How to Keep Yourself from Opening Too Many Chrome Tabs

How to Keep Yourself from Opening Too Many Chrome Tabs

I like to write about different methods for organising your web browser because my own Chrome browser looks like a tab farm. It never fails. No matter how often I dump all of my open tabs into some kind of archive, it only takes a week or two for the problem ” in the form of 20+ browser tabs ” to reappear.

A thought occurred to me the other day. What if I’m doing it wrong? What if instead of trying to deal with my overflowing tabs all the time, I need to address the problem in reverse? I need to prevent myself from opening so many tabs, which will then force me to either be more selective about what I’m looking at or bookmark it and move on.

We’ve previously covered extensions such as xTab (Chrome), which lets you limit how many tabs your browser can display at any time. (If you’re on Firefox, check out Max Tabs ” similar deal.)

[referenced url=”https://www.lifehacker.com.au/2019/01/the-15-best-new-tab-extensions-for-google-chrome-fans/” thumb=”https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/t_ku-large/wqb3sqd1gvqvtirxftxn.png” title=”The Best ‘New Tab’ Extensions For Google Chrome” excerpt=”You wake up. You groggily pull up your laptop or sit in front of your desktop with your delicious coffee nearby. Once your system loads, you load up Google Chrome, and you think how nice it will feel to get rid of all of those open tabs someday. You open a new tab anyway and start your morning content ritual.”]

Nothing against the extension, especially its “kill old tabs you aren’t using” technique, but I find myself drawn to Tabs limiter with queue (Chrome) instead.

Install it, and open up its options to set how many tabs you want to allow Chrome to have. Once you reach that limit, any new tabs you open get added to a background queue. As you close tabs, the tabs in your queue pop up to replace them.

It’s a pleasant and elegant way to handle too-many-tabs syndrome.

However, the “Tabs limiter with queue” extension comes with one important caveat. It can’t prevent you from opening up new blank tabs. If you go that route and type whatever website you want to visit into the address bar, the extension can’t stop you.

It will continue to queue tabs you open from websites ” when you hold down CTRL and click on a hyperlink, for example ” but it isn’t superhuman. It’s just a simple extension.

Additionally, while the extension will save queues between sessions, I wouldn’t recommend using it to save all the sites you plan to eventually get to. An extension such as OneTab is a lot better (and safer) for that, though incorporating “Tabs limiter with queue” into your browser means that you’ll probably want to use good ol’ bookmarks more than anything else.

After all, you’re unlikely to have many open tabs at any given time.


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