[insulanian]

I'm genuinely interested in the reasons people maintain so many tabs open. What type of workflow you have when you end up with so much stuff open?

How do you get back to some of those tabs? Wouldn't it be easier to just google it again when you need it instead of having it lingering around and wasting your HW resources?

[scholia]

They accumulate. Every day there are two or three pages you intend to read later, so you leave them open. A month later, you have an extra 100 tabs loaded. After six months, you have 600. There are also clusters of tabs associated with some research you were doing but didn't quite finish.

Then the problem is it would take a couple of days to go through all the waiting tabs and shut them down, and you don't have a couple of days to spare.

Eventually you just save them all out as a session and start again, and hope you will learn from your mistakes ;-)

I've switched from FF/Chrome to FF/Vivaldi because it has much better ways to handle tabs and bookmarks than Chrome does. Vivaldi does tab stacking, for example.

[c22]

I'm having the problem right now of hundreds of tabs open on my phone, I context-switch out of the browser when I'm done and end up leaving dormant tabs all over the place. Unfortunately whenever I try to scroll through them to close the non-relevant ones Chrome crashes, usually restoring several of the tabs I'd successfully closed.

[scholia]

There are extensions like Session Manager that list all the tabs after a crash, so you can uncheck the ones you don't want to reload. I don't know if there is one for Chrome on mobile, but it might be worth a look....

[hga]

Session Buddy for non-mobile Chrome works very well and allows you to do roughly the same thing. I.e. take an saved session, maybe after copying (I think you can do that), and delete the tabs you're not interested in (it does have one level undo), and then only start the remainder, perhaps window by window (on the desktop, at least).

[c22]

I love session buddy on the desktop, though with javascript off on most pages and 32gb of system memory I have yet to crash chrome from tabs there.

[nightcracker]

Maybe a 'read later' extension could help you? Something longer-term than a tab, but shorter-term than a bookmark.

[burfog]

That would imply taking a positive action to do something about the tab. I want to just ignore the tab until I need it again. I don't want to treat the tab specially.

My real desk is messy. I mostly know where stuff is buried because I put it there and nobody messes with my desk. I clean it about once a year, usually when a big project is fully done forever. I want the same functionality from my browser.

[scholia]

Yes. What I do now is save the page as an mhtml file so I can read it later without having to find it again. (Chrome should really offer better mhtml support.)

[burfog]

not going to touch an extension

Extensions tend to break with browser updates. Extensions tend to cause slowness. Nobody wants your bug report if you are running an extension.

[aexaey]

They sure do accumulate, to the point where by the time you go back to some old tab, and that tab just so happen to be replaced with a window.opener trick, [1] there is no chance of you remembering what was there in the first place, and spotting the fake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11631292

[hga]

Heh.

First, echoing some other comments, this is a test of these web browsers. My Pale Moon instance (a Firefox fork), which I use much less "actively" and with NoScript running on it, has 42 windows with 2119 tabs, but Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand. On the other hand, I have to restart Palemoon regularly, to prevent it from getting unhappy I do so on every even numbered day. I also run a Firefox instance with 12 windows and 62 tabs.

The workflow is roughly:

Windows cover one or a related set of subjects. I know by position which are were, and hit specific tabs at regular schedules. Any site I hit multiple times a day has its window on that tab.

Additional tabs are of course things to get back to. Maybe to digest at a later time, maybe only if an issue is still relevant. I do regularly archive whole windows or most of them using Session Buddy or Session Manager for Firefox/Palemoon.

For me, this sort of spacial navigation works a lot better than any bookmark system or the like that i've seen. I have very very good 3D spacial ability (organic chemistry was easy), so I'm sure that's a major factor in why this is right for me and wouldn't be right for many others.

And at this very moment those hardware resources are for the wasting, at some point after I buy my house, move into it, and my life is 1/10 as crazy as it is now I hope to e.g. be running serious and hungry proof assistants and other stuff, circumstances right now have me using it for little more than a media machine, with the web most certainly being a media. Heck, at this moment, I have one almost as capable machine with 16 GiB only hosting a LTO-4 tape drive.

ADDED: this is on a stationary workstation, so all the problems that might crop up with limited mobile connectivity or screens less than 1080p with a 24 inch diagonal. NEC still makes some fine monitors with very long warranties.

[mistermann]

> Firefox is smart about only loading tabs on demand.

This is the second time I've read this today....for me, when FF restarts, the tabs appear to be empty (they are blank, and reload when activated), but all of the memory is consumed almost as if it is somehow pre-allocated even though the page hasn't loaded. Do you not see this behavior?

[hga]

Errr, I'm sorry, I have such a big memory budget on my machines that I haven't paid that close attention, I care a lot more about it hitting much my more constrained DSL Internet connection.

[SeanDav]

I am also a tabaholic, often running 5+ windows, some with many dozens of tabs and some with just a handful. I use them for easy context switching. If I am in programming mode I switch to the relevant window, sometimes a separate window for each language I am programming in at the moment, for games and leisure, a different window, for news and related, yet another, for general internet use, yet another.

I tend to use Firefox, with its default behaviour of only loading tabs that are active (a huge memory saver) and easy use of NoScript. I also use Great Suspender for Chrome to try control its excessive memory use - works well.

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

I have tried active session managers but after several problems with corruption of sessions I reverted back to multiple windows and tabs.

[hga]

BTW. If you have a lot of HN tabs open and you try to reload a session after a restart, you get IP blocked for a short time - another good reason to use Firefox if you like keeping a few HN news tabs open, as it only loads 1 tab and keeps background tabs suspended.

Indeed; frequently I'll just disconnect my computer from the net for the startup period; crude, but it avoids this problem for sites like HN or others with with throttling.

Not that it happens very often to begin with, Chrome is quite stable, mostly I spaz with the keyboard and hit Ctl-Shift-Q when I meant Ctl-Q, something Chrome doesn't allow you to turn off.

[burfog]

Getting back to them is easy. You can do this with 10 virtual desktops, each with 10 windows, and each window with 10 tabs. That allows for 1000 tabs. It's a tree structure, organized by project or other purpose.

Desktops likely map to projects. Windows likely map to web sites. Tabs likely map to web pages within the same site.

A slight variation is that each window represents a Google search, with the first tab being that search. The results get opened in tabs. I often do this, then switch to the other variation by pulling loose a tab that is for a web site with many interesting pages.

The firefox restart dialog, offering to kill individual tabs and/or whole windows as desired, is great. I wish Chromium had it. I wish it were available at all times. I wish it were offered when the browser complains about an unresponsive tab. Chromium's offer to kill a rendering process is pretty useless, since the offer includes one guilty tab and numerous innocent precious tabs.

[plantain]

It's pretty simple really.

I have a branching factor > 1.0 which means for every tab I open, upon reading that tab, I find at least one more interesting link, and up another tab comes.

It would converge to infinity if my computer didn't crash in a manner causing chrome to be unable to reload, or I didn't periodically hit chrome bugs in the O(1000)'s tab range.

[hga]

That is most certainly a part of it as well. Hypertext is a very real thing, even if it's current implementation is not Xanadu fancy.

[austinjp]

Several projects underway at once, each in its own virtual desktop. Each desktop might have two or three browser windows open, each with several tabs.

As I tire of one project I switch desktop to another that's more aligned to my frame of mind.

I don't tend to kill old browser windows because they serve as a refresher to remind me where I'd got to with a certain problem, or a particular research issue. Only when I've reached some sort of resolution do I kill tabs or even whole browser windows.

Those tabs sure mount up.

Occasionally I try a different workflow but I gravitate to this habit. It seems to work for me.

[werber]

For me, I open a new window for each task I have to do in the morning, and the tabs associated with each one, then the inevitable stack overflow and msn pages pile up as I finish them

[pc2g4d]

For me it's like a short-term bookmarking system with a more convenient UX.