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Comment by clairity | Hacker News Reader

for those commenting about how unhygenic having many tabs open is, why bother trying to cajole others into having just a few tabs open? it's such a weird social norming behavior (to me). i can understand asking why others do it because it is not your norm, but why the addition of trying to force others to conform to your behavior? (i'm genuinely asking, as this kind of stuff is fascinating to me.)

why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right?

and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?

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> shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?

Completely agree. I am actually currently developing a tree-style-tab browser that has Chrome embedded for this reason [0]. I feel most people that tell people not to have a ton of tabs open haven't experienced the increased productivity with tree style tabs. I can ctrl+click 15 source files on a github page, opened as background tabs, then (with multiple tab handler) I can click+drag across the 10 close buttons and close 10 tabs with one gesture. I almost want to take a video of me "power-using" the web with tree style tabs and multiple-tab gestures to help others understand.

I see it as vim:intellij::fewer-tab-argument:more-tab-argument. To each his own.

0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie

I was thinking about a similar way to bookmark multiple things at once, make the gesture just a click, hold, slide and then choose option. Love what you got so far.

nice! that sounds like a really good use of an explainer video because it's hard to visualize otherwise.

For the same reason you might cajole others to perform regular backups. People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism. Very few people actually have two hundred tabs open for a single train of thought.

When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.

Yes, but that's why I have a backup; if recovery fails, I'll just restore my Firefox config files. I've done it before.

I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.

>People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism

We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism".

As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it.

Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched.

I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.

If people use tabs as bookmarks, perhaps it is because something is wrong with bookmarks.

I completely agree. It should be way easier to "braindump" a window full of tabs into a folder of bookmarks. There are browser extensions for this.

Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.

Chrome has that first feature. Right click on a tab, and click "Bookmark All Tabs..."

The bookmarking interface in chrome could use a facelift. The fact that I have to come up with a name for the folder and think about where to put it makes this less than ideal.

Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.

When my Chrome tabs crash unrecoverably it's a huge relief! Tens or Hundreds of things I wanted to read later, but weren't truly important. Too bad, but now I can use Chrome comfortably again.

When Chrome crashes, or when I reboot my Mac, it reopens the previously existing tabs.

It usually does this.

Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with.

It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.

> It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.

This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox

urm, chrome does exactly that? its almost 10 windows i think. closing a window with 10 tabs still counts as a single entry.

The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.

This still doesn't do what I want. If I have 5 windows open with 5-20 tabs each, and force a crash, I can recover them via this menu. It's tedious because I have to do them one by one, but it works.

But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank.

I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.

Because people like to feel superior, and criticizing others is one way to do that.

Personally tab bloat reeks of stemming from internet addiction and/or attention span issues. Would hazard a guess that this is the source of anti-tab sentiment.

Tabs left open don't feed internet addiction/ADHD. The act of opening a new tab does. ("Ooh I wonder if there's anything new on FB/HN/etc.?")

I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.)

But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.

They certainly feed my ADHD. If I have an HN tab open between the the AWS console I have up currently, and that API documentation I need, HN may get some attention before I hit CMD+[ again.

Yeah "the act of opening a new tab does" I agree with. My original statement is based from my own behavior which I was projecting on to others (which I suspect others who are judging people in this thread may be doing), I don't leave my machine on overnight so the over 100 tab numbers being talked about freak me out.

Anecdotally, both my parents (almost 70) have an insane amount of tabs open because they simply don't understand how tabs work. Every time they want to go somewhere else they open a new tab instead of using the current one, and they almost never close em. So this could be great for the less tech-savvy.

Ok, let's think about it in the other direction for a second, and trying on purpose apply just as much meanness so as to appreciate the duality: personally, attempts to limit the number of open tabs reeks of stemming from undiagnosed OCD and/or a lack of important tasks.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't internet addicted, am diagnosed with ADD, and open a lot of tabs. Original statement came from my personal experience, did not mean to offend anyone.

> attempts to limit the number of open tabs reeks of stemming from undiagnosed OCD and/or a lack of important tasks.

Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.

On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.

appreciate the honest response.

i disagree of course, because that's a pretty judgemental slippery slope argument (i.e., that a single behavior implies a whole host of other negative behaviors & attributes).

As an admitted internet addict with an ADD diagnoses I am fairly annoyed that my comment was considered so rude. It didn't seem like something out of bounds to call someone out on to me. Sorry for any offense.

no worries, i personally didn't take any offense (for what it's worth, i upvoted you because your response seemed genuine and without ill will, even if i disagreed with you. but it's internet points, so worth about as much as the paper it's printed on =)

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