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45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

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Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#11

Post by Tagbert »

wvenable wrote: post #2

20? I'm up an average of 200. For those wondering how that is manageable I use Firefox with multirow tabs. And how it gets so high is that I always open links in new tabs in the background when doing any research.

I’m similar, I have around 200 tabs open at any given time on my work machine. I use Firefox and a plugin called Panorama to manage them.

On an ongoing basis, I am typically working on 4-5 projects plus some utility functions. I use Panorama to group the tabs by project. Each project has 10-20 tabs open. Panorama only shows the tabs from a particular group at a given time. By grouping the tabs, the cognitive load is reduced.

Over the course of a day, I will visit most of these project groups and interact with the tabs in each. Some of long running tabs like the main project page. Others are tabs for current open issue. It is helpful to me to be able to treat each project as a browser workspace and be able to return to that workspace at will. Using bookmarks and closing tabs would add more overhead. Often I am switching quickly between projects and I may have open editing sessions on one or more tabs that are not ready to close.

The browser+OS (MacOS ) handles the RAM usage gracefully and swaps tabs to SSD when they are not recently used and more memory is needed. I’ve never seen an “out of memory” message even though I’m running Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps like Affinity Photo at the same time.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#13

Post by piceas »

My tabs are a convenientish curated list. It is wasteful and I hate it. At worst (best?) I've taken to sending a tab to another device as a way of dismissing it for later.

I hope someone jumps on the language model hype and makes an extension that summarizes what I have read, seen, and done on the web. Perhaps with a choice screenshot or two.

I don't need a tree of pages, a spreadsheet, or a pie chart of time wasted on hn. I spent my time here on purpose, show me or tell me why. Remind me of the topics so I can close the tab and come back to it easily when needed.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#14

Post by JohnFen »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #7

It brings me peace to close tabs. I try to aim for having 4 or 5 open. Then I look at my girlfriend's screen and the favicon doesn't even fit it in the tab anymore and it kills me.

I really don't understand how people can stand using their browser in that way. The only time I ever have more than two tabs going is if I'm actively researching something -- and even then, I'll have multiple instances of the browser, each with 4-5 tabs, and at the end of my research session, they all get closed down.

But I don't think that people who have an insane number of tabs going are doing it wrong or anything. I'm just amazed that people find doing that to be useful.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#16

Post by ratg13 »

piceas wrote: post #13

My tabs are a convenientish curated list. It is wasteful and I hate it. At worst (best?) I've taken to sending a tab to another device as a way of dismissing it for later. I hope someone jumps on the language model hype and makes an extension that summarizes what I have read, seen, and done on the web. Perhaps with a choice screenshot or two. I don't need a tree of pages, a spreadsheet, or a pie chart of time wasted…

OneTab and Pocket seem like they might be a good fit for you.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#17

Post by robnotbob »

wvenable wrote: post #2

20? I'm up an average of 200. For those wondering how that is manageable I use Firefox with multirow tabs. And how it gets so high is that I always open links in new tabs in the background when doing any research.

I've been using a newish browser called Arc (OSX only at the moment) for a little bit and it's perfect for this sort of workflow.

They've basically have two types of tabs. Pinned tabs which persist and nonpinned tabs which do not.

https://resources.arc.net/en/articles/6449654-pinned-tabs-ta...

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#18

Post by TillE »

JohnFen wrote: post #14
Peanuts99 wrote: post #7

It brings me peace to close tabs. I try to aim for having 4 or 5 open. Then I look at my girlfriend's screen and the favicon doesn't even fit it in the tab anymore and it kills me.

I really don't understand how people can stand using their browser in that way. The only time I ever have more than two tabs going is if I'm actively researching something -- and even then, I'll have multiple instances of the browser, each with 4-5 tabs, and at the end of my research session, they all get closed down. But I don't think that people who have an insane number of tabs going are doing it wrong or anything…

For me at least, it's basically a substitute for a good bookmarking system. I want to get back to that tab eventually, but if I just bookmark it, it'll get lost in the churn and forgotten forever. I hope some day there will be a holy grail of bookmarking software which somehow solves this, but I don't even know what that would look like.

If I'm working on a specific project and find a great resource, I'll definitely paste the link in an Obsidian note and close the tab. But there's plenty of stuff which doesn't quite fit that workflow.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#19

Post by deprecative »

TillE wrote: post #18
JohnFen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't understand how people can stand using their browser in that way. The only time I ever have more than two tabs going is if I'm actively researching something -- and even then, I'll have multiple instances of the browser, each with 4-5 tabs, and at the end of my research session, they all get closed down. But I don't think that people who have an insane number of tabs going are doing it wrong or anything…

For me at least, it's basically a substitute for a good bookmarking system. I want to get back to that tab eventually, but if I just bookmark it, it'll get lost in the churn and forgotten forever. I hope some day there will be a holy grail of bookmarking software which somehow solves this, but I don't even know what that would look like. If I'm working on a specific project and find a great resource, I'll definitely…

I dunno dude, if you want to save the tab but it gets forgotten if you save it then it probably wasn't all that important. I'd argue that most folks that save tabs or thrive on tab bloat are doing themselves a major disservice and are overly invested in passing fancies rather than meaningful consumption they purport.

Re: 45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

#20

Post by realitythreek »

Peanuts99 wrote: post #7

It brings me peace to close tabs. I try to aim for having 4 or 5 open. Then I look at my girlfriend's screen and the favicon doesn't even fit it in the tab anymore and it kills me.

I expand this idea a tad. 4-8 tabs per window. But then I organize tabs based on context. Then I can switch around contexts and still have my handful of tabs open.

Sometimes that means 1 window, sometimes that means 4 windows. Just depends on what I’m doing.

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