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I've seen comments similar to this one often enough that I need to ask: What is the use case for having that many tabs open, and how can you possibly consume th

I've seen comments similar to this one often enough that I need to ask: What is the use case for having that many tabs open, and how can you possibly consume that much information?

istorical 8y ago
If you're doing research and opening tons of articles, it's common that you might want to go back into your browser history and reopen one of the last 50 things you might have opened but you might not remember the name of the page - it's faster to hold command+shift (or control+shift on windows) and left-bracket or right-bracket to page through tabs and glance at each tab for 2 seconds to see if it's the article you were trying to re-find as opposed to opening up your history and clicking each, waiting for the tab to load, realizing it's not that thing you looked at on Monday that you're looking for, go back to history, check the next link, repeat. In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI.
- hnaccy 8y ago
  >In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI. Definitely. Firefox's built-in history browsing UI is frankly horrible. Norwell History Tools was better but is no longer supported.
  - petert_1 8y ago
    Have you ever used chrome's default history browsing UI, it's even worse.
- megaman22 8y ago
  Bookmarks are a thing. Evidently people don't use them anymore, given how shitty the default UI for it is in Chrome, but I recall being a young whippersnapper on dial-up with Netscape Navigator, and bookmarks was how you kept track of cool stuff you found (search engines were in such flux that I recall it being very difficult to find anything again, even with the same query, but I'm probably misremembering)
  - Izkata 8y ago
    On the thought of improving tabbing UI and not using bookmarks, there are some non-mainstream browsers that work differently. uzbl-browser, I think it was, combines the two and makes no distinction between them.
jimmaswell 8y ago
I open new tabs of things and don't get around to reading them
- phyzome 8y ago
  Let's be honest: With the decay rate of URLs, by the time you get back to that tab, there's like a 10% chance the page will be a 404. I recommend aggressively archiving into Zotero or another tool, perhaps into an "unread" folder, so that at least it's possible to read any one of them.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
    That's actually really good point. Now excuse me while I have Firefox send your comment as a tab to my desktop to remind me to look for a good archiving extension :-) ... I'm not joking.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
detaro 8y ago
In my case, researching many different topics and not having found a better tool to manage the "state" of these processes. A while I tried separate browser sessions, but that got annoying, and all bookmarking tools I've tried also aren't right, although I keep experimenting.
cm2012 8y ago
It's the digital version of hoarding. It can be psychologically painful for people to throw things away.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  There is no such thing as "away". Be careful what you put there.
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  Horizontal tab bars unnecessarily chew up vertical screen space when there is more than ample dead space on the margins for vertical tabs on widescreen monitors. Once you switch to vertical it becomes easy to leave old tabs hanging around. They impose no extra cognitive load until you have enough to require scrolling.
hnaccy 8y ago
I procrastinate bookmarking them and the order and position of the tabs serves as a sort of record of my thought process and actions when I was looking at them. I navigate them using the tab hotkeys, container tab menu, and fast scrolling while watching for favicon clusters.
TheAceOfHearts 8y ago
I keep dozens of windows and hundreds of tabs open because I'm usually researching multiple topics, and I like being able to pause or switch context easily. Every few weeks I do a quick pass through all my open windows and tabs and I close any documents that have grown stale or that I've already finished studying up on or read through.
lovich 8y ago
It's like traversing a tree for me. I'm opening links from links from links and don't start closing tabs until I reach a page I don't open a link from
ball_of_lint 8y ago
I typically don't end up with >100 tabs, but a very common pattern for me is to do a search, open the results that seem interesting in new tabs and leave the search tab for the case I don't find what I want. I'll sometimes have several such searches going on, which can easily consume ~30 tabs. In addition to that I've got a collection of ~10 tabs that I keep open such as email, status page for work, etc. Most tabs end up being either something that I'll skim or only look at when it pages, so its not too much information to consume total. I typically clear my related tabs when I finish a task and most of my tabs are short lived, but I know a number of people that will leave similar search structures open when moving to a new task and possibly have several different contexts open in the same browser.
kelnos 8y ago
I have a "general" window open where I have my tabs for mail, calendar, chat, and a few sites like HN and reddit pinned, and the rest of the tabs end up being links I open from those sites or elsewhere, just random things I would like to read or am reading. Then I'll have another couple windows open that are more purpose-specific, like I might be working on a particular project at work and all the tabs there will be related to it. But overall I'd say In my case my high tab count is mostly due to laziness. I have tons of tabs open that I may never look at again, but just haven't cleaned up. You might say "well, that's dumb, you're wasting memory and should clean up those unneeded tabs", but I'd retort, "why should I do manual work when the computer can clearly just deal with it for me so I don't have to care?"
Kagerjay 8y ago
From my perspective its this I tend to do think and do things very on a very asynchronous / concurrency level. I'll load dozens of webpages CTRL+Left click new tabs open, cross reference other documents open. When I do this, there's two reasons usually - 1. I'm surfing the web for interesting content as quickly as possible - 2. I'm researching a specific topic and answer ------------------------------------------------------------------ So in case 1, I'm on hackernews. Its far faster for CTRL+Left click and upvote dozens of articles that I find relevant. First, I open the comments page to see what the general concensus on the article is, then I load the article after. Because my browser needs a few seconds to load all this in one go, it makes sense for me to open new tabs at a time. I save what is essentially seconds of time, but it adds up in the long run making me way more productive. When I get tab overflow, I just move the most important tab (the hackernews page) to its own window, leaving behind everything else, but not closing it off. I have the "Great suspender" chrome extension set to 30 minutes or so, in that 30 minutes, I will pop open roughly 20-100 tabs and skimp through dozens of articles and hundreds of comments. I do the same process as well, for (2) researching a specific topic in a field. Say my computer breaksdown. I need to deduce what issues I can look up, and go through dozens of sites such as tomshardware, reddit, microsoft tech support, superuser stackexchange, youtube, among many others. I need to cross reference sometimes dozens of sites to identify and narrow the issue. Not everyone does things this way, it requires a specific mindset to be okay with having a chrome tab wasteland, but it gets the job done way faster than any other solution or method I've tested. I realize that (1) reading and keeping up to date on news is valuable, but it also is a huge time drain as well. So I try and get it as quickly over with as possible. During this entire process I will also bookmark certain things as well, based on how useful the information is. In each of these 20-100 sites, I assign a mental metric in my head, depending on the metric, I will do certain things ------------------------------------------------------------------ - 1. If the site is relevant to me down the road and on a site, or has something interesting to talk about, I will CTRL+D pinboard shift add 3 or so tags and press enter. This takes me about 5-10 seconds to do on a page - 2. If the site came from hackernews and is going to be useful in my life in the next 1-2 years, I will "favorite it" - 3. If the site is interesting on hackernews and I read the comments / article, I will "upvote it" - 4. If the article on the site is something I will use in the following week, it will be added as a chrome toolbar bookmark which I sorted on a A-Z basis ------------------------------------------------------------------ At the end of the day I will have funneled down all the interesting tidbits into (1) what is useful and (2) what is interesting, and (3) what is not. These will all be aggregated in a singular list on hackernews or pinboard or into its own dedicated spot on chromes toolbar. This means I can access all the information I've ever read in roughly a few keyboard clicks and strokes and can reference and cite dozens of pieces of factual pieces of information to backup any arguments I have, whether in writing or in person.

I've seen comments similar to this one often enough that I need to ask: What is the use case for having that many tabs open, and how can you possibly consume that much information?

istorical 8y ago

If you're doing research and opening tons of articles, it's common that you might want to go back into your browser history and reopen one of the last 50 things you might have opened but you might not remember the name of the page - it's faster to hold command+shift (or control+shift on windows) and left-bracket or right-bracket to page through tabs and glance at each tab for 2 seconds to see if it's the article you were trying to re-find as opposed to opening up your history and clicking each, waiting for the tab to load, realizing it's not that thing you looked at on Monday that you're looking for, go back to history, check the next link, repeat. In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI.

hnaccy 8y ago
>In other words - this behavior is proof that there's room for improvement of browser history UI. Definitely. Firefox's built-in history browsing UI is frankly horrible. Norwell History Tools was better but is no longer supported.
- petert_1 8y ago
  Have you ever used chrome's default history browsing UI, it's even worse.
megaman22 8y ago
Bookmarks are a thing. Evidently people don't use them anymore, given how shitty the default UI for it is in Chrome, but I recall being a young whippersnapper on dial-up with Netscape Navigator, and bookmarks was how you kept track of cool stuff you found (search engines were in such flux that I recall it being very difficult to find anything again, even with the same query, but I'm probably misremembering)
- Izkata 8y ago
  On the thought of improving tabbing UI and not using bookmarks, there are some non-mainstream browsers that work differently. uzbl-browser, I think it was, combines the two and makes no distinction between them.

jimmaswell 8y ago

I open new tabs of things and don't get around to reading them

phyzome 8y ago
Let's be honest: With the decay rate of URLs, by the time you get back to that tab, there's like a 10% chance the page will be a 404. I recommend aggressively archiving into Zotero or another tool, perhaps into an "unread" folder, so that at least it's possible to read any one of them.
- yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
  That's actually really good point. Now excuse me while I have Firefox send your comment as a tab to my desktop to remind me to look for a good archiving extension :-) ... I'm not joking.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

detaro 8y ago

In my case, researching many different topics and not having found a better tool to manage the "state" of these processes. A while I tried separate browser sessions, but that got annoying, and all bookmarking tools I've tried also aren't right, although I keep experimenting.

cm2012 8y ago

It's the digital version of hoarding. It can be psychologically painful for people to throw things away.

crankylinuxuser 8y ago
There is no such thing as "away". Be careful what you put there.
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
Horizontal tab bars unnecessarily chew up vertical screen space when there is more than ample dead space on the margins for vertical tabs on widescreen monitors. Once you switch to vertical it becomes easy to leave old tabs hanging around. They impose no extra cognitive load until you have enough to require scrolling.

hnaccy 8y ago

I procrastinate bookmarking them and the order and position of the tabs serves as a sort of record of my thought process and actions when I was looking at them. I navigate them using the tab hotkeys, container tab menu, and fast scrolling while watching for favicon clusters.

TheAceOfHearts 8y ago

I keep dozens of windows and hundreds of tabs open because I'm usually researching multiple topics, and I like being able to pause or switch context easily. Every few weeks I do a quick pass through all my open windows and tabs and I close any documents that have grown stale or that I've already finished studying up on or read through.

lovich 8y ago

It's like traversing a tree for me. I'm opening links from links from links and don't start closing tabs until I reach a page I don't open a link from

ball_of_lint 8y ago

I typically don't end up with >100 tabs, but a very common pattern for me is to do a search, open the results that seem interesting in new tabs and leave the search tab for the case I don't find what I want. I'll sometimes have several such searches going on, which can easily consume ~30 tabs. In addition to that I've got a collection of ~10 tabs that I keep open such as email, status page for work, etc. Most tabs end up being either something that I'll skim or only look at when it pages, so its not too much information to consume total. I typically clear my related tabs when I finish a task and most of my tabs are short lived, but I know a number of people that will leave similar search structures open when moving to a new task and possibly have several different contexts open in the same browser.

kelnos 8y ago

I have a "general" window open where I have my tabs for mail, calendar, chat, and a few sites like HN and reddit pinned, and the rest of the tabs end up being links I open from those sites or elsewhere, just random things I would like to read or am reading. Then I'll have another couple windows open that are more purpose-specific, like I might be working on a particular project at work and all the tabs there will be related to it. But overall I'd say In my case my high tab count is mostly due to laziness. I have tons of tabs open that I may never look at again, but just haven't cleaned up. You might say "well, that's dumb, you're wasting memory and should clean up those unneeded tabs", but I'd retort, "why should I do manual work when the computer can clearly just deal with it for me so I don't have to care?"

Kagerjay 8y ago

From my perspective its this I tend to do think and do things very on a very asynchronous / concurrency level. I'll load dozens of webpages CTRL+Left click new tabs open, cross reference other documents open. When I do this, there's two reasons usually - 1. I'm surfing the web for interesting content as quickly as possible - 2. I'm researching a specific topic and answer ------------------------------------------------------------------ So in case 1, I'm on hackernews. Its far faster for CTRL+Left click and upvote dozens of articles that I find relevant. First, I open the comments page to see what the general concensus on the article is, then I load the article after. Because my browser needs a few seconds to load all this in one go, it makes sense for me to open new tabs at a time. I save what is essentially seconds of time, but it adds up in the long run making me way more productive. When I get tab overflow, I just move the most important tab (the hackernews page) to its own window, leaving behind everything else, but not closing it off. I have the "Great suspender" chrome extension set to 30 minutes or so, in that 30 minutes, I will pop open roughly 20-100 tabs and skimp through dozens of articles and hundreds of comments. I do the same process as well, for (2) researching a specific topic in a field. Say my computer breaksdown. I need to deduce what issues I can look up, and go through dozens of sites such as tomshardware, reddit, microsoft tech support, superuser stackexchange, youtube, among many others. I need to cross reference sometimes dozens of sites to identify and narrow the issue. Not everyone does things this way, it requires a specific mindset to be okay with having a chrome tab wasteland, but it gets the job done way faster than any other solution or method I've tested. I realize that (1) reading and keeping up to date on news is valuable, but it also is a huge time drain as well. So I try and get it as quickly over with as possible. During this entire process I will also bookmark certain things as well, based on how useful the information is. In each of these 20-100 sites, I assign a mental metric in my head, depending on the metric, I will do certain things ------------------------------------------------------------------ - 1. If the site is relevant to me down the road and on a site, or has something interesting to talk about, I will CTRL+D pinboard shift add 3 or so tags and press enter. This takes me about 5-10 seconds to do on a page - 2. If the site came from hackernews and is going to be useful in my life in the next 1-2 years, I will "favorite it" - 3. If the site is interesting on hackernews and I read the comments / article, I will "upvote it" - 4. If the article on the site is something I will use in the following week, it will be added as a chrome toolbar bookmark which I sorted on a A-Z basis ------------------------------------------------------------------ At the end of the day I will have funneled down all the interesting tidbits into (1) what is useful and (2) what is interesting, and (3) what is not. These will all be aggregated in a singular list on hackernews or pinboard or into its own dedicated spot on chromes toolbar. This means I can access all the information I've ever read in roughly a few keyboard clicks and strokes and can reference and cite dozens of pieces of factual pieces of information to backup any arguments I have, whether in writing or in person.