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I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it! I hate having more than 6-7
by blauditore 10y ago
I meet many tab hoarders (always open a new one, never close any, ending up with hundrets), but just can't wrap my head around it!
I hate having more than 6-7 simultaneously open because it gets increasingly harder to keep an overview of what you're doing. The same applies for IDE tabs or windows. Too much of them and finding the right one becomes increasingly hard, and losing the thread more likely.
- baby 10y agoNot if you use Tree Style Tabs. I've been using it for years and I have no idea how other people can efficiently browse the web without it.
- kakarot 10y agoTree Style Tabs is a nice idea, but I found the balance of aesthetic and speed for me to be with pressing Ctrl+L and then inputting a few letters relating to the open tab I seek, then just pressing Enter and switching to the tab.
- mcintyre1994 10y agoI don't understand why this seems to only be a thing in Firefox - it's awesome.
- fiddlerwoaroof 10y agoI remember looking for a similar Chrome extension, but I think Chrome doesn't provide the appropriate hooks, or something.
- callalex 10y agoInterestingly, Mozilla is trying to move in the same direction by supporting the same extension APIs as Chrome because they are more maintainable/secure/universal/performant but continue to struggle with adoption because things like the Tree Style Tabs extension are not possible with that api https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-developing-firefox-add-ons/ https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/08/21/the-future-of-dev...
- baby 10y agoAnd it sucks because it's the only reason I'm not moving to Chrome -- Tree Style Tab.
- gyrgtyn 10y agoHow do you get this feature? I know I've seen it, but it's not doing it on Mac Chrome.
- Macha 10y agoFirefox. Maybe chrome has it as well, but Firefox does look like Chrome if you're not looking closely these days.
- pkd 10y agoYou can also type % followed by the query in the search bar to only search within open tabs.
- blauditore 10y agoHmm, looks interesting. I've tried out several tools for organizing tabs, but none of them really worked as well as aggressive manual "garbage collection" for me. Usually the problem was that switching between groups (or whatever concept) was too complicated, or part of the tabs were hidden too much. Maybe I should give this one a try.
- mmagin 10y agoWith Tree Style Tabs I just got to the same level of disorder with even more tabs open. It didn't actually help my behavior :)
- baby 10y agoEven by using nested tabs?
- SerLava 10y agoIf you have to deal with a lot of task switching, blindly closing browser tabs would be a huge waste of time. You can individually check each tab before closing the ones you don't need, but that takes time and cognitive load. So I leave them open until the computer can't handle it.
- k__ 10y agoFinding the right tab is much harder if you got a whole bunch of them. I always close them, most aren't needed for a long time. But if I need stuff I closed I just hit 'reopen closed tab' a few times.
- scholia 10y agoMuch easier in Firefox since you just start typing the name of the site then choose to switch to that tab from the drop-down menu. Or you can pick it off the (down-arrow) drop-down list of your tabs, or just use the mouse-wheel to scroll quickly through all the tab headings.... I typically have 100 or so tabs in Firefox. I did get over 600 once, but that's too many ;-)
- blauditore 10y agoWell, it's quite similar to garbage collection, or disk defragmentation. It comes with some cost but improves performance, so it's all about finding the best trade-off.
- cortesoft 10y agoWhen I am doing coding work, I often have a ton of tabs open. I will keep different documentation tabs open to the relevant sections. I will keep some tabs with answers on StackOverflow. My open tabs are kinda like my working memory. I could close them and reopen them as needed, but it is easier to just click a tab then to try to find the thing again. In addition, sometimes the pages I am looking at have dynamic navigation, and closing and reopening the page will require a good deal of navigation to find the section I was looking at. Plus, the overall time to reload the content, where if I just have the tab open there is no download time. Also, the tab icons help me remember what I was looking at. I will often keep tabs open for what I wanted to read later.
- blauditore 10y agoYeah, I basically do the same thing, but that hardly ever requires 10 tabs for me. When that happens, finding tabs becomes especially harder once their width starts to shrink. As for read-later, I usually pull them into the bookmarks bar (top level, directly visible) to free up some space.
- visakanv 10y agoI use one-tab.com; works fantastically for me. Not a huge stretch to say it changed my life.
- the_watcher 10y agoI used this years ago, then tried to cure myself of tabs by forcing myself away from it. It didn't take, and I completely forgot about this, going back to The Great Suspender (which is also great). Thanks for reminding me about this!
- Drdrdrq 10y agoThanks, looks interesting! Link: http://www.one-tab.com/ http://www.one-tab.com/
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- sqeaky 10y agoI use my tabs as a task list. I close them once I have read the page, taken action on the knowledge in the page or decided it was too stale to matter anymore.
- pjmlp 10y agoSame here, unless I am piling search results, which will be reviewed right afterwards, I hardly have more than five open. On the other hand I rather use native apps, when given the option. Which I also only keep the ones for the task at hand open.
- k__ 10y agoProbably the same thinking that goes with storing everything on the desktop or having many windows open. I'm more of a less is more guy, when it comes to windows/tabs.
- humblebee 10y agoThere might be a more effective way to accomplish what I do with many tabs, but it works for me at the moment so I haven't attempted to find a browser plugin or extension to change the behavior. I use many tabs as a stack of pages when debugging, researching, or reading aggregate news feeds (reddit, hn). It usually starts with a Google search or two, in which I open all links I think _might_ be relevant based off of what information google can provide me from the results page. From there I read through each and open any further tabs if anything is linked too in the text (I hardly ever actually click navigate, it's most always a new tab). Generally this only goes about 3 deep (search, first page, sub links). I will close any pages that I find have no useful information, but if there is anything I think might be useful in the next 30 minutes I just leave it open. I do this for each of the results I originally opened. Somewhere in the 7-15 tabs generally is the answer I'm looking for or at least there is enough information I can answer my question. If any link is particularly beneficial, I will bookmark it. Generally the time span I have a large number of tabs open is no more than an hour before I'm finished and close everything out. Chrome handles this nicely, if you are on a page and open a tab, it will place the new tab next to the current tab, instead of at the end of the tab list. Some sort of tree tab view would probably work much better for this, but Chromes behavior isn't bad for what I do.
- RainaRelanah 10y agoFor tree tab view, I suggest looking at Tabs Outliner. I can't use Chrome without it anymore.
- twic 10y agoI have this pattern. It plays really well with the 'close all tabs to the right' menu option, because once you've found whatever you were looking for, you can nuke all the leftover tabs. What I'd really like, though, is a 'close all descendant tabs' option.
- luhn 10y agoI tend to lean towards tab hoarding. I use Tab Corral to automatically close out old tabs, which works out pretty well. Rather than having to evaluate whether I still need a certain tab up, it quietly closes it after a bit, usually once I've forgotten about it.
- redthrowaway 10y agoTabs are a todo list. I've currently got two pinned tabs open, JIRA and bitbucket tabs that act as placeholders, one unfinished email, one spotify playlist for work, one podcast, and 6 articles to read. And that's only because I recently restarted Chrome. I can easily have 20+ tabs open if Chrome has been running for a week or two.
- the_watcher 10y agoFor me, it's more that I use my tabs as reminders for things I need to do or things I want to read (I know, this is a pretty bad system, and I try to use a better to do list and tools like Pocket on top of tabs, but I always seem to drift back to just tabs simply because it's the lowest effort system for me to ensure I remember). If I'm working, I'll generally just open a new window and keep the tabs I'm actively using there and get to the backlog later.
- bootloop 10y agoI am a tab hoarder I guess. I use them to organize my work. Every window is a project (right now I have 5 of them) and all the tabs (20-30) are mostly resources I need to fulfill them. If I have completed a project or decided to stop working on it I close the window and get rid of all project related pages at once. I don't use favorites or bookmarks because usually I don't need a link permanently. Edit: I actively try not to get too many. If it starts to hide the title/favicon completely I start to close them again until I can recognize them by title without clicking through them.
- wahsd 10y agoI don't know about others. But for me it's a kind of lack of organization combined with poor technical implementation of UX. As I do things, whether they are reading, researching, task completion, etc. tabs start accumulating and the lack of any kind of management functionality in Chrome makes it rather difficult to clear out the dormant tabs without manually going through every single one. Firefox tried using ... I forget what they called it and renamed it to ... some kind of grouping of tabs. But I think there would be an opportunity for some smart grouping by, e.g., time, i.e., tabs opened within certain periods of time are somehow visually grouped, or type, i.e., using some google foo to classify the URL to differentiate between things like food, news, dev/coding, scientific related tabs. I'm just saying, it is annoying and boring as hell looking at dozens of tabs that are all gray because they are so contracted. There needs to be a better UI solution.
- shalmanese 10y agoI've given up on navigation. I use my tabs like a generational garbage collector. Tabs to the left of the current tab are processed, tabs on the right are to-be-processed. I'll go to a page like reddit or HN and spin off a dozen tabs of things to read. Then I'll go through one by one and either process, delay or close. Once I reach about 250 - 300 tabs, I'll do a longer generation sweep and go through all the tabs and try to get it down to less than 100 or so. Basically, I'm never in need of finding any specific tab. If I want the content from that tab, I'll just open a new one and navigate back to that point. The tabs are really a lightweight to-read list.
- tomaskafka 10y agoThe tabs are transient todo list. This is something I need to finish researching, this is a documentation to what I'm working on, these are 3 great articled I want to read in the evening.
- pjc50 10y ago> overview Why do you need an overview? It's like stack frames: you can limit your scope to what you're currently doing. The other tabs represent stuff that's "parked" and you aspire to come back to. (This is why tabs are better than windows for this, because they maintain a linear order while most systems will re-order window order if you visit the windows) My tab-opening habits predate tabs, because I was raised on Netscape Navigator with a modem using "open in new window" instead. I would read down a page and open interesting-looking hyperlinks in the background, so I didn't have to wait for them to load. Another advantage of this technique on modems was that I could close down the line and carry on reading.
- mvindahl 10y agoI use it like a kind of mental stack or breadcrumb. The tabs most relevant to my current task are on the right, usually no more than three. The rest of the tabs is how I got there, occasionally serving as references. Once I get to the point of making it hard to tell one from the other I tend to do a garbage collection sweep. Sometimes, when switching context, I just reopen Chrome to clear the stack. Incidentally, the note papers floating around on my desk works in a similar way, although they are more of an unordered set. Only one or two are relevant, the rest were helpful at some point but no longer are. Cleaning my table usually results in me dumping the whole thing in the dustbin.