pinned (in Arc). I have no idea how to count them, but I have clients in separate spaces and had 84 pins in my first two clients alone.
I admit to being a tabaholic. I’ll come across something and keep the tab open because I want to go back to it later. Or I’ll be researching something, and will open a new window with a bunch of tabs in it. Once I make a decision, I’ll close the whole window.
Sometimes it’s a picture of a book I’d like to read. I’m getting better about putting those in my Amazon wish list.
Before switching to Arc, I had download a tab manager for the laptop (Chrome based I think) and I am pretty sure one of my browsers had over 200 tabs open (not in the same window).
Too much curiosity, too little time.
The only downfall of Arc (for me) was that if I didn’t pin the tabs, they do clean themselves up every week or so. I’ve “lost” some stuff and have had to figure out what it was after the fact. Some stuff is gone for good I guess - can’t remember it if I don’t see it. Like this poll, I’d opened it expecting to complete it over the weekend and here it is a week later.
I love the “open all from previous session” feature on the browsers I was using because I could close it to regain memory. Woe is me though if I forget to do it since you get exactly one chance.
I just found this Chrome extension called Arcify that (supposedly) simulates Arc’s vertical tab spaces. I’ve installed it, but haven’t quite tried it yet.