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You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

berjon.com

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Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#41

Post by radlad »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

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?

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.

Easy come, easy go.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#43

Post by wenc »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

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 open tons of tabs but they rarely stay open.

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgiK-HWKPjw

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#44

Post by cole-k »

broodbucket wrote: post #30

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?

Many tab user (~20-50?) reporting in.

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."

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#45

Post by extra88 »

wenc wrote: post #43
broodbucket wrote: post #30

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 open tons of tabs but they rarely stay open. 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 doin…

> 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

That's what RSS is for.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#46

Post by caryme »

julianeon wrote: post #19

Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes. I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen. In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them. Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed. The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a win…

This matches my usage pattern and I use the term "tab bankruptcy." Twinsies!

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#47

Post by Given_47 »

ksec wrote: post #36
broodbucket wrote: post #30

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?

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 re…

> 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.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#48

Post by Dalewyn »

Izkata wrote: post #34
broodbucket wrote: post #30

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 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 f…

>I use them instead of bookmarks.

This.

The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#49

Post by wenc »

extra88 wrote: post #45
wenc wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I open tons of tabs but they rarely stay open. 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 doin…

> 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 That's what RSS is for.

Yes, I was a Google Reader user for a long time.

When it shut down, I never went back to RSS.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#50

Post by julianeon »

inhumantsar wrote: post #35
julianeon wrote: post #19

Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes. I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen. In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them. Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed. The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a win…

Wouldn't PDFs be a better way to save them? Full page screenshots glitch out me about half the time, esp sites that use js to muck with scrolling

This is pretty tightly tied to my particular setup on Ubuntu, using scrot to screenshot and feh to view images and the terminal to rename them, but here's the issues I'd have w PDFs...

The biggest problem is that sounds more verbose. I'd be saving the page as a PDF, but then I'd have to hunt more to find out why I saved it, since save as PDF often extends beyond one page iirc. Really one page of screenshot is plenty for my needs.

Also PDF's are a lot "heavier" than images. I can scroll through 50 images in a minute, using feh. I don't know how I'd go through multiple PDF's actually, but in any case I imagine in the best case scenario it's still slower. The effort of loading 10 PDFs would deter me from doing it as often, I think.

Finally, using scrot to get the screenshot, it's as simple as one command. Using ctrl+d, it doesn't even require a terminal, I just enter it into the 'command bar' (basically like an always-open browser address bar but for commands on i3). I also do scrot -s to save images sometimes if I don't want the whole page, but that takes slightly longer. With scrot (no arg) I get the whole page instantly, with scrot -s I have to draw a box around the part I want to save.

About 90% of the time scrot (for screenshot) - then open terminal, rename file - is good enough and takes on the order of 15 seconds. It's already very lean, and I don't think I can abstract away the naming part, which is where most of the time goes anyway.

If I wanted to save time I could just not rename the screenshot and keep the name as basically a timestamp, but then I don't know the image's contents. I did actually try using OCR, which kinda worked, but not as well as renaming, which succinctly gets my point across better than OCR's verbosity. Bottom line, if I want to remember a browser screenshot, it's worth 10 seconds of my time to explain why through a descriptive filename. I save I should say I've had no issues using scrot: works 100% of the time so far, faithfully getting what's on my screen. If I did have glitch issues I might search for an alternative - but I haven't had any so far.

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