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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 th

by 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.
- _underfl0w_ 6y ago
  Genuine question because our tab handling strategies seem to differ - how frequently do you return to a given tab? Do you keep them for reference in some way, or is it more out of concern of having to navigate back over again?
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I use TreeStyleTab, and for me it's a mixture. For example, I have a bunch of tabs for online grocery shops in recent months. These are for reference. Whenever I'm in the mood to check for delivery slots (which have become scarce), I click through each of them, login and check if there's a viable delivery slot available. The set of tabs is a reference to remind me of the list of 10 or so shops to check periodically. I might forget some of them otherwise, because they are not all ones I use regularly; they are only in the list to improve my chances when slots become hard to obtain. Then I'll use the same tabs for convenience rather than reference. Muscle memory and visual location. If I found a slot, I might place an order in stages over a few days (one to book the slot, then adding items over the coming days if I realise I need something, finally to amend the order to fit my needs shortly before the delivery date). Then it's useful to have the tabs in use in a convenient location. Their visibility as a pinned tab also serves as a reminder until the shopping is finished (typically ~3-12 days) in case I forget to amend the order. I have a similar thing going on with financial institutions. I have about 20 of these in use, counting both personal and business use (I run accounts of two businesses), banks, credit cards, and tax pages. From time to time I'll want to peruse them and check in on balances and pending tasks, occasionally download a statement. Then it's useful to have a list in one place, similar to with shops. without a list I'd probably miss one. Both of the above could in theory be replaced by bookmarks, but there's a bunch of UX reasons why bookmarks don't work so well. One of them is that we really need a "live bookmarks folder" for each group. If I open another shop/institution tab, I need that to remain in the "persistent" set by default. Using a normal bookmark group, I'd open the group as tabs, then half an hour after I open something else, I'd have to remember to add that extra item to the bookmark group, and just that item. But after an hour of browsing and having visited maybe 250 pages, I'm likely to forget which open tabs are already in a bookmark group and which one's aren't. It's too much work to step through and compare item by item by hand when I'm done and need to move to another task, so I end up taking new "snapshot" bookmark groups rather than managing the existing bookmark set. This gets messy fast. In practice it's easier to just keep a set of tabs open, and delete the ones which are no longer required. Also in my tabs are the articles (many from HN) that I collect into a knowledge base. Tabs aren't a great way to save these, but neither are bookmarks. Ideally I'd want something that saves them with tags and brief notes. For now, I send tabs from my active window over to a dedicate HN window, where they form a long queue of things to go through in a systematic batch at some point and group, sort, categorise, filter, and take notes on the salient points I want proper notes on. They are a kind of research multi-queue. You could think of them as a set of about 50 long-term tasks that are likely to take years to produce the results I want (which are for actual tech developments, not reminiscence). From time to time I'm tempted to batch convert these to bookmarks, but doing so makes them unusable because it loses scroll position and text highlight, so it's labour intensive having to take notes instead. I guess people use "web clipper" software for this kind of task. I haven't found something I'm happy with yet, but I haven't tried much either. I wouldn't be happy locking so much long term research into proprietary software though. On my phone, I use "Share to Orgzly" to capture such things, rather than tabs.
benhurmarcel 6y ago
> How do you not get there? My browser is configured to not restore tabs. And I shutdown every night.
apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
I personally close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I see I have more than ~10 open, I purge them of all but the pinned tab(s) and maybe the left most 2-3 which is generally where I keep the tab I for the ticket I am actively working on. On my personal machine, I'd be surprised if I ever get above 5 non-pinned tabs open. I open a tab, look at it, close it, rinse and repeat. I have the same habits in my IDE and Finder windows and iTerm and Sublime (which I mostly use as a scratchpad). If I have more than a few open, I inherently think I am doing something wrong and go to clean it up. Frankly, I've always viewed the "hundreds of tabs open" as a sorta hoarder mentality. You might need that tab in the future, so you don't ever close it. Even when it is obvious you will never need it, you still don't close it. Even when it makes finding other tabs unusually difficult, you still do not close it. It clearly has no benefit, but you're afraid or unwilling to close it (I use "you" in the general sense; not indicating you, tobr, specifically)
kalleboo 6y ago
I have one window per "task" (like if I'm looking up how to do something using some API, I'll have a single window for that, with new tabs for API docs, some stackoverflow responses, etc), and when I'm done with the task I'll close the window. Windows for "idle browsing" get closed the next day when I open up my computer and look at the tabs and think "well this sounds boring, let's see what new has happened overnight". On my phone OTOH, the tabs just stack up until twice a year I just mass-close them all.

by tobr 6y ago

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.

_underfl0w_ 6y ago
Genuine question because our tab handling strategies seem to differ - how frequently do you return to a given tab? Do you keep them for reference in some way, or is it more out of concern of having to navigate back over again?
- jlokier 6y ago
  I use TreeStyleTab, and for me it's a mixture. For example, I have a bunch of tabs for online grocery shops in recent months. These are for reference. Whenever I'm in the mood to check for delivery slots (which have become scarce), I click through each of them, login and check if there's a viable delivery slot available. The set of tabs is a reference to remind me of the list of 10 or so shops to check periodically. I might forget some of them otherwise, because they are not all ones I use regularly; they are only in the list to improve my chances when slots become hard to obtain. Then I'll use the same tabs for convenience rather than reference. Muscle memory and visual location. If I found a slot, I might place an order in stages over a few days (one to book the slot, then adding items over the coming days if I realise I need something, finally to amend the order to fit my needs shortly before the delivery date). Then it's useful to have the tabs in use in a convenient location. Their visibility as a pinned tab also serves as a reminder until the shopping is finished (typically ~3-12 days) in case I forget to amend the order. I have a similar thing going on with financial institutions. I have about 20 of these in use, counting both personal and business use (I run accounts of two businesses), banks, credit cards, and tax pages. From time to time I'll want to peruse them and check in on balances and pending tasks, occasionally download a statement. Then it's useful to have a list in one place, similar to with shops. without a list I'd probably miss one. Both of the above could in theory be replaced by bookmarks, but there's a bunch of UX reasons why bookmarks don't work so well. One of them is that we really need a "live bookmarks folder" for each group. If I open another shop/institution tab, I need that to remain in the "persistent" set by default. Using a normal bookmark group, I'd open the group as tabs, then half an hour after I open something else, I'd have to remember to add that extra item to the bookmark group, and just that item. But after an hour of browsing and having visited maybe 250 pages, I'm likely to forget which open tabs are already in a bookmark group and which one's aren't. It's too much work to step through and compare item by item by hand when I'm done and need to move to another task, so I end up taking new "snapshot" bookmark groups rather than managing the existing bookmark set. This gets messy fast. In practice it's easier to just keep a set of tabs open, and delete the ones which are no longer required. Also in my tabs are the articles (many from HN) that I collect into a knowledge base. Tabs aren't a great way to save these, but neither are bookmarks. Ideally I'd want something that saves them with tags and brief notes. For now, I send tabs from my active window over to a dedicate HN window, where they form a long queue of things to go through in a systematic batch at some point and group, sort, categorise, filter, and take notes on the salient points I want proper notes on. They are a kind of research multi-queue. You could think of them as a set of about 50 long-term tasks that are likely to take years to produce the results I want (which are for actual tech developments, not reminiscence). From time to time I'm tempted to batch convert these to bookmarks, but doing so makes them unusable because it loses scroll position and text highlight, so it's labour intensive having to take notes instead. I guess people use "web clipper" software for this kind of task. I haven't found something I'm happy with yet, but I haven't tried much either. I wouldn't be happy locking so much long term research into proprietary software though. On my phone, I use "Share to Orgzly" to capture such things, rather than tabs.

benhurmarcel 6y ago

> How do you not get there? My browser is configured to not restore tabs. And I shutdown every night.

apocalyptic0n3 6y ago

I personally close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I see I have more than ~10 open, I purge them of all but the pinned tab(s) and maybe the left most 2-3 which is generally where I keep the tab I for the ticket I am actively working on. On my personal machine, I'd be surprised if I ever get above 5 non-pinned tabs open. I open a tab, look at it, close it, rinse and repeat. I have the same habits in my IDE and Finder windows and iTerm and Sublime (which I mostly use as a scratchpad). If I have more than a few open, I inherently think I am doing something wrong and go to clean it up. Frankly, I've always viewed the "hundreds of tabs open" as a sorta hoarder mentality. You might need that tab in the future, so you don't ever close it. Even when it is obvious you will never need it, you still don't close it. Even when it makes finding other tabs unusually difficult, you still do not close it. It clearly has no benefit, but you're afraid or unwilling to close it (I use "you" in the general sense; not indicating you, tobr, specifically)

kalleboo 6y ago

I have one window per "task" (like if I'm looking up how to do something using some API, I'll have a single window for that, with new tabs for API docs, some stackoverflow responses, etc), and when I'm done with the task I'll close the window. Windows for "idle browsing" get closed the next day when I open up my computer and look at the tabs and think "well this sounds boring, let's see what new has happened overnight". On my phone OTOH, the tabs just stack up until twice a year I just mass-close them all.