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Honest question: why do you use hundreds of tabs at the same time? Why not bookmarks and leave a couple of the most important ones open? I have never understood

Honest question: why do you use hundreds of tabs at the same time? Why not bookmarks and leave a couple of the most important ones open? I have never understood the use case for "hundreds" of browser tabs

659087 9y ago
If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from. I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems. There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.
- nirvdrum 9y ago
  I have a lot of tabs open. Not multiples of hundreds at the moment, but probably around 100. I use the same computer for work and personal, so I have different contexts I switch through at least once a day. Increasingly, things are becoming web apps, so I have a dozen just to do basic tasks these days: email, multiple chat clients, music player, code repository, issue tracker, Twitter, online office suite, etc. Sure, I could bookmark and close and re-open every time, but that's a waste of time when I want to quickly switch back to something. And not every app has sensible bookmarking semantics. Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs. This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of tabs that can be opened. Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.
  - sysadmin420 9y ago
    This is my flow as well, I have 3 monitors in a pyramid formation, each monitor is both a personal and a business chrome browser running on separate desktops. Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever. By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps are a huge pain to constantly log in. I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me, and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.
    - nirvdrum 9y ago
      My issues with Chrome and tab management is that the tabs become progressively smaller, to the point of being unusable. There's likely an add-on for that, but Firefox handles it nicely with the Tab Center feature in Test Pilot. Also, if I need to restart the browser, Chrome loads every tab at startup and that's far from ideal. Firefox will only load the active tabs.
- addicted 9y ago
  Because unlike other browsers Firefox will actually search existing open tabs and present those as possible results (and open the tab if you choose it). I have hundreds of tabs open at a time. Instead of searching for something, then going to the Google page, clicking and waiting for it to load, in Firefox I search for what I want in the bar, it presents the tab as a result and opens it instantaneously. In addition with the vertical tab bar extensions I can see a list of about 40-50 tabs open at a time, using the additional horizontal space monitors provide that web pages don't use to keep an easily visible list of tabs.
- josefx 9y ago
  > If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from I open pages that interest me, I might read them later like I did this discussion or just drop them. Add in open tickets, reference pages, the build server, youtube, etc. and the number grows over time. > My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems. Maybe she should use Firefox instead of Chrome? > There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks. I did this when I started, by now I only use bookmarks for high interest pages, no point in bookmarking everything.

659087 9y ago

If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from. I've always assumed people talking about having hundreds of tabs open just don't understand how to properly use a browser. My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems. There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks.

nirvdrum 9y ago
I have a lot of tabs open. Not multiples of hundreds at the moment, but probably around 100. I use the same computer for work and personal, so I have different contexts I switch through at least once a day. Increasingly, things are becoming web apps, so I have a dozen just to do basic tasks these days: email, multiple chat clients, music player, code repository, issue tracker, Twitter, online office suite, etc. Sure, I could bookmark and close and re-open every time, but that's a waste of time when I want to quickly switch back to something. And not every app has sensible bookmarking semantics. Then throughout the course of the day I end up looking up API docs, get linked to blog posts, news articles, and YouTube videos, and read articles which themselves have relevant links to follow. Most of these I just open in a background tab to check out later in the day. These accumulate until I have time to go through and quickly review them. Those that I want to read and don't have the time currently go to Pocket. The rest get read or summarily closed out. I find bookmarks to be a terrible way to triage tabs. This workflow works for me (and evidently others). It's faster than bookmarking. It's less prone to failure, in my experience (I've suffered bookmark corruption more than once). And a modern computer ought to handle many background tabs just fine. Moreover, if browsers aren't expected to be used in this fashion, they really should set an upper-limit on the number of tabs that can be opened. Hopefully this gives you some perspective on alternative use cases. It sounds like your workflow works out well for you. I've tried it and couldn't get it to stick. If that means I don't know how to use a browser, so be it. At this point, there's enough of us (your grandmother included) that maybe the browser vendors should just find a way to cope with it better.
- sysadmin420 9y ago
  This is my flow as well, I have 3 monitors in a pyramid formation, each monitor is both a personal and a business chrome browser running on separate desktops. Each browser instance is tabbed completely across, I keep them open until I read the page fully, and then save it in keep to keep forever. By Friday I can have hundreds of tabs that I go through and clean up. Web apps are a huge pain to constantly log in. I run Korora with 24GB RAM and an I 7, Chrome is never a system hog for me, and most of the time it surprises me how well it handles my use.
  - nirvdrum 9y ago
    My issues with Chrome and tab management is that the tabs become progressively smaller, to the point of being unusable. There's likely an add-on for that, but Firefox handles it nicely with the Tab Center feature in Test Pilot. Also, if I need to restart the browser, Chrome loads every tab at startup and that's far from ideal. Firefox will only load the active tabs.
addicted 9y ago
Because unlike other browsers Firefox will actually search existing open tabs and present those as possible results (and open the tab if you choose it). I have hundreds of tabs open at a time. Instead of searching for something, then going to the Google page, clicking and waiting for it to load, in Firefox I search for what I want in the bar, it presents the tab as a result and opens it instantaneously. In addition with the vertical tab bar extensions I can see a list of about 40-50 tabs open at a time, using the additional horizontal space monitors provide that web pages don't use to keep an easily visible list of tabs.
josefx 9y ago
> If you want to be 10x, you need at least 10 stackoverflow tabs open to copy and paste from I open pages that interest me, I might read them later like I did this discussion or just drop them. Add in open tickets, reference pages, the build server, youtube, etc. and the number grows over time. > My grandmother, for example, usually has 100 or so open by the time I get a call about her having computer problems. Maybe she should use Firefox instead of Chrome? > There's no logical reason I can come up with for doing this instead of using bookmarks. I did this when I started, by now I only use bookmarks for high interest pages, no point in bookmarking everything.