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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Is that with a reasonable (~10) or unreasonable (~300) number of tabs open?

(Disclaimer: anecdata.)

Unreasonable, for sure. I may not be in the several hundreds of tabs open at any given time, but definitely around a hundred. I gave up on Chrome for this specific reason, it'd just kill my battery in no time, whereas I can go an entire work day with Safari and still have battery left for an episode of SV. I routinely have ridiculous amounts of tabs open (for no good reasons) and Safari so far has been the only browser able to cope without draining my battery in no time.

My main reason for ditching Chrome in favor of Safari, aside from the fact that Safari is ridiculously fast, is that Chrome is a memory hog. The way I browse, with so many tabs open and lots of flipping back and forth, Chrome routinely eats around 4gb of memory in total, whereas Safari uses somewhere in the vicinity of 50%-75% of that. (Looking at it right now, it's at 1.86gb.)

I don't think Safari is the perfect browser by any means, but it's the best one I've used so far.

A classic example of finding a technical solution to a human problem. If you have a hundred tabs open, you're problem is the hundred tabs and not your browser.

Why?

I open up a lot of tabs while researching things, and once I have found my solution, I can either review the rest of the tabs or close the window.

So what is the human problem with having many tabs exactly?

I do almost the same as you, but with Firefox under Windows. A year ago I had to switch to the beta channel because the memory leaks in the "satble" version would crash it on restart (I have it configured to reload the previous session).

A few months later problems began with beta version. Things got nasty when they tried the multiprocess architecture (which luckily has disappeared for good). Now (v 47) they've found a sweet spot.

I have also slightly modified my usage patterns to mitigate the problem:

* I would open one "main page" (HN, for example) and keep that open, refreshing and loading tabs in that window related to news, discussions, posts, etc. I'd never close this tab/window. -> (what I suspect) this would cause FF to keep hundreds (thousands?) of URLs and state in memory to respond to the Shift+T (reopen tab) command.

* I now close the "main window" more often, and thus keep this behaviour at bay. This alone must be the one thing that impacted the browsers stability.

* I try to keep less than 6 windows open at the same time (one with my email accounts, facebook main page, etc, another one for reddit/HN, and then specific windows for different topics).

I haven't had to modify my habits any further fortunately. But I did use to have 20+ windows with ~20 tabs each in average.

Honestly, Chromes UI for lots of tabs sucks as well. Safari has multiple allowances for it and never shrinks tabs down into a tiny, useless state[1] nor does Safari have a tab limit.

Frankly, Chrome sucks with a lot of tabs and sucks at conserving power, on a laptop it loses out on the two things that actually matter to me.

[1] https://imgur.com/bZTgrCg

No argument there, I use safari both for tab sanity and low battery use, I just don't get the hate for people using many tabs.

They're basically stacks of mini bookmarks in my view.

Many tabs is not a hundred tabs. You can't really manage a hundred tabs. Try using bookmarks and a search engine.

I have a similar use pattern, and the short answer is: it isn't worth bookmarking. I (we?) are reading a lot and evaluating if it's even worth keeping. Once I've decided if it's worth keeping then yes, I will bookmark. But first I have to scan through the bunch of documents/pages/topics I have opened and see if they're of any use.

Tabs can be managed easily, I close them when I'm done.

Bookmarks are long-term memory, tabs are short-term memory.

I tried that, but it ended up just being a dump of oh so many bookmarks and I'd spend more time searching, finding all sorts of interesting stuff in my dumps of bookmarks, open those up, and then all of a sudden I'm back to having loads and loads of tabs open.

Seriously, I'm like a tab addict. I need help.

It would be great if browsers had an option to only allow one instance of a certain website. Half my problem is opening multiple tabs of gmail, whatsapp and facebook, for example, when i'm only actually looking for one instance of them.

Pinnes tabs solve that, actually. Whenever I hit a Facebook link or whatever it just switches to and navigates the Facebook tab to the URL. This is an awesome feature and probably singelhandedly responsible for cutting my tab count by the tens anyway. Still not enough, but definitely a step in the right direction.

Do you mean pinned tabs? It doesn't switch to the existing tab for me on chrome with osx. In what environment does this work because I'm very interested in it.

Oh sorry, I meant in Safari. Pinned tabs in Chrome was the killer feature that kept me around. When Safari finally got them I switched in a heart beat and haven't looked back since. (Other than for dev.)

I manage 100 tabs and use vimium to search through them. I like this workflow and it's productive. I could close them and manage a bunch of bookmarks, but I find this is better for me.

A classic example of blaming the human for wanting what they want, when there's no particular reason not to give it to them.

It's 2016. My 3GHz 6-core computer with 32GB of RAM should be able to handle a thousand tabs without even noticing it.

Rule number 1 for the interaction between humans and the computer is to never blame the user. Humans are the way they are and hard to change, you are programming for them, so you need to take into account how they use your program. If you provide tabs, they will leave tons of tabs open.

You seem to be getting down voted, but honestly I agree with you. If there was an option to limit the amount of tabs I can have open, I totally would use it and limit it all to 10, maybe even just 5. Thing is, this isn't so much a conscious choice – it just happens!

I read something, there's an interesting link. I open a tab in the background and continue reading. Maybe I go back to the tab, find a couple more interesting links and open those in the background. Of course, there's also the link that's so obviously just bait, but I'm a weak man so I click it, then feel bad, like I just had a whole big bag of candy on my own or something. Anyway, rinse and repeat and hey presto – 150 tabs are open in no time.

I fundamentally agree with you, but I'm like a chain smoker, except my vice is the humble HTML anchor...

I tend to have the same browsing habits and it was a huge drain on my resources until I started using OneTab. It's a Chrome extension that saves all your tabs on a window and lets you reopen them all at once or one at a time whenever.

If you're still using Chrome give it a shot & hopefully it helps! https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

I used to do something similar. Nowadays I put stuff I want to read into <insert fav read later service> and read them later if I'm not going to do it right away.

Classic Opera could have twice the tabs in 2 GB of RAM and it ran fine.

With only a few tens of tabs. Certainly less than 30.

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