61–70 of 129 posts
Haven't read the article yet, but I added it to my HN favorites to read later...
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…
So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.
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
For example, my HN-dedicated firefox window has ~900 tabs right now, from June. All save the recent 5 are unloaded. I probably won't look at them again but just going through the list is a chronological reminder of what I was doing. Honestly, I could close them all but there's a "what if I need that sub-list of tabs dedicated to XYZ again?" in my head that wins out.
I have a separate note/data management system so this is mostly just... something.
>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
To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.
Bookmark titles are editable. If you create a bookmark and the title doesn't mean anything, change it.
I often put bookmarks on the toolbar, so I shorten them to one character, or empty string (if the icon is clear) to have space for as many as possible.
> I don't like the browser bookmarking system because it's too hard to organize the folders and it's not visual
But then goes on to write a whole section of the article "Here's a few interesting links I discovered buried in those 664 tabs" which gives nothing but topic headings, under which are lists of raw links with no description.
:)
This approach has never once caused me any issues...and it sure feels good.
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.
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 more. I happily keep opening new tabs, knowing full well it will clean up after me.
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.
I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars using computers with severly degradated performance. . When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar) plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand is so much more productive...
I have 546 tabs in Firefox (on macOS) at the moment. I've never noticed any degraded performance. On my phone (iPhone) it's 490+ but that's because 500 is the max. I don't think it keeps them truly loaded until you go back to them.
> 300+ on my Mac. "Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years" (04.08.2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156568
I currently have 20,097 tabs open in one browser profile. The oldest tab appears to be an HN post from 2.5 years ago, which must be the last time I swept tabs into bookmarks. I used to sweep them more regularly, but Firefox + Sidebery don't even break a sweat with 20K tabs, apparently, so why bother? The only downside is that it takes about 15 seconds for the browser to launch. I restart the browser whenever Firefox…
I don't open heavy websites in FF, though. For youtube links, I always use Brave.