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I’ll never understand people who hoard tabs. Every time I’m done with something, I can close all the tabs in a few seconds. A single search can generate 15 tabs

• forlong 3y ago
  Switching context. Very often.
• bayindirh 3y ago
  The tabs pile up, not because I hoard them, but because the task has not been finished yet. I start researching a thing, or troubleshoot a problem, and I dig for some time. This digging generally routes me to places of internet not found or shown by my search engine of choice, hence if I close that set of tabs, I'll lose another half day to find them. However, I can't touch that set of tabs, because a small or another big, more urgent thing gets in the way. I move that tab set to another window and start over. When the task at hand completed, these tabs/windows are closed. The ones that piled over? Save that Windows's session, label it "X Research", and go on. What that research or task ends, some tasks got bookmarked, others got closed, and the saved session is deleted. Internet is much deeper when compared to 00s, and the most valuable information is not on the first page of Google/Kagi/whatever most of the time. Hence the apparent hoarding.
  • corbezzoli 3y ago
    Your browser doesn’t have a history tab?
    • Ndymium 3y ago
      History is an unorganized pile of stuff, I wouldn't be able to find things I once had open possibly months ago - if I'm not lucky I can't even remember what page titles to search for. In my tab bar things are organized into groups that I collapse when I'm not actively using. Thus I can easily find those GitHub issues, discussion forum posts, datasheets, or whatever else I was looking at when I last worked on e.g. my brother's keyboard USB conversion, which sadly had to be put on hold due to other life stuff. This could be replicated with bookmarks, but I have no reason to use bookmarks when my tab bar already works the way I want it to.
      • okwhateverdude 3y ago
        TreeStyleTabs in Firefox has a feature to bookmark the whole tree you've built. I find that very useful for a similar workflow as you. And keeping the tree structure is important because it lets me back up a level or two in case there were more resources to explore that I've not.
    • specialist 3y ago
      While both are belligerently user hostile, History is the only feature set worse than Bookmarks. Safari live updates the displayed history if you reopen a link. Which resets your cursor. Bulk deleting selected entries deletes. each. and. every. single. entry. one. at. a. time. It can take minutes to delete 100s of entries. With a bunch of entries selected, to bulk delete them, it's common to accidentally unintentionally reopen them. There's no way to filter noise entries. Like search results and shopping carts. Using a treetable, with each visited domain as a top level node, would be spiffy. Double extra bonus points for cascading trees mirroring the URL. As God intended. Search is painful. I have similar complaints for Firefox.
  • user3939382 3y ago
    In Firefox anyway there’s a feature to “bookmark all open tabs” which I use for this scenario. It creates a bookmark folder with everything you have open.
    • bayindirh 3y ago
      Does it bookmark all windows' tabs, or only the active window's one?
• amboo7 3y ago
  Plain entropy. I use an extension for killing duplicate tabs, helps a lot.
• hnlmorg 3y ago
  I never understand people who can’t understand that different people have different usage patterns and workflows.
  • spicybright 3y ago
    If anything we should applaud how flexible modern software can to accommodate a user. I still remember a time before tabbed browsing existed.
    • hnlmorg 3y ago
      > I still remember a time before tabbed browsing existed. To be fair, it wasn’t actually that long ago :) (or maybe I’m just old too?)
      • cj 3y ago
        Browser tabs were invented about “25% of the average human lifespan” years ago. I think that classifies as “long ago” :) A bit of a scary way to measure time, I definitely feel old now.
        • hnlmorg 3y ago
          Yeah, but that’s not beyond the memory of the average person. Usually phrases like “I remember a time before” prefix something that most people weren’t alive for. That all said, it’s still longer than I thought. Time flys!
  • cj 3y ago
    It’s hard to understand the “I have a hundred tabs open” usage pattern because the same people constantly complain that they have too many tabs open. It’s logical to not understand other people’s workflows when they themselves complain about their own workflow frequently and vocally (not on HN, but where I work it’s a frequent comment whenever anyone is getting ready to screenshare something)
• UberFly 3y ago
  Good job hero.
• eviks 3y ago
  Do you also fail to understand the barbarians who sort their files into folders?
  • corbezzoli 3y ago
    Tabs are not files. If you need to save things, use bookmarks. If you don’t, don’t keep clutter around. Do you still keep all the files in the download folder since 2013?
    • eviks 3y ago
      > If you need to save things, use bookmarks my losses: - time spent copying the information, even more so to have the same subgroups/order - losing that order when you regroup tabs during continuous work - harder navigation as now I need an extra "bookmarks" UI instead of existing tab lista What would the universal gains be that would justify this? > If you don’t, don’t keep clutter around. Did you notice the word 'sessions' in the title? That's for organizing > Do you still keep all the files in the download folder since 2013? Nope, I split them into folders, just like I split my tabs into sessions
      • corbezzoli 3y ago
        > - harder navigation as now I need an extra "bookmarks" UI instead of existing tab lista This is an HN thread about an extension that offers extra UI to save, manage your tabs. It's evident that the one-line-of-tabs UI is not enough for your use case. Bookmarks already definitely have better UX for organization, they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively! > Did you notice the word 'sessions' in the title? That's for organizing My point is that you can store your "sessions" in a bookmarks folder. Browsers have made it excessively easy to "save all tabs" and "open all bookmarks" already. "Saving a tab session" is literally indistinguishable from "Saving all tabs as bookmarks", you're just duplicating a native browser feature by installing a 3rd party extension that has access to your entire browser history.
        • eviks 3y ago
• clumsysmurf 3y ago
  FWIW, I am able to keep tabs organized in Safari because it has tab groups. But my Firefox sessions always explode because there is no such feature, creating a self perpetuating problem of disorganization begetting more disorganization.
  • sapiol 3y ago
    You might be interested in the Firefox Extension "Tree Style Tab". I can't live without it and refuse to use any browser that can't offer any similar experience.
    • clumsysmurf 3y ago
      Thanks, I have tried TST and Sideberry.
  • themoonisachees 3y ago
    Firefox has tab groups. By default it only has a few preprogrammed groups but extensions can add more
    • clumsysmurf 3y ago
      Well, not like Safari and Chrome ;)
  • hahn-kev 3y ago
    This extension is pretty awesome for that use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view... Used to be a feature in Firefox and the removed it so people made an extension for it.
• smcleod 3y ago
  Yeah I’m the same. As soon as I’m done with a tab I’ll close it, I’d rather close something and reopen it than have a bunch of sites open for no good reason.
• Beijinger 3y ago
  It is really important to stay on top of the literature in your field. Here's my approach: 1. See an interesting paper, open in a web browser 2. Start to read, but get distracted, leave for later 3. Find a new study, open that one. 4. Have too many tabs open, close all.
• dxuh 3y ago
  I visit HackerNews and immediately see a few posts I find interesting and open them in background tabs. I'm scared to just read one and then go back to the home page, because it might have disappeared or changed the title or something like that. Then I read one or two of the open tabs, get distracted and do something else. That nets +3-+5 tabs. Repeat the same on reddit and YouTube. The fear of hitting the back button is much worse on those sites. The other kind of tab-explosion is when I am doing something specific, like researching some topic and open tabs end up being stuff that I deemed worth reading or that remains a to-read. And often enough I don't come back to them and they just sit around. As soon as even more tabs have piled up to make them disappear across the tab bar, they are almost lost in my open tabs forever. Also I am not addicted to heroin, but I can understand that people can get there and can't get out. I keep a very clean apartment, but I understand that not everyone can. I go to the gym 5-6 times a week, but I understand that not everyone can. I consider it part of becoming an adult to understand that not everyone finds it easy to do things you yourself find easy to do.
  • Ylpertnodi 3y ago
    I, for one, would love to know: what are your secrets, or tricks, or tips to be able to do such?
  • yterdy 3y ago
    I'll emphasize a point you alluded to: tab hoarding is driven partly by the algorithmic instability of served content. If pages didn't refresh on the platform's whims, users could navigate back and forth to hub pages, like they used to. Now, it's unlikely that Youtube or Twitter's feed pages will be the same even two minutes apart, and they're designed to serve you content that you enjoy. The only way to ensure that you have access to that content is to immediately open every link that seems halfway interesting; otherwise, they're liable to disappear into the ether, never to be found again. That the modern web is designed to encourage addiction and OCD is not my fault.
    • anjel 3y ago
      You left out interruption of thought and process as a design goal. Long term it does wonders for ADD, even if you didn't have it in the first place.
• bakugo 3y ago
  Do you also throw away books after you read them once? Just curious.
  • corbezzoli 3y ago
    I think you’re talking about browser bookmarks. Open tabs are not books, they’re mail. You deal with it and discard what you don’t need. Heck we even have browser history to find what we saw in the past.
    • hnlmorg 3y ago
      Searching for stuff in your history is just as painful as searching from scratch. It doesn’t discern from the stuff that was worth revisiting from the stuff you opened and then closed again because it was garbage. Which means you then need a browser plugin to manage your history more effectively. And then someone else will say “I don’t understand people who are constantly search for stuff in their history…” followed by them describing their workflow as if it’s the only way to effectively manage data on a computer. ;)