11 ms·

> Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session This is horrifying! How do you get to have one hundred tabs, or worse, a few hundred?

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
Tabs store context (history, cookies, container, etc, with tree-style tabs also parent & child tab relations) that bookmarks don't. I'm not sure about Safari (since I don't use a Mac) but on Firefox you can set up tab discarding (via extension) that unloads unused tabs. So there's a lot less incentive to use bookmarks when you can just leave a tab open forever. Really the only reason to use bookmarks instead of tabs is for synchronization across devices.
- devcpp 6y ago
  Firefox is so good for this even after e10s, it's not even comparable.
- ssvss 6y ago
  >Firefox you can set up tab discarding (via extension) that unloads unused tabs What Add-on do you use for this.
  - ksec 6y ago
    You can simple exit and reopen your browser. Only the focus Tab will be loaded while all others are unloaded.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    Auto Tab Discard[1] does it automatically after a time. Tabs can be set to not get discarded, eg when form elements with changes are present, media is playing, tab is pinned, or just whitelisting. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
- ideologysec 6y ago
  Even then, you can sync open tabs with Firefox Sync! (Or Chrome sync, or Safari via iCloud)
  - SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
    Yes, though I find I want far fewer tabs on Mobile than I do on Desktop.
    - int_19h 6y ago
      Tab sync usually doesn't maintain the same list of tabs on all devices like that - it just lets you see what you had opened elsewhere, and easily re-open it. My desktop and mobile browsing sessions are very different, as well - but I "move" tabs across devices all the time to continue some research etc.
layoutIfNeeded 6y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding
- pishpash 6y ago
  It's actually abnormal to actively throw away things. It's not how the brain works. Do you actively try to "forget" things? Very rarely. We only need to throw away physical objects due to space constraints and rearrangement/search cost. Mental and virtual objects can decay away and there is no rearrangement cost when they are already organized by relevance.
  - nojito 6y ago
    >It's not how the brain works. It actually does...which is how we are able to specialize our knowledge
  - ogre_codes 6y ago
    > We only need to throw away physical objects due to space constraints and rearrangement/search cost. This is the same for throwing away tabs. If I'm not using a tab anymore, I want it out of the way so I can more easily find the tabs I do use.
  - justinator 6y ago
    There’s literally a movement of affluent people to move into tiny houses. It may seem strange to some but maybe what’s abnormal is all this want for more more more is just marketing and one has to admit that they’ve fallen prey to it. I don’t like stuff and I loathe acquiring things. Getting rid of a car, for example changed my life for the better. Needing one in the future leads me anxious, no matter how much money car manufacturers spend to tell me I need to do just that to fit in with their status quo.
    - pishpash 6y ago
      Acquiring fewer things is not mutually exclusive with not discarding things. They may even be positively correlated.
vmception 6y ago
I’ve met some disorganized sales or business development people juggling a lot of proposals and client spiels in browser
khazhoux 6y ago
Some people use tabs the same way others use bookmarks. Myself, I regularly have 100 tabs, easily, across several windows which are minimized. If the browser were to lose all tabs by accident, it wouldn't be a big deal (same as losing bookmarks isn't actually a big deal for some people)
- reaperducer 6y ago
  Some people use tabs the same way others use bookmarks My wife does this on her phone. I find it maddening, and tell her to just bookmark her sites. But that's just not how her brain works. Fortunately, even between iOS updates, Safari remembers all of her old tabs.
  - tobr 6y ago
    Genuinely curious, why do you find it maddening? Is it just the feeling that it’s somehow messy? Wouldn’t bookmarking every page be a lot worse?
    - _jal 6y ago
      I find others' distaste for my personal workflows amusing, until it becomes annoying. At which point the proper response becomes, "go work through your issues in some way that does not involve me."
    - theshrike79 6y ago
      It’s like people who store EVERYTHING on their desktop in a huge unorganised pile. Yes, it works. It’s also maddening, like they’ve never even grasped the basic file operations.
      - dividedbyzero 6y ago
        I'm like that, and I really do believe I have "grasped the basic file operations"; maybe I just have a better grasp of the basic concepts of search, but I guess that's not the case, either; I have it like this because it fits my needs and preferences and works better, quicker, smoother for me, and in my case it's the result of decades of refining the way I use computers. Other people have different needs and preferences and that's absolutely fine as well, as far as I'm concerned. My "messy desktop" approach seems to be almost unbearable to some few people, though, and some very few seem to find it so unbearable that they have been outright aggressive about this in the past, and I really don't get that at all. But in case someone who feels like that reads this, here's my rationale: I pretty much never ever see my desktop. I see my screensaver all the time, desktop never. I use spaces to separate tasks I'm working on and arrange windows to fill the screen, and they pretty much always do. I use the desktop mostly as a drop-off area for whatever it is I momentarily need; I drag and drop stuff there all the time, like images from Firefox. There are some directories, but at most two layers deep I think. I do archive stuff from time to time, but there are pretty much always multiple desktop grids worth of stuff on there. That works really well because I only ever interact with the desktop via Finder (where I can just type the beginning of a name or use the datetime column or Spotlight set to search current directory per default), CLI (which has fd, ag etc.) or file pickers, though I tend to drag-and-drop more than I use "open file" dialogs. Relying on those is much faster and more intuitive for me than thinking up some kind of organisation scheme for dozens of unrelated activities that don't seem to fit into a single scheme very well, and organising everything accordingly, when I'm in the "zone" and would rather not have to think about where to place this particular file. I find it hard to remember such schemes, but I pretty much always know when and how I created something, so a chronological view of everything at once is very helpful. Software work is somewhat more organised (~/workspace and a lot of git repos in there), and data sets are very neatly organised (it doesn't work any other way), but most other things live somewhere on the desktop (or in some kind of searchable cloud). As I see it, as long as I find whatever I need quickly, which I do, why would I "tidy up" those imaginary "folder" things? It's not like they have much in common with physical ordering aids (like folders), where you have to structure things rigidly or else never find a thing, and even there, you often don't structure things very deeply – who puts physical folders inside folders inside folders? My hand tools are organized pretty neatly, but if I could just say "8mm wrench" in the direction of my toolbox and magically hold it in my hand, or magically have all my tools neatly arranged by name, date-of-purchase, type, or just say "wrench for that nut" and find it ... I daresay my toolbox would be a lot messier. Can't do that, so I must put in the work. Where I don't have to, and can keep the chaos out of sight, I won't.
tobr 6y ago
How do you not get there? There’s no point in the “core gameplay loop” of browsing the web where you are encouraged to close a tab. They just disappear among the other ones and you don’t really have a reason to stop and think about whether you’re done with them. At some point there are hundreds.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  Yeah, I only close tabs when my computer starts to feel slow. Or when iOS Safari tells me I have too many tabs open.
- TylerE 6y ago
  I hate clutter. Once i get past maybe 10 or 15 tabs it's time to go on a Ctrl-W spree.
- officeplant 6y ago
  Personally I close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I need it for later it goes into sorted bookmark folders or in a list of bookmarks right in front of me if I'm gonna need it sooner. If I ever get over 15 tabs I'm deep in research mode, but those will all be closed by the end of the day. Ever since SSDs I also shut down my computer when I'm not using it so maybe I'm weird.
- floatingatoll 6y ago
  I close a tab when I want to stop thinking about it, and if I hit fifty tabs, I’m so distracted I don’t have time to think about any of them and just close the entire set.
  - dwighttk 6y ago
    Same but more like five for me.
- aldanor 6y ago
  The only reason I'm using FF is TreeStyleTab. I seriously don't understand how people live without it. Right now I have 993 open tabs, sometimes I have 100, sometimes 2k - don't really care, but they are easily navigatable as a tree-like structure on the side of the screen.
numpad0 6y ago
It’s ADHD/online vocal minority thing. Either you have it or not, there’s no fixing or accidentally contracting it. Go ahead and label them insane and call yourself sane/normal, if that is comforting for you, for being a boring person.
- vlunkr 6y ago
  I was with you until the ad hominem
dntrkv 6y ago
People need to learn to let go and just close tabs. It's freeing. If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. If it doesn't, no big deal. The benefits of not lugging around that baggage outweighs the potentially tiny productivity hit you take to look up the info again.
- tobr 6y ago
  It’s funny how there’s a borderline moral judgement about things like this. It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox, unnamed layers in photoshop, or open windows or tabs or apps or whatever would say something about your character. No, to the extent that these things are even a problem at all, that’s a consequence of a design that fails to take actual human factors into account.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    I was also going to draw parallels to the icons on the desktop. Hundreds of browser tabs open is the 2020 version of having hundreds of icons all crammed onto your Windows desktop.
  - mr_toad 6y ago
    > It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox Not really. Desktop icons and email are persisted to non volatile storage. Expecting windows and tabs to persist in the exact state you left them as if they were real world objects is just not how computers work.
    - spopejoy 6y ago
      That's not true, many applications have moved to the "constant save" model (and games too). For instance, you never ever save in Final Cut Pro anymore (I wish ProTools would go this route). There is no reason a browser can't persist your tab state, or your window state, window positions, etc to disk continually and always relaunch with the persisted state.
- 6y ago
tomjen3 6y ago
Trivial: you need to look something up, you follow a trail on wikipedia and you pretty quickly have 100 tabs. I have OneTab for Firefox, which allows me to convert active tabs into a bookmark list. This helps the problem a lot because I can now park my active tabs.
- jlokier 6y ago
  I've tried something like that. Maybe it was OneTab, I don't remember. Unfortunately I found bookmarks rather useless and switched back to using tabs. It's really unfortunate.
mortenjorck 6y ago
As a UX designer, when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (and having a hundred tabs is clearly not how tabs were intended to be used), my question is: how is this UI failing them? I think the problem is that people generally don’t know when they’ll return to a tab, so they leave it open, and that creating a bookmark is asking too much commitment for something potentially ephemeral. A good system might be one that doesn’t automatically close tabs, as some extensions do, but collapses ones that have remained unused for a certain period into a set of temporary bookmarks. Recently accessed tabs stay in the bar, while stale ones are swept into an “old tabs” list that can be perused at the user’s convenience.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (...), my question is: how is this UI failing them? This is a legitimate question, but not the only one in that situation. Another view, more in line with the unix philosophy, is that "using something in the intended way" is a meaningless concept. A tool must work always, no matter how it is used and abused. Thus, instead of asking "how is this UI failing them?", you could be more pragmatic and ask "how can I optimize the UI so that this usage works correctly?"
  - bobbymasters 6y ago
    As a non-programmer, this seems like an odd philosophy. If I use the claw side of a hammer to strike a nail, I’d expect that it is t going to work well. It seems like there’s a limit on “make the tool work regardless of the use case.”
    - zeroimpl 6y ago
      A better comparison would be: Hammers are designed for striking nails, but some customers have figured out they work well for cracking walnuts, so as a hammer manufacturer we should avoid using toxic ingredients such as lead.
- kjakm 6y ago
pizza 6y ago
Combination of depth-first browsing and FOMO. The one thing that's serendipitous about it is that you might just get to that article you opened up last week after all
ordx 6y ago
Some people hate bookmarks. When you want to read something later you just keep that tab open until you have time to go back. I usually have 200-300 tabs open at any given time. Works great.
- redler 6y ago
  A set of a few hundred tabs, spread across a few windows, is like the bubbling organic head of a stream of temporal bookmarks. It would be great if there were some kind of time-based decay -- or ripening, depending on your perspective -- of open tabs into a more permanent bookmark-like arrangement, with spatial/proximity and window affinity cues. These could easily rehydrate to their live versions, or become fixed as "organic bookmarks" living alongside "affirmative" bookmarks and the normal, more ephemeral, uncurated browsing history.
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Tree Style Tab for organization, Auto Tab Discard for the decay, Vimium-FF for search.
    - redler 6y ago
      Thanks, I'll check those out.
drilldrive 6y ago
I have had similar hundreds of tabs before, though I try to keep to a few dozen nowadays. The source tends to be a cluster of tabs (say 10) associated to a single subject, full of articles and tools I am using related to it. Frankly an obvious solution is to have a "rough-assortment ephemeral bookmark-group" where I can shift-select say 7 tabs at once and keep them for later, with an easy deletion cycle at will. And it would be good for this method to keep track of my local data of the tabs (scroll position, typed entries, ect.). Bookmarks (in Firefox at least) suck for this in contrast to just working directly with tabs, since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them, meanwhile the tabs are grouped together nicely alongside interest-groups I hold for them, and can scroll for what I want or type in the address-bar.
- catach 6y ago
  Definitely not a good solution for the local tab data problem, but for: > since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them If you're already using Tree Style Tab on Firefox, there's a `Bookmark this tree` option that collapses the above workflow to just bookmarking the tree and naming a bookmark folder. Not enough of an improvement, of course.
goatinaboat 6y ago
This is horrifying! How do you get to have one hundred tabs, or worse, a few hundred? No one used bookmarks anymore, they just leave a tab open.
eyelidlessness 6y ago
Speaking only for myself: ADHD
ksec 6y ago
There are people with thousands of tabs. ( Not all Loaded Of course ). Every time there are HN discussion about browser you will see those mentioning it. Most of them are on Firefox so I guess I might be the few who does that on Safari.
Kliment 6y ago
I have 3088 tabs right now. I don't see how this is horrifying at all. I have a tab open for every dependency of every project I do, including one for every component of every electronics project I maintain. I have a tab for every webcomic I follow, a tab for every news page, a tab for every package that's on its way to me. It's like searchable, zero-effort bookmarks with state (including page scroll location) saved. Of course this is on firefox, and total suspender makes it easy to keep resource usage low. I have many years worth of state here, and if I didn't have this I don't see why I would even bother using a browser. It's like a personal knowledge base. Related tabs are clustered together in the list, I know approximately where things are in the list, I have two different search tools (% search and Tab Center Redux' own search box). I don't get why people keep trying to tell others that their workflow is bad ("horrifying") and they should feel bad. I don't care, this works, and nothing else compares.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago

Tabs store context (history, cookies, container, etc, with tree-style tabs also parent & child tab relations) that bookmarks don't. I'm not sure about Safari (since I don't use a Mac) but on Firefox you can set up tab discarding (via extension) that unloads unused tabs. So there's a lot less incentive to use bookmarks when you can just leave a tab open forever. Really the only reason to use bookmarks instead of tabs is for synchronization across devices.

devcpp 6y ago
Firefox is so good for this even after e10s, it's not even comparable.
ssvss 6y ago
>Firefox you can set up tab discarding (via extension) that unloads unused tabs What Add-on do you use for this.
- ksec 6y ago
  You can simple exit and reopen your browser. Only the focus Tab will be loaded while all others are unloaded.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  Auto Tab Discard[1] does it automatically after a time. Tabs can be set to not get discarded, eg when form elements with changes are present, media is playing, tab is pinned, or just whitelisting. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...
ideologysec 6y ago
Even then, you can sync open tabs with Firefox Sync! (Or Chrome sync, or Safari via iCloud)
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y ago
  Yes, though I find I want far fewer tabs on Mobile than I do on Desktop.
  - int_19h 6y ago
    Tab sync usually doesn't maintain the same list of tabs on all devices like that - it just lets you see what you had opened elsewhere, and easily re-open it. My desktop and mobile browsing sessions are very different, as well - but I "move" tabs across devices all the time to continue some research etc.

layoutIfNeeded 6y ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_hoarding

pishpash 6y ago
It's actually abnormal to actively throw away things. It's not how the brain works. Do you actively try to "forget" things? Very rarely. We only need to throw away physical objects due to space constraints and rearrangement/search cost. Mental and virtual objects can decay away and there is no rearrangement cost when they are already organized by relevance.
- nojito 6y ago
  >It's not how the brain works. It actually does...which is how we are able to specialize our knowledge
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > We only need to throw away physical objects due to space constraints and rearrangement/search cost. This is the same for throwing away tabs. If I'm not using a tab anymore, I want it out of the way so I can more easily find the tabs I do use.
- justinator 6y ago
  There’s literally a movement of affluent people to move into tiny houses. It may seem strange to some but maybe what’s abnormal is all this want for more more more is just marketing and one has to admit that they’ve fallen prey to it. I don’t like stuff and I loathe acquiring things. Getting rid of a car, for example changed my life for the better. Needing one in the future leads me anxious, no matter how much money car manufacturers spend to tell me I need to do just that to fit in with their status quo.
  - pishpash 6y ago
    Acquiring fewer things is not mutually exclusive with not discarding things. They may even be positively correlated.

vmception 6y ago

I’ve met some disorganized sales or business development people juggling a lot of proposals and client spiels in browser

khazhoux 6y ago

Some people use tabs the same way others use bookmarks. Myself, I regularly have 100 tabs, easily, across several windows which are minimized. If the browser were to lose all tabs by accident, it wouldn't be a big deal (same as losing bookmarks isn't actually a big deal for some people)

reaperducer 6y ago
Some people use tabs the same way others use bookmarks My wife does this on her phone. I find it maddening, and tell her to just bookmark her sites. But that's just not how her brain works. Fortunately, even between iOS updates, Safari remembers all of her old tabs.
- tobr 6y ago
  Genuinely curious, why do you find it maddening? Is it just the feeling that it’s somehow messy? Wouldn’t bookmarking every page be a lot worse?
  - _jal 6y ago
    I find others' distaste for my personal workflows amusing, until it becomes annoying. At which point the proper response becomes, "go work through your issues in some way that does not involve me."
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    It’s like people who store EVERYTHING on their desktop in a huge unorganised pile. Yes, it works. It’s also maddening, like they’ve never even grasped the basic file operations.
    - dividedbyzero 6y ago
      I'm like that, and I really do believe I have "grasped the basic file operations"; maybe I just have a better grasp of the basic concepts of search, but I guess that's not the case, either; I have it like this because it fits my needs and preferences and works better, quicker, smoother for me, and in my case it's the result of decades of refining the way I use computers. Other people have different needs and preferences and that's absolutely fine as well, as far as I'm concerned. My "messy desktop" approach seems to be almost unbearable to some few people, though, and some very few seem to find it so unbearable that they have been outright aggressive about this in the past, and I really don't get that at all. But in case someone who feels like that reads this, here's my rationale: I pretty much never ever see my desktop. I see my screensaver all the time, desktop never. I use spaces to separate tasks I'm working on and arrange windows to fill the screen, and they pretty much always do. I use the desktop mostly as a drop-off area for whatever it is I momentarily need; I drag and drop stuff there all the time, like images from Firefox. There are some directories, but at most two layers deep I think. I do archive stuff from time to time, but there are pretty much always multiple desktop grids worth of stuff on there. That works really well because I only ever interact with the desktop via Finder (where I can just type the beginning of a name or use the datetime column or Spotlight set to search current directory per default), CLI (which has fd, ag etc.) or file pickers, though I tend to drag-and-drop more than I use "open file" dialogs. Relying on those is much faster and more intuitive for me than thinking up some kind of organisation scheme for dozens of unrelated activities that don't seem to fit into a single scheme very well, and organising everything accordingly, when I'm in the "zone" and would rather not have to think about where to place this particular file. I find it hard to remember such schemes, but I pretty much always know when and how I created something, so a chronological view of everything at once is very helpful. Software work is somewhat more organised (~/workspace and a lot of git repos in there), and data sets are very neatly organised (it doesn't work any other way), but most other things live somewhere on the desktop (or in some kind of searchable cloud). As I see it, as long as I find whatever I need quickly, which I do, why would I "tidy up" those imaginary "folder" things? It's not like they have much in common with physical ordering aids (like folders), where you have to structure things rigidly or else never find a thing, and even there, you often don't structure things very deeply – who puts physical folders inside folders inside folders? My hand tools are organized pretty neatly, but if I could just say "8mm wrench" in the direction of my toolbox and magically hold it in my hand, or magically have all my tools neatly arranged by name, date-of-purchase, type, or just say "wrench for that nut" and find it ... I daresay my toolbox would be a lot messier. Can't do that, so I must put in the work. Where I don't have to, and can keep the chaos out of sight, I won't.

tobr 6y ago

How do you not get there? There’s no point in the “core gameplay loop” of browsing the web where you are encouraged to close a tab. They just disappear among the other ones and you don’t really have a reason to stop and think about whether you’re done with them. At some point there are hundreds.

fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
Yeah, I only close tabs when my computer starts to feel slow. Or when iOS Safari tells me I have too many tabs open.
TylerE 6y ago
I hate clutter. Once i get past maybe 10 or 15 tabs it's time to go on a Ctrl-W spree.
officeplant 6y ago
Personally I close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I need it for later it goes into sorted bookmark folders or in a list of bookmarks right in front of me if I'm gonna need it sooner. If I ever get over 15 tabs I'm deep in research mode, but those will all be closed by the end of the day. Ever since SSDs I also shut down my computer when I'm not using it so maybe I'm weird.
floatingatoll 6y ago
I close a tab when I want to stop thinking about it, and if I hit fifty tabs, I’m so distracted I don’t have time to think about any of them and just close the entire set.
- dwighttk 6y ago
  Same but more like five for me.
aldanor 6y ago
The only reason I'm using FF is TreeStyleTab. I seriously don't understand how people live without it. Right now I have 993 open tabs, sometimes I have 100, sometimes 2k - don't really care, but they are easily navigatable as a tree-like structure on the side of the screen.

numpad0 6y ago

It’s ADHD/online vocal minority thing. Either you have it or not, there’s no fixing or accidentally contracting it. Go ahead and label them insane and call yourself sane/normal, if that is comforting for you, for being a boring person.

vlunkr 6y ago
I was with you until the ad hominem

dntrkv 6y ago

People need to learn to let go and just close tabs. It's freeing. If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. If it doesn't, no big deal. The benefits of not lugging around that baggage outweighs the potentially tiny productivity hit you take to look up the info again.

tobr 6y ago
It’s funny how there’s a borderline moral judgement about things like this. It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox, unnamed layers in photoshop, or open windows or tabs or apps or whatever would say something about your character. No, to the extent that these things are even a problem at all, that’s a consequence of a design that fails to take actual human factors into account.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I was also going to draw parallels to the icons on the desktop. Hundreds of browser tabs open is the 2020 version of having hundreds of icons all crammed onto your Windows desktop.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox Not really. Desktop icons and email are persisted to non volatile storage. Expecting windows and tabs to persist in the exact state you left them as if they were real world objects is just not how computers work.
  - spopejoy 6y ago
    That's not true, many applications have moved to the "constant save" model (and games too). For instance, you never ever save in Final Cut Pro anymore (I wish ProTools would go this route). There is no reason a browser can't persist your tab state, or your window state, window positions, etc to disk continually and always relaunch with the persisted state.
6y ago

tomjen3 6y ago

Trivial: you need to look something up, you follow a trail on wikipedia and you pretty quickly have 100 tabs. I have OneTab for Firefox, which allows me to convert active tabs into a bookmark list. This helps the problem a lot because I can now park my active tabs.

jlokier 6y ago
I've tried something like that. Maybe it was OneTab, I don't remember. Unfortunately I found bookmarks rather useless and switched back to using tabs. It's really unfortunate.

mortenjorck 6y ago

As a UX designer, when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (and having a hundred tabs is clearly not how tabs were intended to be used), my question is: how is this UI failing them? I think the problem is that people generally don’t know when they’ll return to a tab, so they leave it open, and that creating a bookmark is asking too much commitment for something potentially ephemeral. A good system might be one that doesn’t automatically close tabs, as some extensions do, but collapses ones that have remained unused for a certain period into a set of temporary bookmarks. Recently accessed tabs stay in the bar, while stale ones are swept into an “old tabs” list that can be perused at the user’s convenience.

enriquto 6y ago
> when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (...), my question is: how is this UI failing them? This is a legitimate question, but not the only one in that situation. Another view, more in line with the unix philosophy, is that "using something in the intended way" is a meaningless concept. A tool must work always, no matter how it is used and abused. Thus, instead of asking "how is this UI failing them?", you could be more pragmatic and ask "how can I optimize the UI so that this usage works correctly?"
- bobbymasters 6y ago
  As a non-programmer, this seems like an odd philosophy. If I use the claw side of a hammer to strike a nail, I’d expect that it is t going to work well. It seems like there’s a limit on “make the tool work regardless of the use case.”
  - zeroimpl 6y ago
    A better comparison would be: Hammers are designed for striking nails, but some customers have figured out they work well for cracking walnuts, so as a hammer manufacturer we should avoid using toxic ingredients such as lead.
kjakm 6y ago

pizza 6y ago

Combination of depth-first browsing and FOMO. The one thing that's serendipitous about it is that you might just get to that article you opened up last week after all

ordx 6y ago

Some people hate bookmarks. When you want to read something later you just keep that tab open until you have time to go back. I usually have 200-300 tabs open at any given time. Works great.

redler 6y ago
A set of a few hundred tabs, spread across a few windows, is like the bubbling organic head of a stream of temporal bookmarks. It would be great if there were some kind of time-based decay -- or ripening, depending on your perspective -- of open tabs into a more permanent bookmark-like arrangement, with spatial/proximity and window affinity cues. These could easily rehydrate to their live versions, or become fixed as "organic bookmarks" living alongside "affirmative" bookmarks and the normal, more ephemeral, uncurated browsing history.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  Tree Style Tab for organization, Auto Tab Discard for the decay, Vimium-FF for search.
  - redler 6y ago
    Thanks, I'll check those out.

drilldrive 6y ago

I have had similar hundreds of tabs before, though I try to keep to a few dozen nowadays. The source tends to be a cluster of tabs (say 10) associated to a single subject, full of articles and tools I am using related to it. Frankly an obvious solution is to have a "rough-assortment ephemeral bookmark-group" where I can shift-select say 7 tabs at once and keep them for later, with an easy deletion cycle at will. And it would be good for this method to keep track of my local data of the tabs (scroll position, typed entries, ect.). Bookmarks (in Firefox at least) suck for this in contrast to just working directly with tabs, since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them, meanwhile the tabs are grouped together nicely alongside interest-groups I hold for them, and can scroll for what I want or type in the address-bar.

catach 6y ago
Definitely not a good solution for the local tab data problem, but for: > since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them If you're already using Tree Style Tab on Firefox, there's a `Bookmark this tree` option that collapses the above workflow to just bookmarking the tree and naming a bookmark folder. Not enough of an improvement, of course.

goatinaboat 6y ago

This is horrifying! How do you get to have one hundred tabs, or worse, a few hundred? No one used bookmarks anymore, they just leave a tab open.

eyelidlessness 6y ago

Speaking only for myself: ADHD

ksec 6y ago

There are people with thousands of tabs. ( Not all Loaded Of course ). Every time there are HN discussion about browser you will see those mentioning it. Most of them are on Firefox so I guess I might be the few who does that on Safari.

Kliment 6y ago

I have 3088 tabs right now. I don't see how this is horrifying at all. I have a tab open for every dependency of every project I do, including one for every component of every electronics project I maintain. I have a tab for every webcomic I follow, a tab for every news page, a tab for every package that's on its way to me. It's like searchable, zero-effort bookmarks with state (including page scroll location) saved. Of course this is on firefox, and total suspender makes it easy to keep resource usage low. I have many years worth of state here, and if I didn't have this I don't see why I would even bother using a browser. It's like a personal knowledge base. Related tabs are clustered together in the list, I know approximately where things are in the list, I have two different search tools (% search and Tab Center Redux' own search box). I don't get why people keep trying to tell others that their workflow is bad ("horrifying") and they should feel bad. I don't care, this works, and nothing else compares.

deleted 6y ago
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