Recently, we had a guest post on why you should never have more than nine browser tabs open, and it was quite controversial—even among some of us on staff. So, here's our counterpoint: it's okay to have a ton of tabs open, you just need a few tricks to keep them all organized.
If You're Holding Items for Later: "Unload" Them to Save Memory
As I make my rounds on the internet, I often keep a tab open because it reminds me of something I want to do later in the day, or I know I'm going to need it soon. In this case, I've found it's good to "unload" these tabs so they don't suck up your browser's memory and slow it down. In Chrome, we love The Great Suspender, which automatically unloads tabs that haven't been in use for awhile. Firefox users can check out BarTab Lite X, which allows you to unload a tab just by right-clicking on it. That way, you can keep that tab in your tab bar without it slowing down your browser.
If You Need Them All Right Now: Organize Them Into Groups
Nine tabs may seem like a fine limit, until you need to do some actual research. If you need to constantly flip between 20 different tabs, closing or unloading them isn't really an option. You may not be able to keep your browser from slowing down, but you can organize them so they're easier to access using TooManyTabs for Chrome and Firefox. With this extension, you can view your tabs from a "bird's eye view," making it much easier to jump to the tab you need at any given point. You can even search through your open tabs, unload ones you don't need yet, and sort them by title, domain, or creation time. It won't necessarily keep your browser from slowing down, but if you have no other choice, this will at least make all those tabs easier to use.
If You're Saving Articles for Reading: Use a Read Later Service
A lot of you open multiple tabs when you're lining up articles you want to read—say, as you scroll through the front page of your favorite tech blog. If you find that this is too hard to navigate or causes slowdowns, though, more than one of you noted a better solution. We've talked about "read later" apps like Pocket, Instapaper, and Readability before, and they work really well here. Just send your articles to one of these services and they'll be saved for you in a list—without any ads or other formatting—so you don't have to keep all those tabs open even though you're reading one article at a time. Even if you plan on reading those articles right now, this is often a better solution than opening them up in tabs.
Even faster would be to use our previously mentioned tricks for reading multiple blogs. Sort them all into RSS feeds to keep all your blogs in one tab, then just send the articles you star to your read later service of choice. You'll never have to open more than one tab, and you'll be able to read all those articles without having to "find" them again.
If You Need Them All Day Long: Get an Extension or a Desktop App
One of my personal problems is that I always have about six tabs pinned in my browser at a time: things like email, my calendar, my Google Voice inbox, and other stuff are always there since I reference them so often during the day (and don't want to reload them every time). SARodrigues has a good solution to that:
Try replacing pinned tabs with extensions, if possible. It keeps them out of the sight, easily accessible and with the added bonus of notifications.
I grouped my emails in the
X-notifier
extension, feeds in the Google Reader extension, and even my Transmission tab with Remote Transmission extension. The only pinned tab I currently have is Google Music, but soon it will be replaced too.
Of course, you could also offload those things to desktop clients, for things like email, says geekgirlbarbie:
Assuming a few of the tabs are Gmail accounts and Google Reader (I'm guessing, correct me if I'm wrong), and assuming you're computer is powerful enough, you can easily eliminate a few tabs using
Thunderbird
,
Postbox
,
Pidgin
, or
FeedDemon
(which honestly is much better for power users than Google Reader it syncs with Google Reader). That would eliminate a few of your pinned tabs, leaving more open for browsing and give you a few more powerful features to boot.
Of course, there are a ton of other tools and tips out there to manage your overflowing tab bar, but this should help get you started. While I do agree that fewer tabs is often better—and I'll minimize the number of tabs I open whenever possible—sometimes, having 30 tabs open is okay. You just need to manage them properly to stay sane.
Title image remixed from Resurgere.