5 ms·

No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?

by dmd 4y ago

bgilroy26 4y ago
You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
- krallja 4y ago
  I have those too. They’re called Bookmarks. Some of them are decades old. I don’t leave them in RAM.
  - throwaway821909 4y ago
    It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots, downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically would be ideal)
  - antonymy 4y ago
    Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.
    - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
      Bookmarks don't store history or context (for Tree-style tab users, what tab was <this> opened from?). Tabs do. Bookmarks solve only half the problem, tabs solve more.
      - piva00 4y ago
        I use a mix of leaving multiple windows with 1-20 tabs in each and Toby to organise them after a while. My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby. It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
    - hammyhavoc 4y ago
      Well-written modern browsers suspend tabs. Barely uses any RAM.
    - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      Bookmarks are buried in a toolbar and may as well be deleted. Tabs visually remind you of their presence.
  - ASalazarMX 4y ago
    To be fair, Firefox starts up quickly even with hundreds of tabs saved, because only the pinned and current tabs are loaded on start. I used to think it was awesome how it kept memory use efficient by leaving unused tabs unloaded, but it has gotten too good. I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    They aren't in RAM in a decent browser. Mine are written to disk, possible to use session after session, and they are also suspended, thus aren't using resources.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    You can search tabs in Firefox by typing % in the url bar. My PC has 64Gb of RAM. Why should I ever have to close a tab if I'm not ready to?
  - bodge5000 4y ago
    The problem with bookmarks, for a lot of us anyway, is that they're very much "out of sight, out of mind". You bookmark something, and never come back to it. Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now. I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.
  - dublin 4y ago
    Tabs are not in RAM in Firefox - they don't get loaded until you click into them, so you can effectively have a nearly unlimited number of tabs open. (My primary browsing PC has only 8 GB of RAM, but handles thousands of tabs with ease.) As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...) BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now. Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!
- ako 4y ago
  I collect these in pocket.
  - mackrevinack 4y ago
    personally i have found that pocket is like a black hole for articles. ive saved so many over the years but only end up reading .01% of them
  - dublin 4y ago
    Correction: You have chosen to give Pocket your most personal data. No thanks.
    - ako 4y ago
      Online bookmark services are quite common, and not very personal.
baal80spam 4y ago
Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat and tidy at the end of day.
- yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
  /me glances at my (cluttered) desk There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
  - orthoxerox 4y ago
    Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;) But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.
      - doublerebel 4y ago
        Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.
      - bobwaycott 4y ago
        My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.
- Retr0id 4y ago
  Heh, I think you might be onto something here. I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now. I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects. I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.
insightcheck 4y ago
Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an introductory review paper that links to dozens of other sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too. Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article, or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you might start with one or more pages of Google search results). Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through. However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.
- knolan 4y ago
  When I’m writing a paper I’ll download the PDFs of relevant papers to a subfolder of my TeX document’s folder and start building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk. Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about forgetting something.
- reportgunner 4y ago
  > so you open them all in new tabs but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ? When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.
  - rasz 4y ago
    > save the links thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you. >binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.
Gualdrapo 4y ago
I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small. And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.
furyofantares 4y ago
I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though, where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not remember how to get there since you've only done it once.
jacquesm 4y ago
Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what bits that are relevant came from which document. This is getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.
ok_dad 4y ago
Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10 search tabs open.
lotw_dot_site 4y ago
One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development version of my own namesake :)
stayux 4y ago
I will never have more than 5-8 myself. For me, focus is the key of accomplishing a given task. If I have to do a research, I collect by clipping in Obsidian, then tag and reorganize. If a given project needs a series of webpages on startup, I create a new profile in chrome (with different colour) and move along. Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)
- boredtofears 4y ago
  Don’t you lose saved passwords / bookmarks in new profiles?
  - stayux 4y ago
    My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Bookmarks are collected in Markdown with tags/notes (Obsidian), or clipped with a bookmarklet. I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author. Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links. If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.
    - boredtofears 4y ago
      Very cool, thanks for explaining your setup, I like the organization of it.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago
      >My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?
Tagbert 4y ago
On my work laptop, I have 152 tabs open right now. I use a Firefox plugins called Panorama tab groups to organize them by projects. These are long running projects where I have web documents, references, reports and action tickets for each project. There are pages that I reference multiple times per day every day. I don’t want to be closing and reopening them. That is a lot of work and sometimes context and state would be lost. The plugin lets me see just the tabs for a given project at one time. I can switch projects and then I am only seeing the tabs for that project. I could do this within separate windows but that would require managing up to 10 windows in the browser and that’s a lot of work. Also it’s too easy to close the browser and lose the windows. Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.
waste_monk 4y ago
I'm the opposite, my work machine has ~740 tabs over 14 windows, my personal machine at home is well into the 6000's... not sure how you get anything useful done with so few tabs. Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.
rasz 4y ago
Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on https://insanecoding.blogspot.com https://insanecoding.blogspot.com . Interesting blog, so I opened all of the individual blog posts (~20 going back to 2007) and will spend the next ~week reading them in my spare time. If I just bookmarked instead I would quickly forgot about it. Tabs are a live TODO list.

No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?

by dmd 4y ago

No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?

bgilroy26 4y ago

You're probably more of a project finisher than a project starter Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)

krallja 4y ago
I have those too. They’re called Bookmarks. Some of them are decades old. I don’t leave them in RAM.
- throwaway821909 4y ago
  It means (for those of us who can't let go easily) going through every tab, opening all the interesting pages it links to, bookmarking them, preferably with screenshots, downloading any videos, etc. I'd rather they weren't in RAM but there's no easy way to move them to disk (automatically would be ideal)
- antonymy 4y ago
  Ditto. I have no idea why bookmarks are so hard for some people to use. RAM is far more limited than regular storage, and bookmarks are minuscule in size compared to browser tabs. This "problem" was solved decades ago and yet I still see tab-hoarders everywhere.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
    Bookmarks don't store history or context (for Tree-style tab users, what tab was <this> opened from?). Tabs do. Bookmarks solve only half the problem, tabs solve more.
    - piva00 4y ago
      I use a mix of leaving multiple windows with 1-20 tabs in each and Toby to organise them after a while. My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby. It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
  - hammyhavoc 4y ago
    Well-written modern browsers suspend tabs. Barely uses any RAM.
  - BeFlatXIII 4y ago
    Bookmarks are buried in a toolbar and may as well be deleted. Tabs visually remind you of their presence.
- ASalazarMX 4y ago
  To be fair, Firefox starts up quickly even with hundreds of tabs saved, because only the pinned and current tabs are loaded on start. I used to think it was awesome how it kept memory use efficient by leaving unused tabs unloaded, but it has gotten too good. I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.
- hammyhavoc 4y ago
  They aren't in RAM in a decent browser. Mine are written to disk, possible to use session after session, and they are also suspended, thus aren't using resources.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  You can search tabs in Firefox by typing % in the url bar. My PC has 64Gb of RAM. Why should I ever have to close a tab if I'm not ready to?
- bodge5000 4y ago
  The problem with bookmarks, for a lot of us anyway, is that they're very much "out of sight, out of mind". You bookmark something, and never come back to it. Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now. I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.
- dublin 4y ago
  Tabs are not in RAM in Firefox - they don't get loaded until you click into them, so you can effectively have a nearly unlimited number of tabs open. (My primary browsing PC has only 8 GB of RAM, but handles thousands of tabs with ease.) As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...) BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now. Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!
ako 4y ago
I collect these in pocket.
- mackrevinack 4y ago
  personally i have found that pocket is like a black hole for articles. ive saved so many over the years but only end up reading .01% of them
- dublin 4y ago
  Correction: You have chosen to give Pocket your most personal data. No thanks.
  - ako 4y ago
    Online bookmark services are quite common, and not very personal.

baal80spam 4y ago

Same here. I treat my browser like my desk and I keep it neat and tidy at the end of day.

yjftsjthsd-h 4y ago
/me glances at my (cluttered) desk There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
- orthoxerox 4y ago
  Four kinds of people. My desk is always a mess, but I close my tabs every day.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Technically, we now have evidence for three. There is no evidence yet for people with a clean desk but messy tabs ;) But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.
    - doublerebel 4y ago
      Clean desk but messy tabs here. I like the aesthetics of clean interior design, it’s peaceful and inspiring like a blank whiteboard. Also, nobody can see my tabs.
    - bobwaycott 4y ago
      My girlfriend will stop and clean the house if she sees a crumb, but I don’t think she knows she can close tabs. She probably has a tab for everything she’s ever looked at on the internet. They never go away. It’s as overwhelming to me as my inability to spot a crumb is to her.
Retr0id 4y ago
Heh, I think you might be onto something here. I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now. I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects. I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.

insightcheck 4y ago

Let's say you're writing a research paper. You start with an introductory review paper that links to dozens of other sources. You want to evaluate whether these sources are relevant to your paper's topic, so you open them all in new tabs. Then they have other references, so you open those too. Over the course of a couple hours, you might have over 20 tabs you've opened. You then stop opening new tabs, and read them one at a time until you're done. A similar process can happen when doing research for an in-depth blog post, opinion article, or essay (except instead of starting with a review paper, you might start with one or more pages of Google search results). Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through. However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.

knolan 4y ago
When I’m writing a paper I’ll download the PDFs of relevant papers to a subfolder of my TeX document’s folder and start building a bibliography with links to those PDFs in BibDesk. Much easier to find stuff and not have to worry about forgetting something.
reportgunner 4y ago
> so you open them all in new tabs but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ? When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.
- rasz 4y ago
  > save the links thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you. >binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.

Gualdrapo 4y ago

I'm like you, I try to keep my number of "tabs" small. And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.

furyofantares 4y ago

I don't get it at all. I know how to get back to everything I use. I guess I don't do a lot of researching things, though, where you land on pages you've never seen before and might not remember how to get there since you've only done it once.

jacquesm 4y ago

Lucky you. That means you have a very focused work environment with very little distractions. Unfortunately the work I do pretty much forces me to have 10's, regularly 100's of documents open at the same time and to be able to memorize what bits that are relevant came from which document. This is getting harder with advancing age so I used a scrapbooking plug-in to keep track of the citations. Now it is just a file with a bunch of text snippets and hyperlinks.

ok_dad 4y ago

Same, I can't fathom having more than 20 tabs open, and only if I was tracking the hardest most complex bug ever and had 10 search tabs open.

lotw_dot_site 4y ago

One of the greatest joys of my life is going on gleeful rampages of Ctrl+w tab annihilation! Lots of times, I'll end up with just two open tabs: devdocs.io and the local development version of my own namesake :)

stayux 4y ago

I will never have more than 5-8 myself. For me, focus is the key of accomplishing a given task. If I have to do a research, I collect by clipping in Obsidian, then tag and reorganize. If a given project needs a series of webpages on startup, I create a new profile in chrome (with different colour) and move along. Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)

boredtofears 4y ago
Don’t you lose saved passwords / bookmarks in new profiles?
- stayux 4y ago
  My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Bookmarks are collected in Markdown with tags/notes (Obsidian), or clipped with a bookmarklet. I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author. Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links. If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.
  - boredtofears 4y ago
    Very cool, thanks for explaining your setup, I like the organization of it.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    >My passwords live in an encrypted folder with contextual information, then are used in the browser with per site rules. Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?

Tagbert 4y ago

On my work laptop, I have 152 tabs open right now. I use a Firefox plugins called Panorama tab groups to organize them by projects. These are long running projects where I have web documents, references, reports and action tickets for each project. There are pages that I reference multiple times per day every day. I don’t want to be closing and reopening them. That is a lot of work and sometimes context and state would be lost. The plugin lets me see just the tabs for a given project at one time. I can switch projects and then I am only seeing the tabs for that project. I could do this within separate windows but that would require managing up to 10 windows in the browser and that’s a lot of work. Also it’s too easy to close the browser and lose the windows. Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.

waste_monk 4y ago

I'm the opposite, my work machine has ~740 tabs over 14 windows, my personal machine at home is well into the 6000's... not sure how you get anything useful done with so few tabs. Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.

rasz 4y ago

Ill give you one example. Just yesterday I stumbled on https://insanecoding.blogspot.com https://insanecoding.blogspot.com . Interesting blog, so I opened all of the individual blog posts (~20 going back to 2007) and will spend the next ~week reading them in my spare time. If I just bookmarked instead I would quickly forgot about it. Tabs are a live TODO list.