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Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

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Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#11

Post by rtmx »

I think a good way to treat tabs and open files in other apps is like the 'zero inbox' when 'open' means 'do something about it', it's your task list.

Hence, I could never understand how people have more than like 20 tabs open — what are you working on in this case? For myself, I only go to 20-ish territories when aggressively looking for docs or opening something for quick batch-like extraction, it's a very short-timed situation.

Usually it's just three pinned mailboxes and something I'm currently on, like 2-5 tabs, one of them is likely a search engine.

Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#13

Post by standardly »

apothegm wrote: post #9
WalterGR wrote: post #8

More than 6,000 just on my phone. No tabs groups. I only use that browser for recreation. It’s an undifferentiated stream of “things that look interesting” and I may or may not ever look at the tabs again, which is fine. Far fewer on browsers I use for productive pursuits, but hundreds across multiple windows and many tab groups. I have a lot of projects, and haven’t found a great way ‘shelve’ and ‘unshelve’ them.

I’m the same way. Phone is around 250 right now because I cleared out all open tabs about a year ago — was never going to look at them again. About 20-50 open on the personal laptop at a given moment, bursting higher when researching or troubleshooting something. Work computer has more like 75 as baseline, bursting to a couple hundred. Every now and then I very briefly get that back below 20.

GEEZ have you guys tried bookmarks?!

Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#14

Post by DantesKite »

About four right now.

I used to have far more, but I learned the habit of bookmarking tabs that I've kept open for a long period of time.

Actually, now that I think about it, this would make for a useful browser extension: have an LLM that automatically asks to bookmark tabs that have been inactive but present for X number of days.

Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#16

Post by WalterGR »

standardly wrote: post #13
apothegm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the same way. Phone is around 250 right now because I cleared out all open tabs about a year ago — was never going to look at them again. About 20-50 open on the personal laptop at a given moment, bursting higher when researching or troubleshooting something. Work computer has more like 75 as baseline, bursting to a couple hundred. Every now and then I very briefly get that back below 20.

GEEZ have you guys tried bookmarks?!

Is there a good way to use bookmarks to save and restore (think: shelve/unshelve or archive/unarchive) units of multiple windows that may contain tab groups?

(Stretch ask: including favicons.)

Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#17

Post by nonamesleft »

1209 across 8 windows, been like this since the year 2000 or thereabouts (netscape with a tabbed window manager back then, then opera), most of them are hibernated. Why? Bookmarks just dont seem to work for me, i do have some thousands of those for stuff that is not related to anything thats going on right now.

Re: Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why?

#18

Post by apothegm »

standardly wrote: post #13
apothegm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m the same way. Phone is around 250 right now because I cleared out all open tabs about a year ago — was never going to look at them again. About 20-50 open on the personal laptop at a given moment, bursting higher when researching or troubleshooting something. Work computer has more like 75 as baseline, bursting to a couple hundred. Every now and then I very briefly get that back below 20.

GEEZ have you guys tried bookmarks?!

Bookmarks are great for that thing I don’t need to look at for months but want to go back to to get so and so for their birthday. They’re annoying AF for active projects.

Bookmarks require organizing them; folders worth involve waiting for them to open. Also, both bookmarks and following links to reopen things require using the mouse if you don’t want to use incredibly slow, clunky accessibility UIs, and I aim to mouse as little as possible. Context switching is hard enough without having to locate your bookmarks and wait for all the pages to load.

At work I’ve typically got a half dozen ephemeral pull requests (mine and teammates) on both comment and diff view, GitHub actions in flight, a handful of frequently-referred dashboards, a dozen tabs for various AWS services and logs, another 1-2 dozen tabs each for APIs I’m integrating in some of said PRs, plus the relevant admin panels for those third party services; issue tracker with several tabs for projects and tickets in flight or upcoming or being written/fleshed out; internal documentation I’m writing or reading; and then a couple dozen for whatever other topic I’m researching at the moment.

That gets me through a typical day with a couple meetings; a bunch of PR review and revisions; a bug or data question investigation or two; and a few hours of good deep focus work.

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