Can report that my testing indicates 40k+ tabs is doable with unloading on a 64 GB machine, across multiple Firefox windows with tree style tab.

Since task manager has been introduced, making it easy to unload whole related tab groups its even easier to reach absurd total tab counts. ;-)

I just wanted to say thank you to all you mad tab hungry folks for making me feel both seen and comparatively sane.

It's doable with a single window on a 16 GB RAM machine as well.

As someone who has gotten to 2000 a few times, even I have to ask myself "how? why?"

Investigating some some are to decide what to buy properly could be a couple hundred tabs easily. Usually you can close those when you are done, especially if you use Tree Style Tab to have them in their own little trees - but not always you have the time or are waiting to try the thing after it arrives.

Its is more tricky with technical projects, as you might and up with a big reference tab hierarchy that ideally you should first all read before closing it (maybe, just maybe, someone in one of those forum posts you opened in a tab without looking yet solved your problem!) or get back to the interesting tabs when working on the project.

Worst of all are fiction or world building sites... Like, you end up on some page on Project RHO or Orion's Arm or a WH40K wiki somehow and that page has links to some other interesting topics. And those pages have more links - oh, interesting!

Those can get to hundreds or even thousands of tabs easily and you just can't close them - they are just so interesting and there is that one topic/megascale engineering project/story you did not read to the end yet and you can always get back to it - as long as you keep the tabs open!

And lastly, it is a sort of a diary/history log - sometimes you see a forgotten tab tree you did not touch in a while - oh, right I was researching that thing, how nostalgic! :)

How do you organise them across many windows ? I found it difficult to categorize them by topic (i.e. one window with topic X, another window by topic Y and so on)

tbh, ADHD meds help for that. Cut down my average tab backlog by 90%.

I appreciate this advice, but FWIW my tab habit is more a product of curiosity and time constraints, than any kind of compulsion or control issue. More of a "read-it-later-maybe" queue.

I'll open tabs for any possibly-interesting HN story, for example, and then come back later and read maybe 25% of them, often when the comment threads are still short, and almost always when only one hemisphere has had time to weigh in. Then I'll come back the next day and reload the page for new comments. Or I'll close the tab if the topic wasn't as interesting as I hoped, or if the comments are dominated by a boring tangent.

Periodicaly I sweep through the older tabs that I've never read. Some have expired in their currency. Some are reassessed for interestingness and dispatched quickly. Others are left for future sweeps.

It may not be neurotypical, but I don't think it's ADHD. :)

I should note: this is on my personal/non-sensitive browser profile. My primary work profile is usually fewer than 1000 tabs and is more actively-pruned, but generally reflects things that are still in current ongoing work. And my personal/sensitive profiles only contain a handful of tabs each, things like pending order invoices, etc.

This sort of thing sounds like a fantastic use of Firefox's bookmarks system.

Bookmarks don't retain scroll position, and must be actively managed to preserve hierarchy.

Firefox tabs are a zero-cost, and far more usable, implementation of bookmarks.

Chrome tabs are terrible -- the UI and memory demands are absurd.

Firefox (vertical) tabs are great, convenient, fast, easy, and cause no resource drama.

I have bookmarks too though. They serve three purposes: a) remember this forever but get it out of my way for now, b) put this in a managed hierarchy easily accessed from my bookmarks toolbar, or c) save out this big hierarchy of tabs that I haven't looked at in a while but were each probably the culmination of some level of manual navigation that I don't want to repeat.

I bookmark pages I want to keep on hand forever. I don't expect to ever delete them. I wouldn't bookmark product reviews that I'm just juggling while deciding on a purchase, even if I have to put off that purchase on the backburner for a week to deal with the rest of my life.

I personaly create a 'temp' bookmark folder for things like this. An advantage is that it then syncs to all my Firefox instances.