There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync.
I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.
I scrolled all the way to here since I expected way more mentions of Tabs Outliner. It’s kept me stuck on Chrome for so long, but now with the death of The Great Suspender extension my hand has been forced to build my own personal replacement as I want to get off chrome again…
Losing the great suspender means I can’t in concert with Tabs Outliner switch in and out groups of dozens of tabs at a time. Now doing this chews multiple GB of memory and my machine all but locks up for minutes at a time if I forget that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve run into macOS’s “out of memory killer” window pop up on several occasions now entirely from chrome alone.
I am a heavy user of tabs and I’d be trying all the mentioned ones in this page, but I have to express to anyone who has not tried it, if you are building a tab management tool and have not looked at Tabs Outliner in chrome, you need to, it represents the high water mark of tab hoarder & power user features. I’ve got 17 thousand tabs saved in hundreds of windows and groups on just one of my machines!
I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
Thanks for your reply. It's good to hear that Tabs Outliner is a favorite for other power users out there. Interesting that you had a great synergy between it and The Great Suspender. I myself hadn't ever used The Great Suspender before hearing about it's recent demise. It sounded pretty useful, and upon looking for alternatives, I discovered the cross-browser extention Auto Tab Discard. FYI: https://github.com/rNeomy/auto-tab-discard
>I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
I'm not sure you know this, but nowadays browsers have low-level sql-like api called indexeddb[0] which may fit your needs without using sqlite.
There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync.
I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.