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Comment by nandemo | Hacker News Reader

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nandemo·

This was a nightmare before tabs were a thing.

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why?

Follow a link, lose your place and have to start over.

I don't get this. What's wrong with the back button plus visited link colors?

I feel like the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction and the number of open tabs makes things more confusing.

Usually, the next page also has interesting links, and the tree quickly becomes painful to traverse.

You click an interesting link, read it, click the back button, then click the next unvisited link. Where's the pain and how would tabs make it less?

Because what actually happens is I click an interesting link, read it, find a couple interesting-looking links, click them, read the first, see another 3 interesting links (on the now 2 levels-deep nested page), click them, notice that one of them links to a category or tag that's relevant to what I'm looking at (which has, on most wikis, dozens of pages)...

In short, sufficiently high branching factor means that neither depth first nor breadth first search can keep up without a lot of memory.

EDIT: Note that, at over 100 tabs per browser session, I am probably an extreme edge case. :)

The combination of the instability of Windows 3.1/95, terrible window management, 14"/15" monitors and uncontrolled pop-up windows was dreadful.

Windows NT made the browser crashing your computer a little less common.

Linux wasn't any better - the only graphical browser then for Linux was Netscape, and and that was even less stable on Linux than on Windows.

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