What to do when you have ninety tabs open and cannot close any of them
4 min read · How-to
Tabs accumulate because they are doing two jobs at once: they are your to-do list and your insurance against never finding the page again. Closing them by willpower fails because it deletes the to-do list along with the tabs. The fix is to move both jobs elsewhere — save the whole window as a session so nothing is lost, promote the handful of links you genuinely return to onto a board, then close the window. Linksley covers both halves: sessions for working state, boards for the links that earned a permanent home.
Ninety-four tabs is a memory problem, not a character flaw
The favicons are down to slivers. Three of them are playing audio and you cannot find which. Somewhere in there is the pricing page you meant to compare, the flight you did not book, and a form half-filled at 11pm on Tuesday. You will not close any of it, because closing it means admitting you will never do it — and because two of those tabs are genuinely impossible to find again.
That is the real mechanic. A tab is not a page you are reading; it is a task you have not finished, plus a fear of losing the page. Any fix that only addresses the tab count and ignores those two jobs gets undone within a day.
Why 'just close them' never sticks
Advice about tab hygiene usually amounts to discipline: close what you are not using. It fails for a specific reason — the browser gives you no safe place to put a tab that is not finished. Bookmarking forty tabs one by one is thirty minutes of work and produces a folder you will never open. Leaving them open costs you nothing today, so the tabs win.
Reopen closed window (Ctrl+Shift+T) helps for about five minutes of accident recovery, and then the trail runs out. It was never designed to hold a week of work.
The move: save the window, then close it
The fix is making closing free. If the whole set can come back in one click, closing it stops being a decision about whether the work matters.
The window is gone and the work is not. Most sessions are never reopened, and that is the point — you find that out cheaply, instead of paying rent on ninety tabs to avoid finding out.
- Open the extension popup and save the open tabs as a session. Name it after the work: Q3 pricing research, not Session 14.
- A saved window reopens as one browser window, so a set of tabs you kept together comes back together rather than spilling into whatever window you happen to be in.
- Close the window without ceremony.
- Turn on the opt-in browser snapshots if you want a crash or a new laptop to be an inconvenience rather than a loss — they restore whole windows, including their positions.
Promote the five you actually come back to
Before closing, scan for the links you have reopened more than once this month. The admin console. The style guide. The client's shared drive. Those are not working state, they are infrastructure, and they belong on a board with a category name — not in a session and not in a tab.
That is the split worth keeping in your head: sessions are the pile you might need again, boards are what you decided to keep. Put a board on your new tab and the promoted links are in front of you every time you open a window, which is the only reliable reason people stop hoarding tabs — the fear of not finding it again goes away.
If you are a seven-tab person who closes things naturally, none of this is for you. This is for the people whose browser has not been restarted since March. And if you do restart: saving all open tabs first takes about four seconds.
Common questions
Why do I keep so many tabs open?
Because open tabs are doing two jobs your browser has no other place for: holding your unfinished to-do list, and making sure you can find the page again. Close them without replacing those jobs and the pile rebuilds within days.
How do I close tabs without losing them?
Save the window as a named session first. The whole set can be reopened later as one window, which makes closing it a free action instead of a judgment call.
Do lots of open tabs slow down your computer?
They consume memory, and modern browsers unload inactive ones to compensate, which is why old tabs reload when you click them. The bigger cost is usually attention — you cannot find anything in a strip of sliver-wide favicons.
What is the difference between saving a session and bookmarking every tab?
Bookmarking forty tabs creates a folder you will never open. A session keeps the set together with its window structure and reopens it in one click, and it is meant to be temporary.
Close the window, keep the work
Save every tab as a session, promote the few that matter, and start tomorrow with one tab.
Start free