A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Why People Hoard Tabs

  • Many describe tab hoarding as a natural workflow: every action opens a new tab because back/forward and in-page navigation are unreliable.
  • Tabs are used as “in-progress” workspaces: research, shopping, job search, courses, medical research, long-running hobbies, etc.
  • Several link it to ADHD / visual thinking: if something isn’t visible as a tab, it’s forgotten. Tabs function as a to‑do list and memory aid.
  • Others connect hoarding to poor bookmark UX and degraded web/search quality: people don’t trust they’ll ever find the same resource again.
  • Some content is inherently un-bookmarkable because the URL doesn’t encode state; only an open tab preserves the exact view.

Bookmarks vs Tabs vs History

  • Strong camp: bookmark UX is clunky, non-visual, inconsistent across desktop/mobile, lacks good search, and doesn’t cache content. This pushes users toward tabs.
  • Counter-camp: hierarchical bookmarks, tags, and keyword shortcuts (especially in Firefox) work fine; hoarding is more about habits than tools.
  • Several note that bookmarks are bad for “short-term, maybe important” items; they want a middle ground between ephemeral tabs and long-term bookmarks.
  • A minority “cure” tab hoarding by hoarding bookmarks instead or relying heavily on history search.

Tools and Workflows

  • Popular tools: Instapaper/read-it-later services; OneTab; TabWrangler/Auto Tab Discard; Sidebery, Tree Style Tab, Simple Tab Groups; vertical tabs; separate windows/spaces/profiles.
  • Some self-host or use services like Pinboard, ArchiveBox, linkding, Karakeep, or local text/HTML captures (e.g., MarkDownload + grep, SingleFile).
  • Others use aggressive strategies: regularly “close other tabs,” periodically save all tabs as bookmarks and wipe, or let extensions auto-expire idle tabs.

Performance, Browser Design, and Limits

  • Several report thousands to tens of thousands of tabs working fine thanks to modern tab eviction/unloading, especially in Firefox + extensions or Brave.
  • Others complain about degraded performance and fragile session persistence (Firefox’s session storage and occasional data loss are criticized).
  • Mobile Safari’s 500-tab-per-group limit is a hard cap that some routinely hit.

Cultural Split and Skepticism

  • One side sees heavy tab use as a legitimate, optimized workflow; another is baffled and prefers <10 tabs plus clean bookmarks/history.
  • Some think “tab hoarding” as a pathology is outdated now that browsers handle large tab counts; others still feel overwhelmed and seek ways to “get to sanity.”