You are manually caching web content. Were you aware that (a) your browser does that for you; (b) the internet does that for you ?
I'm as guilty of this as anyone and can tell you from experience that it's sutpid.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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From a practical standpoint, it's hard to imagine what you could possibly be doing where it's beneficial to have a thousand tabs open.
If I'm writing a research paper, I might want 5 or 10 tabs open at a given time. Let's say I'm a little chaotic so I get up to 20. And then limitations on my working memory kick in, and having any more open tabs actually makes me worse off.
But then let's suppose it's a thesis that's 50 pages long. So I might be relying on 40 or 50 references. I'm not relying on them all at the same time, right? So I definitely don't want to keep those tabs open all at the same time.
What I could do, and what you could consider, is either bookmarking things or using archive.org to make a backup of the pages.
In one of the other comments you mentioned Facebook. That has me a little concerned again with your objectives. If it's something private on Facebook that can't be recovered later, and you need something reliable, then you have no choice but to do long screenshots or scrolling videos. If it's not reliable, then why do you care so much to keep the window open? Just close the window, remember whatever you remember, and move on with your life.
Whatever you do, here's a few rules of thumb... Your web browser is not an archiving tool. Printing to PDF is one way to archive things. There are other ways to archive things too. You don't actually need to archive as much as you might think you need to archive. Most of the things that we think might be important now actually won't be useful at all three months from now. Rarely would one actually want to have a thousand sources of information for any given task.
Have you tried bookmarking things instead of leaving them open as tabs?
Yes, I find that it identical to closing a tab. I never go in the bookmarks manager after. It is very clunky to use, it adds extra steps compared to keeping the tab open. At that point, it's usually easier to use google to find it again, since at least google can search text inside the page, not just the title. I do occasionally dump my thousands of tabs into the bookmarks managers, in a single unusable folder. It hasn't yet happenned that one of these tabs was retreived. But I hope in the future that I could dump all these tabs into another piece of software that will fetch all the tab's body data and allow me to search it all with a local LLM based search like "using my bookmarks, create one browser window with all URLs on the topic of the 7 megahertz maser" We're close but not there yet.
You might be interested in this then, it's an app that uses AI to auto-tag saved bookmarks: https://hoarder.app/
Neat!, thanks
Why don't you just open less tabs? Just close the browser when you are done using it
Install Onetab
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