Unclutter Your Firefox Tabs With These Tools, Addons, and Tips

I’m a news hound, a Twitter fiend, and a resource packrat.  That’s a deadly, productivity-killing combination, especially when the potential for 70 Firefox tabs is almost always there to stifle my workflow and slow any of my computers to a crawl.

The great thing about Twitter is the seemingly endless stream of links and stories people share every second. A good Twitter headline is enough to grab my attention and make me click on that obscure bit.ly link.  There are jewels in the Internet you can only find through user-generated streams.

As a casual blogger, I’m always looking for ways to make my writing life easier.  I like to maintain a repository of links to refer to so I have facts to backup my claims.  But that also means bookmarking 80 percent of the sites I visit which makes blogging too much of chore at times.

So I’ve finally come up with my near-perfect resource collection schema that works very well for me.  Your mileage may vary of course.  If you use a browser other than Firefox most of the time, by all means switch.  You’ll be better off.

Let’s say I have 30 article tabs open in Firefox.  Here’s what I do to cut that down to the bare necessities (around 7 or 8).

1. Instapaper – Using the “Read it Later” bookmarklet, you can instantly push an offline version of the tagged article to your Instapaper account.  If you have an iPhone, like I do, the Instapaper app will be your best friend; when you view articles on your iPhone, they’ll be specially formatted to make reading a breeze.  Instapaper has made a world of difference in my reading habits because I don’t need a dozen news tabs open just so I can follow up with them later.

2. Bookmark the articles I like and find most useful – Not every article I push to Instapaper is worth the extra step.  I would simply delete it and move on.  No need to fatten up your bookmark database.  But if there’s something I like, I’ll bookmark it, add the appropriate tags, and then depending on how anal you are like I am, place the bookmark in a dated or categorized folder.

3. Google Reader – Another one of my favorite reading tools.  I track about 40 RSS feeds.  If I want to catch up on something later, I can simply “star” it and read it at a more convenient time.  Google Reader takes up one tab and provides a wealth of information in a single view.

4. Treetabs – Once you have a bunch of links open, a tab bar across the screen can become unwieldy at times.  One of my favorite Firefox addons to solve that problem is Treetabs.  It creates a vertical list of tabs either on the right or left side of the screen.  Tabs can be grouped, subgrouped (parent/child style) and threaded.  It’s easier to process multiple tabs in a vertical view than it is on a horizontal view, IMHO.

5. Tagsifter – Once you’ve built up a repository of 600+ bookmarks, you’ll need an easy way to search for them. I like to use Tagsifter.  By pressing Alt+V+E+T, you can open up a sidebar where you can search for bookmarks by keywords or name.  You can sort your tags and bookmarks in various ways as well. Saves a lot of time if you need to find a resource pronto.

6. Xmarks – Formerly Foxmarks, Xmarks will allow you to sync your bookmarks across multiple browsers and computer effortlessly.  Nothing is more satisfying than having all of your 600 bookmarks perfectly in sync with both your work and home computer.  All you need to do is create a free account and you’re golden.

I’m sure all of you have your own little processes and tools to manage tons of content and I’d love to hear all of them!  Any thoughts on how I could better organize my bookmarks, articles, and links?  How do you guys manage your bookmarks and favorite articles?