5 ms·
It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic,
by sillysaurus3 9y ago
It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).
- fletchowns 9y agoThere has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
- awalton 9y agoI don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about. Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
- zdkl 9y ago> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant" Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
- sillysaurus3 9y agoDifferent people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086 I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
- meowface 9y agoI'm a chronic tab abuser as well, often with over 100 tabs at once. 1000 tabs still sounds insane to me.
- TheGrassyKnoll 9y agoWell, I'm running 600+ in Firefox for no particular reason. I guess that makes me only 60% insane.
- julian_1 9y agoThe same approach works well for forum discussions. One tab representing the forum, and child-tabs to track the comments section. For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
- mustacheemperor 9y agoI'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.
- 123e1daAdfafsdf 9y ago
- fletchowns 9y agoOk let's say you remember seeing something on a tab but couldn't remember which one it was on. How do you even begin to find that tab? With 1000 files on my file system I have any number of ways of searching not only the filenames, but also the contents of the files, visualizations based on size of the files, etc etc. I don't think it's a good comparison.
- KGIII 9y agoGiven the limits of human memory, I wonder how many of those 1,000 tabs are duplicates?
- jamesrcole 9y agoSo what do you suggest is a better way to find the information, that would end up being less total work for the user? I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
- huntie 9y agoI'm not sure that there is. Bookmarks don't work as well because you can't preserve a session as easily. For example, I can just create a new tab group for a project that I want to work on, and then it will stay in the background until I have the resources to work on it. I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
- Sleeep 9y agoYou can bookmark tab groups (at least in Firefox) that's what I do to save a session.
- julian_1 9y agoWith a lhs vertical tree-style tab-manager, I'm at around 100-200 tabs. It works the same as an expandable chapter/section navigation metaphor, except I control the content and nesting.
- heydonovan 9y agoI'm curious, do you not have tons of tabs open? Do you just use a few at a time? A typical day at work will require at least 50+ tabs for each customer that comes in, plus Google/StackOverflow/Slack for whatever I'm researching, not to mention a few SoundCloud/YouTube tabs for music, while browsing Reddit or HackerNews, and then whatever I have racked up to read later. I'm open to another solution though, but can't think of one.
- fletchowns 9y agoI typically have 5 - 30 tabs open at work depending on what I'm doing
- tormeh 9y agoA breadth-first search of the web is likely to do that kind of thing. Nothing wrong with it.
- tambourine_man 9y agoMaybe the Web is as much to blame as Chrome. Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
- webmaven 9y agoDamn, I should have waited to comment. I even phrased it the same way. /me smh
- tambourine_man 9y agoHa! Echo chamber indeed.
- pfranz 9y agoI hesitate to say that Chrome leaks memory because of what you're seeing. Webpages have exploded in size over the years (both with high dpi images, css, and javascript). I'm not sure I have quite as many tabs as you, but I generally work the same way (window per topic, tens of tabs per window). Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
- webmaven 9y agoWorth noting that average page size has ballooned ~5× in that same time period.
- bigbugbag 9y agoonly 5x ? I would have said over 10x maybe even 20x.
- lousken 9y agoI have never opened 1000tabs in chrome but I can manage 100-200. I've noticed that a lot of this responsivness comes down to extensions. If you have only one bad extension it kill the performance of chrome. Another thing are ads ofc or sites with lots of (poorly written) javascript, but with ublock origin Chrome works fine for me. Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
- kanzure 9y agoI also use many 100s of browser tabs almost all the time. The Opera browser in 2009-2011 used to handle 500 tabs easily for me. These days I am often sitting at >200 tabs in both Chrome and Firefox on same machine. I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...) One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way. Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
- lkcl 9y agovimperator aka pentadactyl. works really well and if you press the alt key you get the "standard" menu back. it increases screen real-estate, and i love it. it's by no means perfect but i won't go back to standard key bindings in firefox... ever. yes i also have 200-300 tabs open in firefox, and maintain them there for months at a time. firefox continues to eat memory (i got a laptop with 16 GB of RAM just to cope with how insane firefox gets) so a restart is necessary on a regular basis... that's done inside pentadactyl with ":restart".
- kanzure 9y agook clarified with you later that i meant xpcom bindings not keyboard bindings :)
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI frequently play a little game with Chrome: 1. Open up Window->Task Manager 2. Sort by CPU 3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list 4. Try not to kill extensions 5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage 6. Kill everything over 99mb 7. Continue enjoying Chrome Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time. Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
- sillysaurus3 9y agoI have a bash script called `kill-chrome-helpers` that kills all Chrome processes without terminating any Chrome windows. It kills extensions too, but whenever that happens Chrome pops up a bubble saying "click here to restore the extension", so usually I just run the script and then click a few times. The script is dead simple: killall "Google Chrome Helper" This has the annoying effect of turning every page into a crash symbol, but it's pretty easy to just refresh a whole row of tabs.
- cookiecaper 9y agoA couple things. First, it's best to avoid using `killall`. On Linux it searches the process list, but on Solaris and possibly other nixes, it kills all processes system-wide. Using `pkill` is a better habit, but read the manpage first because it matches a little differently. Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
- tagrun 9y agoNo, that is rather a Solaris quirk. That's ancient (literally) sysv behavior and killall in neither OpenBSD, nor FreeBSD work like that today. So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.