4 ms·

I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the m

by mscrivo 11y ago

I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the muscle memory of knowing where each tab is? If so, how does that work when you move to a device that has a different resolution?

cozuya 11y ago
Tabaholics should really take a look at the onetab chrome extension to temporarily bookmark/store pages.
bgaluszka 11y ago
Personally I use tabs as sort of temporary bookmarks and I don't use bookmarks at all. Right now I have 7 windows open and every one of them has tens of tabs open. Windows help me organize them by topic (e.g. I have window where I lookup stuff related to biking, another window is for learning rust, and another is work related stuff etc). I use FF with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Klathmon 11y ago
Well for me i generally have about 10 tabs "pinned" that are always there, always in the same place, and always open. That is in my "general" window which i also browse reddit/hn and other sites on. http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using. Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows. Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap). It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day. I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.
- pavel_lishin 11y ago
  Having multiple tabs per window seems reasonable - I have ten open in my "work" window, and seven (three pinned) in my "personal" one - but when I see someone with a single browser with a hundred tabs open, I always wonder what their workflow and brain are like. I think that's probably what mscrivo was curious about.
  - Klathmon 11y ago
    I've had projects get so "packed" with tabs that i have about 50 in there, but it's generally just used as a stack at that point. Every "tangent" i need to explore, or every other level i need to dive into opens another tab, and by hitting CTRL+W i can pop them off when i'm done and go back to where i split. So i have had times where there are 50+ tabs in a window, but generally that's the exception not the rule for me, but i can easily understand how people get there normally. One of my friends uses "google searches" as a form of note taking. It's "backed up" to his history, 90% of them end up as a search at one point anyway, and it's easy to open one and type it in without any extra steps or much thought at all.
  - toothbrush 11y ago
    I am a data point. I frequently have up to 100 tabs open, which are often interesting articles, music or gadgets i stumbled across and want to keep for reference. I use a tiling WM so i only ever have 1 browser window. But with the extremely efficient Pentadactyl buffer (== tab) search i could type something like "hack chrome" and this comment thread would be one RET, or a TAB (== next completion) RET away.
  - TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
    Data point: I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open. I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly. For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later. Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc. Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.
toothbrush 11y ago
My browser (Firefox + Pentadactyl) allows me to press b (for buffers) and then a snippet of the tab title or URI, then RET, which will take me there. It's actually quite efficient, even if you're not 100% sure what you're looking for.
- MetaCosm 11y ago
  Chrome + cVim -- B (b is used for bookmarks).
dredmorbius 11y ago
State management. There's a huge gaping hole between tabs and bookmarks which needs filling. Essentially a "stuff to be read" queue, though with relations back to the parent document / page. That backlink is where tree-style tab managers win. Firefox also delays page load to when you actually navigate to the fucking page, which Chrome utterly fucks up.

by mscrivo 11y ago

cozuya 11y ago

Tabaholics should really take a look at the onetab chrome extension to temporarily bookmark/store pages.

bgaluszka 11y ago

Personally I use tabs as sort of temporary bookmarks and I don't use bookmarks at all. Right now I have 7 windows open and every one of them has tens of tabs open. Windows help me organize them by topic (e.g. I have window where I lookup stuff related to biking, another window is for learning rust, and another is work related stuff etc). I use FF with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Klathmon 11y ago

Well for me i generally have about 10 tabs "pinned" that are always there, always in the same place, and always open. That is in my "general" window which i also browse reddit/hn and other sites on. http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using. Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows. Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap). It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day. I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.

pavel_lishin 11y ago
Having multiple tabs per window seems reasonable - I have ten open in my "work" window, and seven (three pinned) in my "personal" one - but when I see someone with a single browser with a hundred tabs open, I always wonder what their workflow and brain are like. I think that's probably what mscrivo was curious about.
- Klathmon 11y ago
  I've had projects get so "packed" with tabs that i have about 50 in there, but it's generally just used as a stack at that point. Every "tangent" i need to explore, or every other level i need to dive into opens another tab, and by hitting CTRL+W i can pop them off when i'm done and go back to where i split. So i have had times where there are 50+ tabs in a window, but generally that's the exception not the rule for me, but i can easily understand how people get there normally. One of my friends uses "google searches" as a form of note taking. It's "backed up" to his history, 90% of them end up as a search at one point anyway, and it's easy to open one and type it in without any extra steps or much thought at all.
- toothbrush 11y ago
  I am a data point. I frequently have up to 100 tabs open, which are often interesting articles, music or gadgets i stumbled across and want to keep for reference. I use a tiling WM so i only ever have 1 browser window. But with the extremely efficient Pentadactyl buffer (== tab) search i could type something like "hack chrome" and this comment thread would be one RET, or a TAB (== next completion) RET away.
- TheLoneWolfling 11y ago
  Data point: I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open. I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly. For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later. Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc. Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.

toothbrush 11y ago

My browser (Firefox + Pentadactyl) allows me to press b (for buffers) and then a snippet of the tab title or URI, then RET, which will take me there. It's actually quite efficient, even if you're not 100% sure what you're looking for.

MetaCosm 11y ago
Chrome + cVim -- B (b is used for bookmarks).

dredmorbius 11y ago

State management. There's a huge gaping hole between tabs and bookmarks which needs filling. Essentially a "stuff to be read" queue, though with relations back to the parent document / page. That backlink is where tree-style tab managers win. Firefox also delays page load to when you actually navigate to the fucking page, which Chrome utterly fucks up.