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You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

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Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#51

Post by julianeon »

caryme wrote: post #46
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!

Great taste my friend! Once you get used to it, it's hard to imagine anything better.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#52

Post by mostlylurks »

clouddrover wrote: post #29
DennisP wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's silly to require manual intervention for something so easy to automate. For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs, bookmarks aren't that helpful. I can't resist quoting the article: > (If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)

> For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.

As someone that opens up hundreds (or thousands) of tabs regularly, I close each tab after I'm done with that specific tab, and it would make no sense to close it before that. But because I open most of my tabs from pages which contain a lot of links, like search results or link aggregators, and because each of those tabs may in turn generate even more tabs because they contain several relevant links or may raise questions which lead me to throw some more queries at my favorite search engine, it takes quite a bit of time before I take the first peak at most of the resulting tabs, so they end up sticking around until I go through them, one by one.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#53

Post by DiggyJohnson »

Given_47 wrote: post #47
ksec wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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?

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#54

Post by fassssst »

Dalewyn wrote: post #48
Izkata wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But why?

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#56

Post by djbusby »

DiggyJohnson wrote: post #53
Given_47 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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?

Your browser likely has a tab search feature (chrome and FF have it). So, you can see/find easy. Also some plugins can help there too.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#57

Post by evanjrowley »

fassssst wrote: post #54
Dalewyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But why?

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.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#58

Post by SkyArrow »

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

PDFs are ok but I prefer the SingleFile extension which has the benefit of not introducing page breaks which often split images in two. It also preserves the original source and assets in case one ever needs to extract them.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#59

Post by zx8080 »

skybrian wrote: post #21
zx8080 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maintaining Chromium takes at least around $1B annually. This involves playing around with all that shiny new standards to pass the unneeded stuff together with needed one to make sure a browser engineering does not need less than that sum. Why? Because if it's cheaper then anyome could make browser. And allow it ignore ads. DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now. It's actually very clever: once b…

I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things? On mobile, some people even use apps that only interact with one bank. Or an app just for YouTube. (I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.) A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.

> I don’t see why you can’t use one browser for banking and another for other things?

Because those banks have recently replaced SMS OTP with mobile app push confirmation dialog. But the bank's app does not want to work when there's any app installed on a smartphone not specifically whitelisted in a bank.

Everyone hates SMS OTP them here at HN, but here's an alternative.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#60

Post by keepamovin »

cole-k wrote: post #44
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 obse…

> 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

Ha! Like a tab succubus

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