Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it.
I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?
Jeez. TIL. Couldn't live without it.
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).
It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.
Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"
Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
/me smh
Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)
One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.
Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
1. Open up Window->Task Manager
2. Sort by CPU
3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list
4. Try not to kill extensions
5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage
6. Kill everything over 99mb
7. Continue enjoying Chrome
Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.
Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
killall "Google Chrome Helper"
Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.
In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open
I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.
Why?
Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).
I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.
I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.
Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.
This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.
YM, as always, MV.
Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.
If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.
I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.
I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.
For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!
On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.
One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).
I just found it today and already I love it.
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I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.
So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.
FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.
After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.
Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.
At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.
"% <substring>"
Great feature, completely undiscoverable.
I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed.
Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.
Maybe.
I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...
Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.