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Comment by vocatus_gate | Hacker News Reader

How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.

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I open almost every link in new tabs. It's faster to close a tab and return to the prior tab than it is to go Back, and the back button often doesn't work with dynamic pages. Plus, when replying in various forums, it's much easier to flip between tabs to refer to stuff that was said upthread, especially when you have to go back a page or two.

Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.

Also looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history. In fact going through your browsing history may be faster because you can actually use key words to search for what you want.

I have 2-3 tabs open most of the time. If I am looking something up, I go to 10-12. When I am done, it goes back down to 2-3. I can't even fathom under what situation people are using hundreds of tabs.

> looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history

I have heaps of tabs open, but there are orders of magnitude more pages in my browser history. The latter usually contains so much that is too much to look through to find anything but quite recent entries. The tabs still open are pages still with some relevance to me, while the history is filled with lots of incidental stuff that is no longer of use.

[Edit: also, with open tabs the page content is already there so it's more quickly accessible. This can be useful if you need to look at it to help find the page you're looking for, and to get the content from the page]

I usually max out at around 50. Today I got to 40, by reading several articles in the morning, and then starting a programming project in the afternoon. And the project included several unfamiliar topics, and I opened multiple tabs for some Google searches because not every website has the same take on the matter.

I open a tab as an (internal) signifier that "this might be interesting". I will browse it, and cull the ones that dont fit my interest/mood/timescope.

For me, it reduces cognitive load. I don't keep in mind all tabs that I have open -- that's why I keep them open! To forget about them.

Bookmarks are mentally for things I want to save and reuse. But I'll probably open 40 HN sourced articles (from the main page and comments) per day, and continually cycle/review them for interest/effort throughout the day.

On the contrary, opening tabs reduce the cognitive load for me. Instead of having to use some of my limited mental space to keep in mind that there's some interesting link I'd like to go when I have finished reading the current page, I just open it now and will go back to later. Same as writing something down in a todo list.

I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.

I think a lot of people use it like instapaper? A queue of things to read.

If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think

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