3 ms·

Serious question, people who have hundreds or thousands of tabs at a time, why? Personally I've never found the need to have so many tabs open.

sneak 7y ago
When I am researching on a topic, I middle-click all branches from my main thread of research, making a window a topic and all of the tabs my "to read" list. Most of them can get closed as I read them. The web is a tree of links, but my reading is linear, so I have to queue the nodes discovered in a linear fashion for reading.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
joegahona 7y ago
Agreed, it just seems like laziness and poor hygiene. The digital equivalent of men letting their nails grow long.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  Seems closed-minded and judgemental to ascribe negative traits to people who use things differently than you. For example, I prefer tabs over bookmarks because I never revisit bookmarks. With tabs, I will eventually get around to them. And I'm in no rush to minimize them. I may want to pick my brain from weeks ago and looking at the tabset I had open then is exactly what I want to do, like that one time I was deep-diving on Crusader King 2 strategies. It's not like poor hygiene or a dirty house because it's completely digital. What is the actual difference between having a minimized browser with 100 tabs and 100 "to-do" bookmarks and 100 tabs saved to OneTab? Just your arbitrary prejudices.
weaksauce 7y ago
Programming and you have scores of tabs open on various apis. Doing research on a problem and each window is a thread of inquiry. Some long running tabs are more temporary bookmarks for things that don’t merit an actual bookmark. There are other reasons I’m sure. Just because it’s not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s not useful.
errnoh 7y ago
I think my tabs mostly belong to one of two categories: * Research about a subject (that I didn't close when I continued to the next one) * "Oh that's interesting, I'll read it later" I do remember that 10+ years ago I used to have a nice collection of bookmarks, each with relevant tags. Then one day I had to switch browsers due to performance issues, the new browser didn't support tags from the previous one so lost everything. Ended up just keeping tabs open after that and every now and then I just go through them until 500 or so remain. For the "read it later" scenario I'm aware that there are a lot of services that try to solve that problem, none that I've tried just seem to fit my workflow.
- weaksauce 7y ago
  I'm very similar to you... i even made a webext to help me find tabs quickly as i will tend to open a window do something and then open up a few tabs in that window and eventually minimize the window to dock. if you have a hundred tabs open across many windows you come into a situation of where did that tab go? now it's just cmd-shift-e and visually scroll through the list of open tabs and then click on the link to bring it front and center. might be useful to you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... and open source too if someone feels like contributing: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
  - BugWatch 7y ago
    Thank you for your extension; I'm a user and it really helps me find the tab in my Firefox "window-forest". I'm a heavy Tree Style Tab user, though, and tree-state isn't reflected in your addon. Would you consider implementing the support (and maybe easy JSON export of the generated list)? In any case, thanks for your efforts.
    - weaksauce 7y ago
      you're welcome... not sure if tree style tabs has an api i can use to get that information. i actually have a dump of tabs to json in an unreleased version i used for backup and restore but it's not live yet.
eq_sd_ 7y ago
Usually the most tabs I have open is because I was window shopping, particularly on Etsy. Etsy doesn't have a quick look option and it's faster to me to middle mouse click links to open them then go through them all once I'm done looking for a particular thing. Except it often ends up being a rabbit hole and I never get around to looking at the tabs. You can favorite an item from the list view of items, but it adds it to the favorite list without prompting to sort into another list, which is worse than the YT or FB implementations of collection sorting. It's also easier to miss the prompt on the item view page since it only pops up for a few seconds. It ends up being easier to just open all the tabs and never favorite items I might want or not instead of going through favorites. I tend to open various tabs to read things on Reddit, Wikipedia, research papers, etc in general and not come around to them either. On top of that sometimes I leave things open because I want to share it later and haven't found a tool that makes it easy to sort collections like this. Pinterest is okay for things that have images, but the usability is not quite there either.

sneak 7y ago

When I am researching on a topic, I middle-click all branches from my main thread of research, making a window a topic and all of the tabs my "to read" list. Most of them can get closed as I read them. The web is a tree of links, but my reading is linear, so I have to queue the nodes discovered in a linear fashion for reading.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

joegahona 7y ago

Agreed, it just seems like laziness and poor hygiene. The digital equivalent of men letting their nails grow long.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
Seems closed-minded and judgemental to ascribe negative traits to people who use things differently than you. For example, I prefer tabs over bookmarks because I never revisit bookmarks. With tabs, I will eventually get around to them. And I'm in no rush to minimize them. I may want to pick my brain from weeks ago and looking at the tabset I had open then is exactly what I want to do, like that one time I was deep-diving on Crusader King 2 strategies. It's not like poor hygiene or a dirty house because it's completely digital. What is the actual difference between having a minimized browser with 100 tabs and 100 "to-do" bookmarks and 100 tabs saved to OneTab? Just your arbitrary prejudices.

weaksauce 7y ago

Programming and you have scores of tabs open on various apis. Doing research on a problem and each window is a thread of inquiry. Some long running tabs are more temporary bookmarks for things that don’t merit an actual bookmark. There are other reasons I’m sure. Just because it’s not useful to you doesn’t mean it’s not useful.

errnoh 7y ago

I think my tabs mostly belong to one of two categories: * Research about a subject (that I didn't close when I continued to the next one) * "Oh that's interesting, I'll read it later" I do remember that 10+ years ago I used to have a nice collection of bookmarks, each with relevant tags. Then one day I had to switch browsers due to performance issues, the new browser didn't support tags from the previous one so lost everything. Ended up just keeping tabs open after that and every now and then I just go through them until 500 or so remain. For the "read it later" scenario I'm aware that there are a lot of services that try to solve that problem, none that I've tried just seem to fit my workflow.

weaksauce 7y ago
I'm very similar to you... i even made a webext to help me find tabs quickly as i will tend to open a window do something and then open up a few tabs in that window and eventually minimize the window to dock. if you have a hundred tabs open across many windows you come into a situation of where did that tab go? now it's just cmd-shift-e and visually scroll through the list of open tabs and then click on the link to bring it front and center. might be useful to you: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... and open source too if someone feels like contributing: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
- BugWatch 7y ago
  Thank you for your extension; I'm a user and it really helps me find the tab in my Firefox "window-forest". I'm a heavy Tree Style Tab user, though, and tree-state isn't reflected in your addon. Would you consider implementing the support (and maybe easy JSON export of the generated list)? In any case, thanks for your efforts.
  - weaksauce 7y ago
    you're welcome... not sure if tree style tabs has an api i can use to get that information. i actually have a dump of tabs to json in an unreleased version i used for backup and restore but it's not live yet.

eq_sd_ 7y ago

Usually the most tabs I have open is because I was window shopping, particularly on Etsy. Etsy doesn't have a quick look option and it's faster to me to middle mouse click links to open them then go through them all once I'm done looking for a particular thing. Except it often ends up being a rabbit hole and I never get around to looking at the tabs. You can favorite an item from the list view of items, but it adds it to the favorite list without prompting to sort into another list, which is worse than the YT or FB implementations of collection sorting. It's also easier to miss the prompt on the item view page since it only pops up for a few seconds. It ends up being easier to just open all the tabs and never favorite items I might want or not instead of going through favorites. I tend to open various tabs to read things on Reddit, Wikipedia, research papers, etc in general and not come around to them either. On top of that sometimes I leave things open because I want to share it later and haven't found a tool that makes it easy to sort collections like this. Pinterest is okay for things that have images, but the usability is not quite there either.