Tab Hoarding: why you can't just close them

Ask anyone with 200 tabs open why they don't just bookmark them, and you get some version of the same answer: they'll never look at them again. That isn't really about storage. A bookmark still sits in a folder somewhere. It's about recognition. Once a link is filed away as a line of blue text, nothing about it tells you why you saved it.

That's worth separating from the practical problem, because the two need different fixes. If your Mac is groaning under 300 tabs right now, there are free, built-in ways to get them off screen today. If you keep ending up back here every few months, the cause is somewhere else, and it's worth naming honestly before reaching for another tool.

Why won't you just bookmark them?

This isn't a new complaint. In a long-running Hacker News thread about browser tab limits, one commenter summed up the mechanic in a sentence: bookmarks “just get forgotten about... tabs are a visible reminder.” A more recent thread, titled A tab hoarder's journey to sanity, drew 106 points and 123 comments making the same point from different angles. One reply named the actual gap directly: the step from wanting to keep something to actually bookmarking it is missing. Nobody built a bookmarks bar that makes filing feel as effortless as just leaving the tab open.

It's also common enough that search engines autocomplete “tab hoarding” with both “adhd” and “ocd” attached. If that's you, the fix below isn't a willpower problem, and it isn't really about the tabs either. It's about giving a saved link somewhere to go that still looks like something once it's saved.

How to save every open tab right now

If the actual problem this minute is a window you can no longer see the edge of, close nothing yet and do this first.

In Chrome and most Chromium browsers (Edge, Brave, Arc), one shortcut bookmarks the lot:

1. Press Cmd-Shift-D. Every tab in the current window is added to a new folder in your bookmarks bar, named after today's date.
2. Repeat it per window. The shortcut only reaches the window you're looking at, so if you have three Chrome windows open, run it three times.
3. Rename the folder afterwards from the bookmark manager (Cmd-Shift-O), so future you has a clue what “5 Aug” was about.

Safari doesn't have a direct equivalent, but Tab Groups solve a version of the same anxiety without bookmarking anything. Control-click a tab, choose Move to Tab Group, and Safari collapses a whole set of open tabs into one named, collapsible entry in the sidebar that syncs to your other Apple devices. It doesn't reduce your tab count, and closing the group closes the tabs with it. What it does do is turn one overwhelming window into several named, manageable ones, which covers most of what people actually mean when they ask to “save” their tabs.

A free tool built for exactly this

If bookmarking 40 tabs into a folder you'll never open again doesn't feel like progress, OneTab is a genuinely useful free extension for Chrome and Firefox built around a slightly different idea. Click its icon and every open tab in the window collapses into a single list page, freeing the memory those tabs were using. Click again and they all come back, in order.

It keeps that list local to your browser rather than an account, lets you export or share it as a plain page, and doesn't cost anything. For getting a stuffed window under control today, it's a better fit than a bookmarks folder, because the list it makes is built to be worked through and cleared, not filed away and forgotten in the exact way a bookmarks folder usually is.

So why do the tabs always come back?

Because none of the above touches the actual reason a tab felt safer than a bookmark in the first place. A bookmark is a line of blue text. It doesn't show you the picture, the layout, the thing that made you stop scrolling on it. A tab, sitting right there in the bar, still does, for as long as you leave it open. Bookmark it, and that goes away: the link becomes indistinguishable from four hundred others exactly like it.

That's the part actually worth fixing, and it's a different job from “get these off my screen by Friday.” It means whatever you save has to look, months later, enough like the page it came from that you recognise it on sight, the same way an open tab does today.

What Muse does, and doesn't do, about this

This is where it's worth being precise about our own app, because it would be easy to imply more than is true. Muse doesn't have a save-all-tabs button. It isn't a tab manager, and it won't sweep 40 open tabs into your library in one action the way Cmd-Shift-D or OneTab will.

What it does have is a browser extension for clipping a page as you're looking at it, and that extension isn't published in any browser's store yet. So today, getting a link into Muse means dragging it in from the address bar or pasting it, one at a time, the same manual step as bookmarking, just aimed somewhere else.

Where somewhere else matters: Muse pulls the page's own title, its site icon and its preview image, so a saved link sits in your library looking like the page it came from rather than a row of text. That's the specific thing bookmarks don't do and tabs accidentally do, and it's the actual gap the Hacker News thread above is describing, the missing step between wanting to keep something and it still looking worth keeping once it's saved.

It won't stop link rot either. If a saved page eventually goes down, what survives in Muse is the preview, the title and any note you added, not a working copy of the page itself. And Muse needs an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later, so it isn't an option for an older machine.

For a genuinely huge tab pile you need gone today, start with Cmd-Shift-D or OneTab. Muse is for the links you go on saving after that, once you want them to still mean something the next time you find them.