3 ms·

What are you using 100+ tabs for?

by wapz 9y ago

Klover 9y ago
People can use a ton of tabs for a ton of reasons. I used to do the same thing at times, when I used Treestyle tab in Firefox. But it's an old type of extension soon to be deprecated, and was giving me bugs on browser updates (maybe due to it being a XUL extension). The add-on put tabs on the side of the screen, and grouped them up into trees, which you could also collapse. So if you were to browse Wikipedia and click on all sorts of links, you'd have a whole tree with different branches. Then when you take a break, you just collapse the tree and start a new tree. Want to reference something from the Wikipedia tree? Just expand it again! It worked really well with the session restore functionality of Firefox, which doesn't reload all tabs again when the browser launches. So you had very little performance impact for what felt like the perfect bookmark and tab integration. So in order to reach 100+ tabs, it's just one hour of casual browsing per day and within a week you'll have 100 tabs open of Wikipedia trees, various clothing stores, a code problem tree or two, and a HN tree with all the little interesting links. Then you may wonder why you wouldn't just bookmark pages and close tabs? Personally I open bookmarks a few times a year, but this Treestyle extension made me click around so many times per day. (By the way, if anyone has found a similar add-on please let me know)
- wapz 9y ago
  Wow I've never heard of that. The most tabs I've ever personally used is around 25 to do some server stress testing (very low-scale). The most I've ever seen is around 35 from one of my coworkers that uses tabs instead of bookmarks for some reason.
kakarot 9y ago
I said 100+ per instance ;) It's closer to 500 or so at a given time. I have a few instances that only run up a dozen or two tabs in their lifetimes. I do lots of research on a variety of topics, and break it up with ADHD wikipedia binges and the like, then with aggregators like HN it's very easy to open a dozen or two tabs and just start powering through them. Some of these tabs sit for weeks, and some just rot away till they are irrelevant and I delete them. You could think of this as a temporary bookmarking system, much in the way you may have a filing cabinet but your desk still stays covered with mountains of papers that are relevant to your current work. I keep a bookmark bar with just favicons and no text. Only my most-used sites for the domain on which the instance runs. When this bar fills up, that's it. I either make room for new items or they aren't important enough. I have a folder for more "long term" bookmarks that I basically never check. This way, I only keep links to stuff I currently need. Firefox doesn't load them on default so it's very quick and non-resource hungry. It has to be or I couldn't be running 3-4 instances of Firefox at once, when you factor in all of the VM overhead. I don't use Tree Style tabs like sister comment suggests. I have an unorthodox browsing style that doesn't mesh well with the way it sorts tabs. Besides, the API it uses is indeed being phased out. I prefer using the location bar to quickly search my tabs. In general, bookmarks just have a limited use-case for me because, if it's static and information-dense I would probably rather save an offline copy anyway in the spirit of doomsday prepping.

What are you using 100+ tabs for?

by wapz 9y ago

What are you using 100+ tabs for?

People can use a ton of tabs for a ton of reasons. I used to do the same thing at times, when I used Treestyle tab in Firefox. But it's an old type of extension soon to be deprecated, and was giving me bugs on browser updates (maybe due to it being a XUL extension). The add-on put tabs on the side of the screen, and grouped them up into trees, which you could also collapse. So if you were to browse Wikipedia and click on all sorts of links, you'd have a whole tree with different branches. Then when you take a break, you just collapse the tree and start a new tree. Want to reference something from the Wikipedia tree? Just expand it again! It worked really well with the session restore functionality of Firefox, which doesn't reload all tabs again when the browser launches. So you had very little performance impact for what felt like the perfect bookmark and tab integration. So in order to reach 100+ tabs, it's just one hour of casual browsing per day and within a week you'll have 100 tabs open of Wikipedia trees, various clothing stores, a code problem tree or two, and a HN tree with all the little interesting links. Then you may wonder why you wouldn't just bookmark pages and close tabs? Personally I open bookmarks a few times a year, but this Treestyle extension made me click around so many times per day. (By the way, if anyone has found a similar add-on please let me know)

wapz 9y ago
Wow I've never heard of that. The most tabs I've ever personally used is around 25 to do some server stress testing (very low-scale). The most I've ever seen is around 35 from one of my coworkers that uses tabs instead of bookmarks for some reason.

kakarot 9y ago

I said 100+ per instance ;) It's closer to 500 or so at a given time. I have a few instances that only run up a dozen or two tabs in their lifetimes. I do lots of research on a variety of topics, and break it up with ADHD wikipedia binges and the like, then with aggregators like HN it's very easy to open a dozen or two tabs and just start powering through them. Some of these tabs sit for weeks, and some just rot away till they are irrelevant and I delete them. You could think of this as a temporary bookmarking system, much in the way you may have a filing cabinet but your desk still stays covered with mountains of papers that are relevant to your current work. I keep a bookmark bar with just favicons and no text. Only my most-used sites for the domain on which the instance runs. When this bar fills up, that's it. I either make room for new items or they aren't important enough. I have a folder for more "long term" bookmarks that I basically never check. This way, I only keep links to stuff I currently need. Firefox doesn't load them on default so it's very quick and non-resource hungry. It has to be or I couldn't be running 3-4 instances of Firefox at once, when you factor in all of the VM overhead. I don't use Tree Style tabs like sister comment suggests. I have an unorthodox browsing style that doesn't mesh well with the way it sorts tabs. Besides, the API it uses is indeed being phased out. I prefer using the location bar to quickly search my tabs. In general, bookmarks just have a limited use-case for me because, if it's static and information-dense I would probably rather save an offline copy anyway in the spirit of doomsday prepping.