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

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#111

Post by Vinnl »

ashleyn wrote: post #17

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.

It sounds like when you, say, compare a bunch of different products, you have an uncanny ability to know exactly where in your tab history those products are? I really have to open them in a bunch of tabs as I go, and then I can quickly switch between them when I'm at the point of making a choice.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#112

Post by wt__ »

If this really is attributable to ADHD (and I’m sceptical) perhaps the opposite is those of us with (very mild, undiagnosed) OCD who insist on cleaning our tabs up several times a day?

I can fully understand “hoarding” for people who don’t understand how tabs work, or that they can slow things down/get in the way, so don’t realise (on iOS Safari for instance), they have dozens of old tabs in the background.

What I don’t understand is:

(a) as I see it, surely the default behaviour is… you’re working on some project or other, gradually accumulating more and more tabs, the space for each starts to get a bit small, you can’t tell what they are, you know you don’t need most of them, your computer starts to feel a bit sluggish (and frankly something will be hogging memory, I can’t imagine how bad it would get with hundreds of them, never mind figures like 7,800 in the comments) so… therefore “oh I have too many tabs open, let’s close a few / them all”

(b) why don’t more people make use of History? That’s got me out of a hole many times, especially as I can often remember roughly when looked at something and Firefox offers a filtered search by page title.

c) Tab Groups make my head hurt every time I’ve tried to use them, it feels like more effort organising the groups, and knowing that sooner or later i will place a tab in The Wrong Group, and then I have to move it to the correct one, and mentally debate if I should even still have that group at all, get distracted by the stuff in those tabs instead of what I should be working on etc.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#113

Post by wink »

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…

I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle).

The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.

I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).

The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.

ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.

So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.

The middle ground is missing (on several axis):

  - daily & semi-important -> bookmarks bar
  - long-term & maybe important & !daily -> bookmark manager
  - "need to read this" -> tab

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#114

Post by dkarl »

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…

I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#115

Post by random3 »

ulbu wrote: post #81
snailmailman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one. I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type Y…

tabs is just not the correct abstraction for focused work.

To clarify - is Internet, the browser (to which tabs are implicit) not the “correct” abstraction either? What are you trying to say?

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#116

Post by random3 »

nancyminusone wrote: post #71
r_lee wrote: post #63

>reads title smells like ADHD "I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists." yup

Doesn't make sense to me, and I've been diagnosed with the same. I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it? Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.

You know in a chrome you can search through tabs, right?

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#117

Post by random3 »

bhaney wrote: post #19

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…

The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#118

Post by random3 »

BeetleB wrote: post #68
RyanOD wrote: post #67

Every couple weeks, I click the red "x" and close all my tabs and start fresh. This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.

Here's a more intermediate approach: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/ The basic idea: It closes any tab that has not been visited in the last N hours. You can lock tabs to prevent them from closing (you can match on domain names, etc). You can also see the last so many tabs it closed (1000? I forgot if this is configurable). It's been fantastic . I don't need to manually manage tabs any mor…

This sort of denies there was any purpose to keep the tab open to begin with.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#119

Post by random3 »

Yizahi wrote: post #83

Thankfully Firefox helped me with tab hoarding dependency, by silently losing saves session without any visible crash or issue, just on the normal open. Now I have to treat tabs as if they won't be saved ever again and don't leave anything important open. Thanks Mozilla, great use of your time and money, spending them on useless LLM integration and lining CEOs pockets instead of fixing damn basic functionality.

lol - Chrome does the same - state management is pure crap

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#120

Post by em-bee »

wink wrote: post #113
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…

I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle). The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding. I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access). The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda w…

daily, regardless of how important, works better as a tab. could even be a pinned tab.

"long-term & !daily" is the only thing that could be a bookmark. the problem then is categorization. tagging helps. but before i bookmark something i open it as a tab to look at it, which makes bookmarking a extra step over "i want to keep this, so i'll just not close the tab". somewhere the impulse from "i want to keep this" to "bookmark this" is missing.

Post reply on HN