I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?
I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet. e.g. I've had a tab group for a while for buying new shoes. Really, most of these tabs should be bookmarks, but I'm just not bothered enough to change it (yet).
Interspersed among the FOMO tabs are things I'm currently working on. These are strewn all over the place and I've observed two things about how I use them. First, when I try to prune work tabs I am always overzealous and I find myself reopening the same tabs over and over. Second, I'm sensitive to where tabs are located spatially and I'm able to frequently find my way back to oldish tabs.
So basically, I'm saying "I have a system," but that is a flimsy defense and the real answer is probably "I'm not bothered enough to change."
I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable:
* Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth)
* Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable.
I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.
Oh, that's really interesting. That use case wouldn't work for me because I want to be able to access my bookmarks from any browser on any machine -- so I use a bookmark server.
I'll try to articulate this as someone who usually has 500-1000 open tabs.
Bookmarks are things that meet or surpass a certain threshold of usefulness. My open tabs probably include things that should be bookmarked, but all of that information needs to be screened for what's really worth saving. Clusters of tabs for various trains of thought take time to condense into purified bookmarks.
In order for me to have less tabs open, I guess reality would need to become much more boring.
Ironically, as I'm browsing the web, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. are all maintaining various growing data structures about me that encapsulate key information, like what content is the most engaging for me, my social graph, or tracking the sites I visit most. People act like having 1000 tabs is a problem, but no one cares when Google's database gets it's 100,000th record for the data they're keeping on you. I wish that raw data could be shared with the respective users. It would be nice to know more about my digital self than the algorithms do. It's another facet of what makes these tech companies god-like.
So you don’t use bookmarks because bookmarks seem like they have to be perfectly named/organized? Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”. Seems like it would instantly unlock a more natural UI for the same data, but maybe I’m missing something.
Thanks for explaining what you already have, I’ve always been SO confused by people with hundreds of tabs. I hope I wasn’t the only one who read “people either use 3 tabs or 300” and thought that was insanely out of touch
> Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”. Seems like it would instantly unlock a more natural UI for the same data, but maybe I’m missing something.
Back to my comment that started this: That would be a flat list with no grouping and little to no context. Tree Style Tabs automatically organizes them by context.
For example, one of my root tabs is Youtube. Immediate children include a few channels that upload a lot of videos so I don't subscribe to them (they'd drown out the ones that upload rarely) but want to keep up with them. Those then have child tabs for their videos I want to watch/listen to at some point, but haven't gotten to yet.
I do the same on here, one of my root tabs is the Hacker News homepage. This one has a bunch of additional long-running tabs, interesting projects I want to try out myself, or reminders to try something out and maybe switch to it instead of whatever I'm currently using. Most of these have further subtabs as I've started exploring whatever it was but not yet finished with it.
And yeah, you could do such groupings with bookmarks... but that's manual work. This is automatic.
>Why not just… not? I.e. a bookmark folder called “chaos”
Both open browser tabs and bookmarks get auto-completed by the omnibar in contemporary browsers. One important difference is, after a new browser session is created, those pervious tabs go away, but the bookmarks stay. The "chaos" bookmark method results in more chaotic omnibar auto-complete suggestions over time. Unfortunately, that seems like a worse outcome.
The answer used to be Yes. 32GB RAM was a spec I'd commonly try to get. As the other commenter has indicated, contemporary browsers have decent logic for unloading open tabs from RAM. Likely it's one of the many improvements made after Google Chrome received strong criticism for it's RAM consumption.
Firefox doesn't load tabs after a restart until you click on them, and I use a tab unloader so tabs also get unloaded after a few hours (mentioned in my original comment that started this chain).
Tabs also store an implicit chronology and don't require organization other than the order/vague time they were "saved" and the related tree they were in (tree-style tabs).
I also find the tab scrolling UI of a long list easier than manually waypointing stuff into folders and then trying to remember what, where, and other context of the saved items
I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read, but my tab counts rarely exceed 20. I read those articles/comments, and I Cmd-W to close them. At the end of the day I end up with 0 tabs, and close the browser.
Even when I'm in the middle of doing research, I open a ton of tabs, save the promising ones as bookmarks in a folder, and close the rest. I take my cue from that scene in Ratatouille where the chef says "keep your stations clear" [1]. I try not clutter my tab bar with irrelevant tabs so my attention is not divided.
I've seen people who open 100s of tabs, and they do what I do except they never close tabs. To me that seems to be a sign of a cluttered mind, but it's the same kind of mind that is able to find objects in a messy room, so who am I to judge? Whatever works I guess.
The risk of not closing/bookmarking tabs is that you're one Cmd-Q or system hang away from losing all your tabs.
> I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read
Simple: Events come in, like emails, chats, bug reports, etc. They have URLs in them. I click the URL, bringing another tab into the world. Half the time I forget to close the tab. Sometimes the browser windows breed when I drag two tabs out to view them side by side. Days later I realize I can't keep track anymore and I run a script that kills *edge*,*chrome*.
For example, I load Hacker News, scan all the headlines and ctrl-click anything that looks interesting, plus the comments section.
I use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through them. I might ctrl-click additional links in the article or comment section to browse through when I'm finished reading.
If I'm interrupted, I'll open a new tab, or a new window if there's too many (I prefer 10 or less, since you can then use ctrl-# to jump between them.) Eventually, if I've given up on them, I'll close a bunch in one go. Or I'll just close a whole window because I haven't looked at in a while.
On HN, I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs ( I am not making this shit up ). And it was from a pre 2013 Account.
So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.
As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.
> I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs
Yea that's nothing, haha. I currently have 3592 open. Like you mention, research and tab hoarding go hand in hand. Even recreational research: everyone is familiar with the wikipedia spree with its innumerable hyperlinked articles and references, and now you suddenly have 20 additional open tabs. I'll read maybe two of them, but the others piqued my interest enough to warrant opening, so definitely not closing them. If you never purge, you eventually end up in the hundreds/thousands.
My tabs get auto suspended when they've been idle for thirty mins, which prevents the memory usage from becoming ridiculous enough to incentivize me to change! Though I do need a better system, such as a tagging/categorization system for links. At least half my open tabs are things not of immediate relevance (duh), but HN posts/random blog posts on $NICHE_TOPIC that I'll (hopefully) get to eventually; eg building a DIY keyboard. Especially the blog posts, I can't be sure that I'll stumble upon them again. Sites like MakeUseOf can fuck off, they always float to the top of the SERP.
Fascinating. I have a very internet-research heavy project (writing a nonfiction book), but how do you find a specific tab that you want to go back to. It seems like that would be harder than using bookmarks or simply re-navigating to the resource.
Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?
You know, that highlights the idiocy of my workflow. I typically search through my bookmarks or history with Vimium, and not through my open tabs because I want to open the link in my current context; not the context where that tab resides.
But overall I actually think the visual aspect is the reason, its mostly an unavoidable nag saying "DONT FORGET!" Closing tabs sends them into the abyss, unless you precisely remember what you're looking for (for someone wont to ctrl/cmd click hyperlinks, good luck finding those). And I do use session buddy to save and organize contexts (and keeps the tab situation somewhat "sane") but—and similarly with OneTab—those just get sent off to the extension's local db and you forget.
> Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?
When I used to only have a few hundred, spread out into different windows, and designated virtual desktops for each meta topic, definitely. It's what I want to get back to.
I had the problem at some point, that Firefox wouldn't start anymore after an upgrade (at ~7,5k). That's was when I gave up, and fed all tabs to the one-tab extension, which saves them as links and closes the tabs. Nowadays I regularly press its save-and-close-all button, so the number of tabs stays reasonable (less than 200 or so).
Haha, I use session buddy for that but I reopen all tabs every time I restart my computer because the fallacious thinking of "THIS time I'll go through some of them!" My above comment did prompt me to seriously start looking into a better system, though predictably now I have a ton of tabs open for linkding, archivy, et al. The awesome-$THING project(s) are great resources but you quickly spawn fifty additional tabs for each project's repo
I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet. e.g. I've had a tab group for a while for buying new shoes. Really, most of these tabs should be bookmarks, but I'm just not bothered enough to change it (yet).
Interspersed among the FOMO tabs are things I'm currently working on. These are strewn all over the place and I've observed two things about how I use them. First, when I try to prune work tabs I am always overzealous and I find myself reopening the same tabs over and over. Second, I'm sensitive to where tabs are located spatially and I'm able to frequently find my way back to oldish tabs.
So basically, I'm saying "I have a system," but that is a flimsy defense and the real answer is probably "I'm not bothered enough to change."