Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 129 posts

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#11

Post by cosmic_cheese »

apercu wrote: post #6
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

> Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.

Efficacy plays a role in this effect, but so does unintuitive connections between search terms and results. "Google-fu" used to be a somewhat solid "science" but now small query differences can yield unpredictable effects on results, and the likelihood of remembering the exact query that yielded the desired result is low.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#12

Post by IAmBroom »

apercu wrote: post #6
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

> Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.

"I see you're searching for 19th-century mayors of New York City. Here's some 4k UHD TV's for sale! (Promoted)"

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#14

Post by apparent »

This used to be an issue for me, but it seems that in Brave it unloads tabs efficiently enough that I can have many hundreds open (on an MBA) without adverse effect. The only time I go in and clear things out, it's when I need to reboot and have to categorize/save all my incognito tabs, which are wiped out on quit.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#16

Post by wintermutestwin »

Bah! Tab “hoarding” is part of my workflow and it works great with the right tooling in place: FF with sidebury, containers, and suspender extensions. Panels for 8 high level topics with a set of 10-20 pinned tabs for each and I can see ~60 tabs per panel at once. I work in three phases: tab accumulation (browsing), tab elimination (reading), tab reorg to move tabs to specific panels. Of course vertical tabs make this all possible and it is frustrating that there isn’t a browser with all of my extension functionality and ux baked in.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#17

Post by ashleyn »

It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common. I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is.

I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#18

Post by Noumenon72 »

I recently discovered that Chrome "More Tools" lets you "Name Window", so you can find the tab you want with alt-tab even if you opened some other tabs in front of it. Like I have one for "Gemini Enterprise", "AWS Console", etc. I might have some other tabs open with AWS Console but I can use this to find my main one.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#19

Post by bhaney »

I'm so tired of this topic.

"Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently support those use cases. The tab hoarding dilemma arose during this period, and should have died with it. I currently have more tabs open than the author did, on a 15 year old laptop running an out-of-date version of Chromium, and it's using less than a gig of ram. >99% of the tabs are evicted, which is done automatically by the browser based on the presence of ephemeral data in the tab (partially filled out forms) and my typical frequency of accessing that tab. It works great. Every major browser has some form of this, as well as tab searching and tab grouping. If you want to use tabs as if they're bookmarks, like I do, you've been able to do so without problems for many years. It's time to retire the rhetoric of the scandalous tab hoarder.

Post reply on HN