Throttle Tabs: limit visible browser tabs to a set maximum

October 18, 2022 1:35 PM

"A while ago I made an addon for myself. It was essentially a tab FIFO [First In, First Out]. It would only allow 10 tabs to be open at a time. If an 11th tab was created, the least recently activated tab would be closed." Throttle Tabs is a Firefox browser extension (an add-on) by Eitan Isaacson to help manage open tabs. "I decided to add an 'overflow' feature which is essentially tab purgatory. Instead of having the addon auto-close the tab, it hides it. .... The overflow can be capped too so it can permanently discard old tabs after a given limit." Source code.
posted by brainwane (38 comments total)

Doesn't limit the number of windows! I like it, though.
posted by aniola at 1:52 PM on October 18, 2022

Cool. I’ve been using Arc by The Browser Company and it has a similar concept baked in, though it’s based on time since active vs # of tabs open. There’s a lot of improvement to be made in how we Web and anybody taking a stab at it is doing good work imo
posted by wemayfreeze at 1:53 PM on October 18, 2022

No thank you, I like my tabs to infinity.
posted by jenfullmoon at 1:56 PM on October 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

Safari on iOS already does this. The limit is 500. You can guess how I know.
posted by nat at 2:01 PM on October 18, 2022 [19 favorites]

I do a lot of organizing using windows filled with tabs, so this is against my workflow. But for people who need it, I'm super happy it exists!
posted by hippybear at 2:18 PM on October 18, 2022

My leftmost tab remains a YouTube playlist of Junior Vasquez remixes that I opened in response to an FPP here in possibly 2016 and it’s going to stay that way until the heat death of my laptop.
posted by migurski at 2:50 PM on October 18, 2022 [17 favorites]

I have no idea if trying this will rewire my brain or make it implode.
posted by Faintdreams at 2:58 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

> Safari on iOS already does this. The limit is 500. You can guess how I know.

I, too, have implemented an ad-hoc version of the 10-tab system in the margin between 490 and 500.
posted by Phssthpok at 3:08 PM on October 18, 2022 [14 favorites]

Seems like the author is telling on themselves by implementing “tab purgatory” rather than simply closing them.

I, for one, prefer a method I call Tab Bankruptcy, whereupon reaching n+1 tabs (n being an arbitrary value equal to the number of tabs I am emotionally-capable of having open at that moment) I simply close the window and deal with the consequences thereof.

I like the catharsis of this chaos method. It’s like throwing your laptop out of the window while muttering “well fuck all this then” but without the property damage.
posted by turbowombat at 3:25 PM on October 18, 2022 [29 favorites]

MetaFilter: it’s like throwing your laptop out of the window while muttering “well fuck all this then”
posted by hippybear at 3:32 PM on October 18, 2022 [13 favorites]

> Tab Bankruptcy, whereupon reaching n+1 tabs (n being an arbitrary value equal to the number of tabs I am emotionally-capable of having open at that moment) I simply close the window and deal with the consequences thereof.

The maddest of lads.
posted by genpfault at 3:47 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

judging by some of the response here surely this is breaking a major taboo
posted by lalochezia at 3:53 PM on October 18, 2022

I want to draw a parallel between open browser tabs and unread inbox messages but I feel like it's asking for trouble.
posted by djseafood at 4:02 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

turbowombat, per the blog post, the reason that Isaacson implemented tab purgatory is "Since users might not trust an addon that automatically closes tabs". He himself uses it in auto-close mode and does not use the purgatory feature. And in the first paragraph he says

After a couple of days I’ll have hundreds of tabs open. I declare “tab bankruptcy”, I purge them all, and start over.

posted by brainwane at 4:38 PM on October 18, 2022

Why why would you hurt yourself this way?? The only way to handle tabs is to keep going until your computer crashes and forces you to restart. This is the way.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 5:18 PM on October 18, 2022 [10 favorites]

When I open more tabs than the browser can fit they already go into “purgatory.” I don’t understand this, the point is to set a limit that’s artificially lower than that?
posted by atoxyl at 6:09 PM on October 18, 2022

Oh my god, I can’t even handle the cognitive load of having like, five tabs open. Even that is being generous. But I don’t need this. If I haven’t taken action on a tab in the first like, five minutes it’s open, I’m not going to, and it gets closed and immediately forgotten. Just keep swimming.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:21 PM on October 18, 2022 [3 favorites]

I just open a new window and fill that with more tabs.
posted by porpoise at 7:07 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

The only way to handle tabs is to keep going until your computer crashes and forces you to restart.

I can’t even handle the cognitive load of having like, five tabs open.

This post is going to end up added to the MeFi Wiki "You WHAT?" page, isn't it?
posted by Greg_Ace at 7:27 PM on October 18, 2022

If I didn’t purge my twitter history every three months I could prove that I have been using “tab bankruptcy” since 2019. But that doesn’t change the fact that I apparently can’t read for detail these days.
posted by turbowombat at 7:54 PM on October 18, 2022 [1 favorite]

Tabs suck. They're a cop-out for a shitty Window management. They bream expose on Mac, and Taskbar preview on Windows. I wish they'd die.

But no, Google saw fit to add them to Android, and even add "tab groups" that make it even harder to see what's open where. Why are programmer-types given control over UI decisions?
posted by Popular Ethics at 9:48 PM on October 18, 2022

Well, that's...also an opinion.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:59 PM on October 18, 2022 [7 favorites]

> Safari on iOS already does this. The limit is 500. You can guess how I know.

Yup. My feedback issue with Apple is still open, with no reply.
posted by Pronoiac at 10:44 PM on October 18, 2022

I like tabs, and I make extensive use of tabs… but I personally will never understand people who feel the need to have dozens of tabs open at all times, let alone people who have HUNDREDS of tabs.

You can’t possibly be checking All The Tabs every second. Managing the plethora of tabs and actually finding the thing you want seems like it must be a nightmare. Opening your browser must be painfully slow. What’s the use case? Isn’t “I need to check this link periodically and want it to be quickly available” exactly what a bookmark is for? Isn’t “wait I want to remember that I saw this” what your browser history is for? What do the tabs do that can’t be done otherwise? I am genuinely trying to understand. One of my colleagues always has a million tabs open and I can’t figure out how she can work that way, it makes me feel weird just seeing it in meetings, and it isn’t even my computer!!

I’m on Team Close All Tabs when Exiting Browser. In case you couldn’t guess.
posted by caution live frogs at 5:32 AM on October 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

Tabs suck. They're a cop-out for a shitty Window management.

I totally agree. Window switching has gown down an evolutionary dead end of "point at it with a stick".

For me, when I need to switch windows what I really need is to switch tasks or switch what tool is in use for a task. This is the first problem keeping us in the evolutionary dead end: it is not window switching, it is task switching.

When I have the need to switch tasks I don't think about what the window looks like, I think "I had the documentation for sqlalchemy open and I need it now." I think it in words, not images. For the GUI of a OS to show me a spread of images of windows I have open is nearly useless and even more useless if it is open in a non-visible tab in a browser window, and even counterproductive if it is going to show me a browser window with some time wasting distraction of a website.

It is symbols, not images.

I wrote a task switcher that integrates my IDE editors, normal windows, browser tabs and terminal emulators. I split each tab out to a window with an extension to make it easier to get a hold of the tabs via the normal window APIs. It shows me a list of tasks I could switch to, It's a lot, hundreds, but then it filters. I type "sqlal" and it filters to all windows or tabs with "sqlal" in the title or URL. Maybe I have a lot of tabs open to SQLAlchemy's docs. I type "[space]orm[space]join" and how I get all the ones about ORM and joins. And bam I'm back to work.

Apple or MS could develop this as a product in very little time.
posted by bdc34 at 5:33 AM on October 19, 2022 [2 favorites]

Close your tabs when you're done with them, you godless heathern.

If I see 10 in Chrome on my phone I start twitching. I keep 4-6 tabs pinned on the tab bar in Chrome and Firefox, and I don't have more than it would take to start shrinking the tab size in the one window I have open.
posted by deezil at 6:49 AM on October 19, 2022

"I’m on Team Close All Tabs when Exiting Browser. "

It reads like english, but completely incomprehensible. What is "Close All Tabs"? What is "Exiting Browser"? I'm down to like, 55 tabs in three windows grouped by topic or use-case, and that's a light day.
posted by mrgoat at 8:24 AM on October 19, 2022 [3 favorites]

The only time I have more than 3 tabs open is if I am researching a topic, working on a project, running a TTRPG game, or there is a spicy Metafilter post that I want to follow.
posted by gwydapllew at 8:58 AM on October 19, 2022

I honestly didn't expect the judgement I hear in some of the comments in this thread.
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:55 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think different people's brains just work differently and tabs are a reflection of that. I can't have a messy desk. Everything has it's place and I have space open to use whenever needed and when I'm done with what I'm working on it goes to whatever place is appropriate. I can't think if there is a ton of clutter everywhere. Whereas some people have multiple piles of papers on their desk and the more things they use the desk for adds even more to the mess but it works for them somehow. Tabs are the same thing.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:04 AM on October 19, 2022

I learned from this blog post that I could use % (when starting to type in the Firefox address bar) to show only matches in my currently open tabs. So that makes the pile more searchable and usable.
posted by brainwane at 10:18 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

On my phone, when you have Too Many Tabs open it no longer counts them, it's just a smiley face.

:D

It hasn't been anything other than a smiley face in MONTHS.

I have so many tabs open because I can't store them any other way effectively. There is no easy Pinterest add-on on my phone. Favourites is slow to add to individually, and annoying because then I don't see pictures I just see URLs and that's worse to scroll through.

What I like is my phone now does groups, so I can group tabs together by topic and sort them. For me, This Is The Way. All tabs. All the time.
posted by stillnocturnal at 10:22 AM on October 19, 2022

At work, sometimes I'll have more than 100 tabs open at once after using a Chrome extension to open a list of URLs in separate tabs. But I play whack-a-mole with those tabs, closing each one as I finish testing what's on the page.

I frequently do the same with Metafilter and its subsites, scrolling down the page and opening links in new tabs. But for most day to day web browsing, I never need to keep tabs open. Typing a bit in the search bar will turn up URLs that match the search, so I can always find the recipe on my phone that I was looking at on my desktop, etc. Everyone has their own methods that work for them, but to me, keeping browser tabs open is like keeping kitchen drawers and cabinets open.
posted by emelenjr at 10:42 AM on October 19, 2022

Opening your browser must be painfully slow

Doing what with my browser?

You can’t possibly be checking All The Tabs every second. Managing the plethora of tabs and actually finding the thing you want seems like it must be a nightmare.

Well, like, I have them all loosely organized in the bar by site/purpose, right? So between that and the icons and hover text it’s not that hard. But I will say that my OS GUI usage was revolutionized by quick name search tools (like Alfred on OSX) to open applications or files. So if there’s an equivalent to manage tabs that’s probably ideal for me.
posted by atoxyl at 10:50 AM on October 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

I guess that’s just the browser search bar but with tabs there’s an informal to-do element as well. I mean it’s just like stacking stuff on your desk - it can be a mess but most people have a loose system.
posted by atoxyl at 10:56 AM on October 19, 2022

Opening your browser must be painfully slow.
You never have to go through that if you never close it ;-)

I like this idea, although there are plenty of times when I need a lot more than ten tabs open while working. I do get caught in that, 'but what if I need to go back to it' problem. Every now and again, I go down the tab bankruptcy process and just throw them all out the window when it feels like they're causing my computer mortal pain.

I don't use Firefox or I'd give it a go, because I could definitely use some discipline in this area.
posted by dg at 2:44 PM on October 19, 2022

It's amazing how particular people's preferences are around these things. This one looks like a good fit for me, so thanks!
posted by johnabbe at 4:03 PM on October 19, 2022

I totally get that different people are wired differently. It's not judgemental - it's an examination of "how does doing X work for you when doing X breaks my brain?" I like that we are not all the same, but it is also fascinating to see how we are different and understand how an approach that would wreck my productivity can be effective for someone else.

I mean, I close out all of my apps on desktop when I'm done using them. Automatically. But on a phone, I see my wife reflexively force-closing apps and I'm trying to stop myself from telling her AGAIN she doesn't need to do that. She sees my phone with dozens of apps open in background, and has to stop herself from trying to reach over and force close them. Our poor kid is caught in the middle - if she checks his phone she wants to close everything, but he agrees that it isn't necessary and gets anxious when she does.

Same for file management. Her work computer desktop is full of files, whereas I resent every icon IT forces me to have visible - if I had permission to change it to show only the computer and trash, I would. Files on my desktop are enough of an annoyance that I use it as a to-do list - desktop photo is my kid throwing a rock, the file I need to address is always placed next to the rock. It's my way of ensuring I do not forget to knock that file off my to-do list. (See, the kid is throwing a rock at the file, ha ha.)
posted by caution live frogs at 7:01 AM on October 24, 2022