Drowning in tabs?

How often do I see people clicking around their one million open browser tabs to find the right one?! I don't get it, folks. There are a few options to organize this stuff! I know …

… but to be clear: it’s not about the chaos introduced by this massive amount of tabs – it's about not being able to handle it.

This is probably the easiest strategy. You can still have a trillion open tabs in a single browser window like before. So no need to change this learned behavior. But you can use the built-in search modern browsers provide or use a Raycast Extension (see below).

I don't have a Windows computer or one running Linux, but if someone sends me the shortcuts I will happily add them here.

(Almost) all modern browsers provide a feature where you can group your tabs together. If you find yourself opening tabs totally unrelated to the one you were originally looking for, consider to group them. In this way all the tabs from an unrelated group are hidden and only the ones of the current group are visible.

To be honest, the user experience of Safari tab groups is not that great. The groups are organized in the sidebar and can’t be accessed quickly if you don’t want to keep it open all the time.

Between Chrome and Edge there’s no real difference how tab groups are handled. This is no surprise since Edge is based on Chromium. You can combine multiple tabs, label the group with a custom name and a color which makes it much easier to differentiate between groups.

At the time of writing the Firefox tab groups feature is experimental and may not yet be available to all users. But I am confident that this will soon be launched for everyone.

This one is my favorite approach. I use different browsers for different purposes. There’s one (Opera in my case) for my web apps like time tracking and things like that. The tabs are all pinned to prevent them from being closed by mistake.

I (still) use Chrome for development and as soon as my work for a project is done I close all tabs and windows. Even if I plan to come back later this day. In addition I use a separate window for each environment. If one tab is the local copy of the website I can be sure all other tabs of this window are too. For the staging or the production server I use different windows. Switching apps or windows or rearranging them on my screen is done with keyboard commands so having multiple windows open is definitely no problem.

For regular browsing I use the DuckDuckGo Browser which is pretty good in terms of privacy protection. All my web search is done with the DuckDuckGo search.

Yes, it is allowed to close tabs! Bookmarks are a great way to organize URLs for later use. And since they are searchable as well it should be easy to find them again. There a great Raycast extensions for that for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, and even for Brave or Vivaldi. Some of them can search for open tabs as well. Do you remember? This was how we started.