[brw]

Massively agreed. I've had this problem for years and always have hundreds, sometimes thousands of tabs open, spread across a couple dozen windows. Memory usage is actually pretty alright with Chrome these days as the vast majority of tabs stay unloaded, and its Memory Saver feature also unloads opened tabs over time, so it's perfectly usable even with 16GB of RAM. Before that I had to use The Great Suspender to keep the memory usage in check.

I feel like I've tried every tab/bookmark managing app/extension under the sun and none of them stuck. I've also thought about creating my own, but it feels like even I don't know what I'm looking for exactly. The main problem I have is that they all have too much friction compared to simply keeping the tabs open. It would have to be something deeply integrated into the browser.

Vivaldi has some really cool tab management features and it would be my main browser of choice, but with my amount of tabs, windows and extensions its UI performance degraded to the point of becoming unusable, whereas Chrome held up just fine. Granted it has been a couple of years since I last tried it so that might have improved since. I'd still recommend anyone with similar "power user" needs to give it a try. It's a pretty awesome browser.

Tab Groups in Chrome are actually surprisingly decent as well. They're pretty low friction, and open tab groups even sync across devices, including mobile, in (near) real time now, which is great. But I do have some issues with them causing me not to use them. For example, when you re-open a closed tab group it will instantly load all of the tabs inside of it, instead of keeping each tab unloaded until visited, like on startup. You also can't add tabs to a closed tab group. So you either always have to keep the tab group open, meaning they're not much more than a visual aid and only slightly more useful than bookmark folders, or store fewer tabs per group, making them even less useful. They also have the same "object permanence" issue as bookmarks, where it's simply too easy to forget about a closed tab group altogether once I close it.

[cpill]

I make a new window for each task in working on keeping the tabs grouped together, and more importantly, make it easy to kill them when the team is done. if I have a group of tabs open for a long time that I'm meaning to read (and I know deep down that I won't but can't admit it to myself) I'll just copy the URLs to a note in Obsidian and lay them to rest.