How do I deal with hundreds of open browser tabs without losing them?

Tab hoarding threads split into two camps. In r/firefox, someone showed off a huge tab count, a year after starting clean from a window of about 8,000: r/firefox thread. One popular reply said it is faster to close a tab and type the address again than to hunt for it. In r/ios, a person who rescued 500 closed tabs was told they would never get to tab number 329 anyway: r/ios thread.

Both camps miss the point. An open tab works as a promise to yourself, and telling someone to just close it does not settle the worry. What works is moving the promise somewhere safe first, then closing.

Why it is worth doing now

Tabs are not a safe place to keep things. In that r/ios thread, one commenter said their wife kept hundreds of tabs open until the phone crashed and they were all lost. The person who posted the thread had wiped theirs with one accidental tap. Your tabs are one mistake away from gone, and they are not in any searchable list. A bookmark folder is safer than the tabs you are afraid to close.

On a computer: the two minute fix

• Chrome: press Ctrl+Shift+D (Cmd+Shift+D on a Mac) to bookmark all tabs into a new folder. Name it with today's date.
• Firefox: the same shortcut works in most setups. If it does not, select all tabs, right-click and bookmark them.
• Safari on a Mac: open the Bookmarks menu and add bookmarks for all open tabs.
• Close everything. Then open the folder once to prove the links are there.

Do not sort that folder. Sorting is what stopped you closing tabs in the first place. You can search bookmarks from the address bar later, so a messy dated folder still works.

If you want something gentler, OneTab is a free extension that collapses your tabs into a list of links in one click. People in r/ADHD praised it as a watch-later list they actually use, and one person kept hundreds of tabs there: r/ADHD thread. That is an old thread, so check that the extension still suits your browser before you trust it with everything.

On iPhone

In Safari's tab view, you can turn all open tabs into a Tab Group. They stay saved under that group's name and your main view starts empty. Tap and hold the tab count or the Tabs button to find the option to close all tabs, but only do that after saving them. Exact menus have moved between iOS versions, so look for the Tab Group option rather than a set location.

The people in r/ios were right about one thing: Safari has a Reading List for pages you mean to come back to, under the Share button. It suits a few pages a day, not 500.

If you close tabs by accident, act at once. The poster in that thread said the plus button only showed 50 recently closed tabs, but shaking the phone on an empty tab screen offered to undo closing all 499. That is one person's report. It relies on Shake to Undo being on and on acting before you do much else.

Keeping it from coming back

One r/ADHD commenter set a limit of 30 tabs on their phone and starts closing when the count reaches the twenties. A limit is easier to keep than a vague plan to do better. On iPhone, Safari settings can also close tabs for you after a day, a week or a month. Save anything you care about first, because that is the same accident in slow motion.

Where Nemos fits

If you want one searchable home for what you keep, Nemos has Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions and a share sheet option, so a page saved on any of them lands in the same library with a preview. You can then search it next to your notes and screenshots, and put a reminder on the few pages that have a deadline.

For a one-time clear-out, the free bookmark folder above is enough, and you can bring it into Nemos later as a bookmarks HTML file if you want.