[HN Gopher] I have 218 browser tabs open
___________________________________________________________________
I have 218 browser tabs open
Author : michaelsalim
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-08-01 21:45 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (michaelsalim.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (michaelsalim.co.uk)
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| I don't have _that_ many tabs open right now or usually, but I 'm
| wondering what Firefox users in the habit of messing with > 100
| tabs are doing. Sooner rather than later Firefox won't allow you
| to open new tabs ("one thing to do") and forces a restart after
| updating in the background. I don't know if you can open another
| FF window/process in that situation but I think that behavior is
| very annoying and kindof needs fixing if FF wants to be a browser
| for power users.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| This is actually something I almost touch on in the article.
| Sideberry have a feature to store snapshots. So if I restart
| the browser, I just restore from there. I also have it set to
| save every 2 hours so that I can always recover from crashes.
| gitgud wrote:
| It's great your browser can now scale to hundreds of tabs, but
| can your brain handle that many? Can you focus with 200 tabs
| open?
|
| Personally, I feel much better when I close a tab, rather than
| leave it open. It feels like I'm freeing up RAM in my head...
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| Tab hoarder here: mentally, they're somewhere between history
| and how you probably treat tabs. Probably 90% of my actual
| switches are within the last 10, another 9% in the last 100,
| etc. All I really want is infinite storage of pages with exact
| state, including dynamic content. Since history can't do this I
| use tabs and wait for the inevitable browser crashes. I think
| there's no particular moment/decision when a short-term memory
| becomes a long-term memory, tabs are the closest you can get to
| this. They're not at the front of my mind.
| turdit wrote:
| that's really interesting
| boplicity wrote:
| I do a lot of research for my job; I often open up 30 new tabs
| in a matter of a minute, and then slowly work through them, a
| little bit like a checklist, vetting the information in each
| one. I can imagine using a similar process for even larger
| number of tabs, but you're right that it gets a bit unwieldy at
| some point.
|
| That being said, Tree Style Tabs in Firefox makes mentally
| handling large numbers of tabs very easy. Without it, my
| workflow would not be functional.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| The tabs handle it so your brain doesn't have to? Tabs
| represent productive effort toward a goal, mission, or valued
| task.
|
| https://www.friendlyskies.net/maybe/why-closing-tabs-is-so-h...
|
| The false dichotomy of "reasonable tabs vs. too many tabs" is
| an embarrassing result of slow evolution in software design.
| The fact that humans feel blame for the resulting behavior is
| 100% wrong and unnecessary.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Agree. I have a handful of pinned tabs. My email, messages,
| and, depending on the machine, a few tabs of research for
| either my current work task or game I'm playing or project I'm
| working on. At the end of each day I close all non-pinned tabs.
| Stuff that I access regularly but not constantly gets
| bookmarked into some folders.
| Bayart wrote:
| I have about 500 between the two computers in my room atm.
| Probably 50 on my work laptop.
|
| My tab count only resets whenever my browser crashes
| irrecoverably.
|
| I started doing it back in the Opera days (presto engine). It
| could sustain hundreds of tabs consistently at a time everything
| swapped on spinning rust.
|
| I treat tabs as "urgent" bookmarks : stuff I want to read later,
| but in a more palpable time frame.
| yatharth1991 wrote:
| After a certain number N, which is < 20-30, the number of open
| tabs are inversely proportional to your productivity.
| enbugger wrote:
| >"Why not use bookmarks?" section
|
| You can still prefer using bookmarks for something long-term, but
| utilize Bookmarks bar for a quicker access.
| CivBase wrote:
| Yeah, the author's answer wasn't very satisfying for me. I use
| tabs for things I'm actively using, keep quick-access stuff on
| the bookmarks toolbar, and keep long-term stuff in directories
| or the bookmarks pane/menu. No need to come up with a hacky
| workflow as an excuse to keep hundreds of tabs open.
|
| It's wild what lengths people will go through to avoid minor
| changes to their workflow.
| btown wrote:
| For those skeptical how this can happen, it's the natural
| situation when two things are true:
|
| (a) wanting to create a new browser window when a new "context"
| is necessary, rather than navigating away from one's current
| context, and
|
| (b) being in an environment where "contexts" are added more
| rapidly than they can be fully triaged, delegated, or completed.
|
| If you're (1) working on some deep frontend code and previewing
| it in the browser, then (2) you need to look up how to do a
| certain thing in React which might require reading multiple
| documentation and Stack Overflow posts, and in the midst of that
| (3) need to fix an urgent bug in something you've owned, and you
| do so but are waiting for CI to pass on the fix, and while
| waiting for that (4) you also need to unblock a colleague on a
| question about a specific piece of documentation and send them
| some Github links but not wanting to close them until they
| respond: you've just created 4 windows with many tabs open in
| each.
|
| Now, if on top of this you are in a CTO or PM style role in which
| you need to do a few observability or analytics dives per day to
| try to understand specific customer situations... each of those
| may result in a context as well. On this crazy day, you have 10
| context windows, each with 4 or more tabs, accumulate during a
| single day, and you may only be able to fully get through the
| backlog over the course of the following few days.
| Probabilistically, there will be a time during certain weeks
| where you have 160-200 tabs from this workload alone.
|
| Tools like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/toby-for-
| chrome/hd... and https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
| manager-plus-f... are extremely useful, but do require that
| you're willing to suspend your page state, including any state in
| dev tools or scroll position - so they're simply a way to speed
| up getting through the backlog of contexts, not a silver bullet.
|
| So if you're the one they go to when situations arise, and you
| can't grow your team as fast as you need... the TL;DR is: if any
| of this sounds familiar, you will want that 64GB of RAM for your
| laptop sooner rather than later.
| readingnews wrote:
| I was literally working on a computer at work. Was taking too
| long to shutdown...
|
| I wonder why. I could not resist taking a picture.
|
| http://dimlight.org/number9/pics/tabs.jpg
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| _laughs in multiple VMs solely devoted to Firefox tabs_
| zh3 wrote:
| You should see my wife's laptop....
| Pokepokalypse wrote:
| amateur
| controversial97 wrote:
| With 32GB of RAM, I can have roughly around 3000 tabs open in
| firefox and 3000 in Chromium at the same time before things go
| unrecoverable wonky.
| galkk wrote:
| I find tree style tabs very effective in things like
| oncall/learning/investigation situations because they act as kind
| of breadcrumbs/grouping solution. Like
|
| list of issues -> issue -> [log search, similar issues search,
| metrics etc]. You get stuck/wait for something then go to next
| issue, but have chance to return back to your entire context. And
| when you finished you just close entire subtree and move on.
|
| With linear list of tabs (or even groups in chrome) it is much
| less convenient.
| spython wrote:
| In 2018 I wrote a blog post called Open tabs are cognitive spaces
| [0] - about that exact problem. It got a bit popular on HN, and
| since then quite a few alternative browsers tried to solve the
| problem, I even consulted a few of them, such as Beam[1] and
| Synth[2].
|
| The hard part of the problem is that by creating 'spaces' full of
| tabs to make our lives easier we create yet another
| categorization, another taxonomy, and with it all the timeless
| problems that taxonomies have: Should the current page belong to
| category A or a similar category B? Or to both? How can I merge
| two spaces into one in a good way? Can I do it automatically or
| do I have to, yet again, select, curate, categorize? How can
| browsing and researching be a living process and at the same time
| be neatly sorted for later recall?
|
| One thing that I kind of still miss after watching the field
| develop for four years, is the simple idea of making groups of
| tabs easily shareable. Just let me share a tab group with another
| person! Better yet let us work on the same tab group together,
| treating it like a living document, a living research space.
|
| I guess this can't be solved by an alternative browser, but
| instead by an open standard that could be implemented in all
| browsers.
|
| [0] https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
|
| [1] https://beamapp.co/
|
| [2] https://synth.app/
| jul45 wrote:
| Well, making groups of tabs easily shareable is coming in iOS
| 16 and macOS Ventura, I guess that's a start.
| https://allthings.how/how-to-use-shared-tab-groups-in-safari...
| [deleted]
| mihaitodor wrote:
| Only? for me it got out of hand years ago... Session Buddy is
| currently reporting "146 Windows 1371 Tabs" on my personal
| computer. On top of that, I have more than 100 on my phone,
| around 200 on my work laptop and several txt files with lists of
| open tabs saved from years ago when I changed computers.
|
| While I'm sure I want to read / watch over 50% of those, going
| back through them requires some time off which I'm struggling to
| find, so they keep piling up slowly...
| brazzy wrote:
| It's amazing how humans keep finding new ways to hoard
| things...
| mihaitodor wrote:
| It's not as burdensome as piling up physical objects. In
| fact, I'm quite used to having them lie around in my browser
| since it doesn't keep them loaded in memory any more (I'm
| using Chrome on OSX).
|
| While I know nothing about collecting stamps, I believe there
| is some similarity: If any of them seem of some value, I will
| bother to bookmark them along with a brief description in
| Google Keep. After several years, this small "mind map" has
| proven to be quite valuable for me. Why Google Keep and not
| bookmarks? It seems to work better for me than any other
| bookmark system I tried and the 2-level nesting feels just
| right: I created about 30 labels and each of them have
| various archived notes that contain multiple links together
| with their descriptions. So far, I believe each of the notes
| I created have one label, but I might end up attaching
| multiple labels to some of them eventually.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| Needing lots of browser tabs is a direct result of the fact that
| individual web sites are not very good at multitasking (they can
| usually only do one thing) or at "remembering" (they are almost
| never locally stateful). I'm actively working on both of those
| things via Linux on the Web!
| user_7832 wrote:
| I know it's hardly anything worth "flexing", but I have hundreds
| of tabs on every browser on all my devices, easily (and
| regrettably) totalling a few thousand overall. I have had to
| install new browsers because reopening a crashed browser would
| freeze my computer.
|
| The reason I'm posting this here? Because I want people to know
| how terrible of an experience it is. No, not having the tabs open
| themselves. But the frequent app crashes and hangs. The time
| chrome crashed and lost all tabs (iPadOS so no ctr shift t. And
| it was triggered by opening a link so the "restore" button
| disapeared immediately.)
|
| I do not know if anyone on Google's Chrome, or Apple's Safari or
| Mozilla's Firefox teams are reading this - but if you are, you
| should know that tab management on all types of devices - be it
| android or a windows laptop - sucks to say the least, and is
| buggy/broken to be more accurate. Chrome throws a smiley face
| which isn't cute when you want to actually see a number.
| (Fortunately kiwi browser - my designated music browser - tells
| me I have 700-something tabs despite being chromium based.) I
| cannot open the tab switcher in chrome (android) for a solid few
| minutes unless I want the app to freeze, or more realistically,
| to delete/misplace some tabs. (I.e Tabs get randomly rearranged,
| and the tab grouping feature doesn't help.)
|
| You end up learning "tricks" to avoid upsetting your browser.
| "Don't newtab for the first x seconds, instead open a link from
| Google search and it'll be faster" "Don't bother typing anything
| at all in the search field, auto complete doesn't work until the
| tab-smiley comes on which takes 20 seconds in chrome canary and 2
| minutes on regular chrome"
|
| On windows browsers hog memory until the system slows to a crawl.
| Safari is the least terrible, despite the questionable 500 tab
| limit navigation is still fluid.
|
| As to why I don't close tabs - because when you think 20
| different things you want to search (thanks ADHD) and haven't
| read any of them, you'll want to go back later when you have
| time.
|
| (Btw if anyone from any of the browser's teams is interested in
| seeing a live demo of this in a "real life" use-case I'll be more
| than happy to demonstrate what "ultra-high" organic page use
| looks like.)
| mavhc wrote:
| Chrome crashing and losing all the tabs was the only way to
| keep them under control, now with bugs fixed and a session
| manager extension, I can always get them back.
| user_7832 wrote:
| By session manager do you mean an extension?
|
| I used an extension called OneTab that had a few thousand of
| my tabs on my old laptop... it took that extension crashing
| _twice_ (probably burning 4~5k tabs) before I learnt my
| lesson and backed up all my tabs to a txt file.
| mohamez wrote:
| I've been using OneTab for more than five years now and
| never crashed.
| baisq wrote:
| Safari has a very low limit of tabs open. I don't manage the
| tabs of my phone at all, I just let them pile up, and
| eventually I always hit the limit. Thankfully there's an option
| that automatically deletes all tabs that you haven't opened in
| a month.
| pronoiac wrote:
| Mobile Safari's limit is 500 tabs, including on the iPad.
| When you then try to open another tab, the options are:
|
| * close tabs not opened in the past month
|
| * close all tabs
|
| * cancel
|
| It's not a big dialog box. If you misclick "close all tabs,"
| there's no "are you sure?" confirmation. You can recover 200
| or so.
|
| I've filed feedback / issue / bugs about this.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| > The time chrome crashed and lost all tabs (iPadOS so no ctr
| shift t. And it was triggered by opening link so the "restore"
| button disapeared immediately.)
|
| That's actually what pushed me to Firefox. After loosing ~50
| tabs (yet again) I simply said f that, now I have a clean state
| and installed Firefox. I've never lost any tabs since.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Do you mean Firefox on iOS? Do you know if they have auto-
| translate?
|
| One of the hidden "pros" of using chrome is that as a non-
| dutch speaking guy in the Netherlands chrome actually can
| translate pages 80% of the time. I almost don't use my iPad
| for browsing as safari (on iOS 14) cannot and chrome is a
| little quicker than a dead horse.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 'when you have time'.
|
| Right...
|
| Have you noticed that todo lists tend to progress a bit like
| ticket queues for long lived projects? The oldest open ticket
| is usually from the day the ticket system was founded and the
| last one from five minutes ago. And there is a monotonic
| increase in the number of open tickets across any span of time
| you care to zoom in on.
| Tamer wrote:
| Over 1000 (+The great Suspender) https://i.imgur.com/ESBKggu.png
| (Session Buddy)
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 1827 tabs here - I have a problem. Firefox devs, if you're
| listening, an "automatically clear tabs older than 30 days on
| close/open" option would be highly desirable for me (and maybe
| those like me).
| sebow wrote:
| I also recently closed ~8k.(Yes, mostly HN/lobsters/news and
| usually things I found interesting in the past ~6 months) For
| firefox users: there's a nice little addon called
| LoadTabOnSelect3. Without it firefox crashes to the point where
| you can't recover a session if firefox tries to impossibly load
| thousands of tabs on a machine(ram amount is irrelevant). The
| feature you're talking about is found in many addons, I believe
| also in the one i mentioned. Don't hold your breath waiting for
| Mozilla to implement good things quickly (though they're much
| better in that regard than Google: which removes features and
| makes the web experience worse)
| iKlsR wrote:
| Funny that I will hoard an entire window with dozens for weeks,
| accidentally lose it one day and be like meh.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| For bonus points, I'm pretty sure that option exists on Firefox
| for Android
| jacquesm wrote:
| Probably a multiple of that here. My trick to keep it manageable
| is when I start a new job I start a new browser instance and I
| really try hard to keep all of the related articles open in tabs
| in that particular instance. Vertical tabs are pretty much a must
| for this. Then, when the job is done (invoice sent) the whole
| browser instance is nuked and that cleans it all up again. It's a
| bit like garbage collection in software, I don't have to make any
| small decisions because I'll just kill the whole process.
| mohamez wrote:
| On Chrome: OneTab + The Marvellous Suspender + "Ctrl+Shift+A" to
| search tabs, did wonders for me.
| thomaspaulmann wrote:
| Only?
| rektide wrote:
| Opera browser's forums shutting down made me sad, because I had a
| very long very old post talking about how the browser window was
| a container of information.
|
| My final ask was a way to save a single window into a session,
| which would complement Opera's ability to load a session of
| windows.
|
| Making the browser a better organizer of information, where
| subworkspaces can be open & closed, remains a priority for me,
| decades latter (because I still have too many tabs open). I had
| some progress reading out & snapshotting current tabs across
| devices, but I'd like a weekly list, and ability yo annotate
| better the tabs that cross my feed.
| superkuh wrote:
| I started tabbed browsing with Opera 5. It was amazing then
| back when I could do 50 tabs, and it's amazing now with firefox
| forks when I can do 500 tabs with less than 3GB of ram used
| (with Noscript on for most websites not whitelisted). But don't
| try this in a multi-process browser, not even modern Firefox
| can handle truly large session files like Palemoon or Seamonkey
| classic can.
|
| I have saved my Opera->Firefox->Palemoon session files at least
| every month since 2003. I have a little perl script for
| converting any of their session file formats to a number of
| tabs (http://superkuh.com/opera-sessions-to-tab-number.pl.txt).
| Using it I can plot the number of tabs in my browser over 20
| years. But that's just trivial visualization. I still find my
| old session files valuable in other ways.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Over 15 tabs and the person is just using it as a conversation
| piece.
| tconfrey wrote:
| Tabs == To-do's
|
| Every open tab is a pending to-do, if only to come back and close
| or bookmark it. Having hundreds of open todo's in your face the
| whole time takes a mental toll. For most people closing tabs will
| free up some mental space as well as swap space.
|
| The problem is that it's still too hard to save and organize
| things as you go without the right tooling. My approach FWIW:
|
| https://braintool.org/2022/01/28/Browser-based-Productivity-...
| [deleted]
| travoltaj wrote:
| I have a massive tab problem, and had to build a personal SOP to
| manage it. I have 400+ tabs open on Chrome right now, on my
| mobile. Every now and then, I use chrome on my laptop to open all
| tabs from my mobile (tabs from other devices show in History),
| save them to one tab (browser extension), and save it as a HTML,
| and close all tabs on my mobile. It doesn't take more than a week
| to build up to more than 100 again.
|
| I believe my record has been 1100+ tabs on Chrome, and 5000+ tabs
| on Opera Mobile.
|
| The desktop version of these apps can't handle these amounts
| nearly as well..
| morninglight wrote:
| What is the cost of this capability in terms of a browser's
| memory footprint, performance and security? In other words, if
| the browser could omit this capability would it be
| significantly smaller, faster and more secure?
|
| If that were true, then perhaps there should be a "pro" or
| "enterprise" version of the browser at a different price point.
| Most users can easily limit themselves to about 10 tabs.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Is there some kind of tree view for bookmarks as well? I have
| hundreds. I put them into relevant folder, and put those folders
| into more folders. Still, it does feel a little clunky and I'm
| running out of space at the top of my bookmarks bar.
| Macha wrote:
| Firefox bookmarks open in the sidebar these days with Ctrl-B
| which is pretty similar? I guess the one disadvantage compared
| to the tree presentation of tree tabs is that everything starts
| collapsed.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| The same extension in the article, Sideberry does so for
| bookmarks. It's on the first panel by default.
| mjevans wrote:
| Firefox's switch to dynamically unloading opened tabs has
| regressed my use of the UI from precached anything I might want
| to have open or remember later... to a rolling snowball of tabs
| cross multiple 'windows' (idea sessions) and several profiles
| (cookie sandboxes).
|
| Yeah, it's bad enough that the tab search feature is useful and
| also that I'd like some better way of re-organizing the dataset.
| the8472 wrote:
| browser.tabs.unloadOnLowMemory defaults to false for me? and
| for cookie sandboxes you can use container tabs.
| nix0n wrote:
| Defaults to true for me, but sometimes I end up using
| about:unloads to manually force unloading anyway.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Only 218?
| mavhc wrote:
| I have 1000 tabs open over various computers, not sure it's a
| good thing though, 10% I need, 20% I forgot to close, and 70% I'm
| totally going to get around to reading one day
| qwertox wrote:
| Meanwhile here I am on Chrome using a Python script which kills
| all Chrome instances so that it presents me the "restore tabs"
| option upon startup when I decide that I want to continue the
| last session the next day. I do this because my default settings
| are to load some predefined pages which I use very often.
|
| This is on Windows, which I power off every night. When I send it
| to sleep for a couple of days in a row (in order to "persist" my
| Chrome windows and tabs) it suddenly stops working. The entire
| machine stops working. Well, I can still use it, but I can't
| start new processes (I do have 32 GB of RAM and a lot of it is
| not used then).
|
| Only a matter of months until I switch to some Apple product, I'm
| so done with Windows.
| incanus77 wrote:
| I'll add to the chorus of "only?"
|
| I have abut 300 right now across three Macs, an iPad, and an
| iPhone, plus Safari Tab Groups (i.e. tab groups shared between
| machines) with 11 groups of (on average) about 15 tabs per group.
|
| Before Safari Tab Groups, I had some Bash & AppleScripts setup to
| give me menu access to all tabs via SwiftBar and some Syncthing
| syncing of tabs metadata.
|
| I also actively bookmark (in fact, one of my 11 tab groups is "To
| Pinboard" which allows me a space to thoughtfully write up
| certain links for my link blog[1]) and I aggressively close tabs.
|
| But I'm in a lot of projects, some stalled, some periodic, some
| active, some tiny, some technical, some more blue sky-y.
|
| I'm always reading the book that is the internet - tabs are all
| pages.
|
| I don't really get overwhelmed by it since everything has a place
| and I don't have to dedicate mental energy to it, knowing my
| system works.
|
| [1] https://justinmiller.io/links/
| avmich wrote:
| Is there a tool which saves on the local machine the pages which
| were opened? So that e.g. browser can safely be closed, and then
| information from those pages searched, and page re-opened if
| needed? I remember there were some companies specializing in
| desktop-wide search...
| myhf wrote:
| Pinboard[1] has a browser plugin that can do that with a "save
| tab set" command. Searching the saved bookmarks is a separate
| paid feature.
|
| [1] https://pinboard.in/
| deepdriver wrote:
| Chrome and Firefox have a setting to "reopen where I left off."
| This will save your tabs when you quit and reopen them when you
| start a new browser window. Things get complicated when you
| have multiple windows open at the same time. "Bookmark all
| tabs" is a good workaround if you're leery about plugins.
| michaelsalim wrote:
| Sideberry has a snapshot feature! I didn't write about it in
| the article but it's another huge reason why it's great.
|
| It stores your tabs in the panel properly. Additionally, you
| can also set it to save your tabs every [INTERVAL] as a backup
| system.
| TylerE wrote:
| Chrome almost always manages this
| m12k wrote:
| I use OneTab for this. It feels like the browser equivalent of
| just sweeping all the papers on your desk into a drawer
| michaelsalim wrote:
| Author here. Based on some of the comments, it sounds like I'm an
| amateur by HN standards haha. But hey, now I can send this to
| people who says I'm crazy.
| dmd wrote:
| No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still
| can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On
| a really busy day, maybe 8?
| bgilroy26 wrote:
| You're probably more of a project finisher than a project
| starter
|
| Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to
| learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since
| opening (cumulatively 1000+)
| krallja wrote:
| I have those too. They're called Bookmarks. Some of them are
| decades old. I don't leave them in RAM.
| throwaway821909 wrote:
| It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going
| through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it
| links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots,
| downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM
| but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically
| would be ideal)
| antonymy wrote:
| Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some
| people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular
| storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to
| browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet
| I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| To be fair, Firefox starts up quickly even with hundreds of
| tabs saved, because only the pinned and current tabs are
| loaded on start. I used to think it was awesome how it kept
| memory use efficient by leaving unused tabs unloaded, but
| it has gotten too good.
|
| I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but
| the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've
| become less selective with this power.
| baal80spam wrote:
| Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat
| and tidy at the end of day.
| Retr0id wrote:
| Heh, I think you might be onto something here.
|
| I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right
| now.
|
| I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second
| desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent
| projects.
|
| I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses
| many tabs, or vice versa.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| /me glances at my (cluttered) desk
|
| There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close
| my tabs every day.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no
| evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs
| ;)
|
| But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on
| the location of a prime specimen and see what happens
| when we breed them with the third kind to establish if
| there is a genetic component to this.
| ok_dad wrote:
| I used to have a completely clean desk at an engineering
| company where everyone had piles and piles of spec sheets,
| documentation, and first articles strewn around. People
| thought I didn't work, so I piled up a few things here and
| there to gather dust and look "messy" and kept the working
| area of my desk clean :)
| furyofantares wrote:
| I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I
| use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though,
| where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not
| remember how to get there since you've only done it once.
| insightcheck wrote:
| Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an
| introductory review paper that links to dozens of other
| sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are
| relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new
| tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too.
| Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs
| you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them
| one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen
| when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article,
| or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you
| might start with one or more pages of Google search results).
|
| Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed
| newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you
| get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of
| them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+
| tabs to read through.
|
| However, if you don't need to do that much research for a
| particular task (or you can get the information you need from
| just a few resources like a quality book), you may not
| encounter a need to open this many tabs.
| knolan wrote:
| When I'm writing a paper I'll download the PDFs of relevant
| papers to a subfolder of my TeX document's folder and start
| building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk.
| Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about
| forgetting something.
| lotw_dot_site wrote:
| One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful
| rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up
| with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development
| version of my own namesake :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment
| with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do
| pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of
| documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what
| bits that are relevant came from which document. This is
| getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking
| plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file
| with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.
| ok_dad wrote:
| Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if
| I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10
| search tabs open.
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small.
|
| And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs
| from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between
| them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a
| silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and
| visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no
| developer can't do much.
| fletchowns wrote:
| Simple Tab Groups is an extremely useful Firefox extension:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
| baal80spam wrote:
| I prefer Chrome's built-in tab grouping feature and I cannot
| understand why Firefox doesn't have it out of the box.
| daveidol wrote:
| It's a relatively new feature for Chrome, but I agree I think
| FF should copy it
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