When the Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage
joe.cat
joe.cat
I regularly operate with 1000+ tabs on less than 3 GB of ram. This works because I disable javascript and look at web sites instead of run applications. I have extensions to full text search and switch between them and each tab stores it's path on the web, unlike bookmarks. And I've been saving my sessions every month since Opera 5 introduced tabs (I use a FF fork now). That covers 2003-2021.
Tabs are great. Modern browsers are bad.
I'm certainly guilty of keeping too many tabs open I'll never read, and about once a month I declare "tab bankrupty" and close most of them.
When I'm doing research, I save papers in Zotero instead of just keeping a tab open. That way I can organize them how I wanted and keep notes associated with them.
when i search for something, i easily open more than a dozen tabs at once. if i do that multiple times a day, then i get into the hundreds quickly. each collection of tabs is an issue i work on. at some point i have to decide if i want to keep those tabs or if i want to restart the search when i get back to that issue.
The HN equivalent of "I don't even own a TV".
edit: Though not so much tabs, just the NO-JS default...
I am working down on my Tabs, finally got to 53 right now from 500+ last week.
Keeps a certain level of focus, and prevents attempts at multitasking and keeps tab titles and icons visible in the tab bar.
It's not considered generally idiomatic as an error handling strategy, but it does exist if it's needed.
Here's the trick I think:
I and many others use tabs to offload the brain. For those who have read "Getting Things Done" I think this is similar.
We don't think about them, just look them up if and when we need them.
Kind of the same way as a journal or notebook: it doesn't stress me that I have hundreds of pages I might never get back to; it eases my mind that if I need to get back it is still there.
I use Tree Style Tabs and a couple of extensions on top of that so sometimes I'll copy a subtree as a nested markdown list and store it in Joplin, then close it.
But no: 600 tabs like I've had more than once was totally feasible years ago and should be no match for a moderns system.
That said as long as people don't try to force me to change the way I work they are free to do it their way.
That is all gone, FF has been dumbed down, and Chrome(ium) even more so.
After that I usually bookmark them all and nuke them.
Realistically, part of the idea is that if there's something of vague interest, I middle-click figuring I might revisit it at some point in the future. Usually this isn't the case, but as I know it'll wind up in my bookmarks at some point, there's still that possibility. Sometimes it even happens!
I do something similar to one of the siblings' replies with work though. One window per project/task with all associated tabs (e.g. documentation). Usually these don't get abused as much.
"Suspend Tab" for not loading inactive tabs is also important. I typically run about 50/50 in my active sessions in terms of active vs suspended tabs. "Search Tabs" and "Tab Mix Plus" are also very helpful. "Decentraleyes" also helps (mostly latency and privacy) by providing most not-bleeding-edge JS libs, fonts, etc locally only once.
Generally the first 1/3 of my tabs are long term tab groups I keep going back to for reference. These are almost all suspended most of the time they rarely change over the course of a single year. The second third is medium term tabs from projects I worked on but moved on from. I go through every month or two and bookmark projects I won't continue while closing the tabs. The last third is active tabs and changes day to day and week to week. I generally know the positions and relative groupings of all the tabs in the first 2/3 by heart. http://erewhon.superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2017.png http://erewhon.superkuh.com/whathappenedin2016accordingtotab...
Featurewise, UI-wise?
So you could group a bunch of open web pages, a word document and a file folder for some research on a particular topic. Or a game and a walkthrough together. Your repl, ide, and a web browser open on stackoverflow for some programming.
Instead of application-oriented navigation, you'd have group s of tasks that you'd navigate between. You'd probably ctrl-tab between tabs inside of a container more often than you'd alt-tab between tasks.
tabbed (suckless.org)
XEmbed
i3
Tabs didn't appear in Netscape before 2002. I recall reading somewhere on the web that devs from Netscape didn't like the idea but don't quote me on that.
One thing we learned is hot-swapping screenshots while you load in the background (on pages you haven’t interacted with) works wonders.
Basically I go back to a tab, see the info where I left off while our browser hot swaps it with the loaded page. Often just hovering on the “sleeping” tab list to see the last captured shot to grab the snippet of info or to realize that isn’t the tab you needed is sufficient. I’m not sure if suspender does this.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prune/gblddboefgbl...
It keeps track of the last time you looked at a tab, and depending how you set it up can either group tabs into a collapsed group, or close them automatically once they reach a set threshold. It also stops you from opening duplicates, focusing originals instead (based on exact URI match).
For any other feature requests, the project is on GitHub so just create a quick issue here: https://github.com/tbrockman/prune/issues/new?assignees=&lab...
It's a little finicky with drag/drop but is very powerful.
Edge has vertical tabs which is space saving but lacks a hierarchy which is important to me.
I'm currently using Auto Tab Discard, which has a "Permanently delete (remove) old discarded tabs if they are inactive for (in hours)" and I'm manually grouping things with Panorama View. I don't know if it's built in to Firefox or one of the addons, but I've noticed it will already suggest an existing tab when I type the name/site in to the address bar.
We need local Tab Management solution so I can do it safely on my local PC.
I remember one time I was in Tab frenzy and I had around 100 tabs opened on my mobile phone Chrome browser and I think I hit the maximum limit because Chrome started showing me smiley face every time I tried to open a new tab I guess cool Easter Egg.
I had an idea of getting rid of "Browser Tab" concept and include all opened Tabs in one tab as HTML document so for example when you open a new Tab(web link) it would get included in your HTML document tab so essentially you would have a list of all opened Tabs(web links).
Imagine having one tab in your browser in a form of HTML document with the list of all "opened tabs" , "recently closed" etc. something similar to "Browser History" but of active sessions(web links). Something similar is done by Tab Extensions but they are not good enough.
You could even emulate links (load all web pages in one web HTML document) or scrape them and incrementally search them all in order to minimize tremendous management hassle and noise from information overload.
I can relate, and I call this "Tab Hell." Did you ever try the old Firefox "Panorama" feature? (previously referred to as "Tab Candy")
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/closetabemail/lkgc...
I think shameless plugs should be viewed as more positive. It's much better to find out about a product or tool in a relevant context and from the author itself instead of an Ad or blog post.
I have seen people at work with hundreds open spending ages trying to find the right tab for a presentation or spreadsheet or log file or whatever. It just feels like the sort of people with "lots" of tabs are the disorganised ones who forget to email you back when they say they will or turn up late to meetings. Are they just disorganised examples, and there are actually organised people that use hundreds of tabes at once?
To people with this many tabs, why do you do it?
The only explanation I've heard is "I'll look at this later" but that is what bookmarks or navigation history or search engines are for?
I have fuzzy search across the tabs, so i never click around on a tab looking for what i want.
When I'm developing / doing research, I have to juggle multiple questions with possible answers spread on multiple sites and after a while it gets out of hand. Organizing as I go does not work because I need the flow and organization kills it. Leaving it be doesn't work after a while because the friction of going back to what you need becomes insurmountable.
And if you are multitasking (divert your attention to a different problem / research topic with the intent of going back to the original problem later on) it becomes an absolute nightmare as the mess is multiplied.
I do use extensions to stash tabs, but they generally stash with page headers and not all page headers are informative.
Someone who knows what they are doing should really solve this problem.
I used OmniWeb on the Mac which had tabs and tab groups more than 20 years ago. It was so liberating when the official alternative on the Mac was the dreadful IE.
Still has tab features I miss today.
+1 to making this better. Please.
I would also like to understand how you get to that state in the first place. I see colleagues at work with so many tabs they don't know what is what all the time and they spend so much time trying to find the right tab it's unbelievable. They need to show something to us that requires switching between maybe two or three tabs and they always mess it up. Half the time in these meetings is spent on findings tabs and/or scrolling wildly within them.
Personally I have exactly 2 Windows open and I never get to more tabs than where I can still see from the tab title what is what. I also know what's where, meaning Gmail is open in the first tab of the first window, calendar in Tre second, timesheet in the third.
Second window has sprint board and monitors as first and following tabs and is generally used for 'work'. When unneeded work tabs get closed. For example if I review a PR, the tab stays open until I'm done with that PR and then it's closed.
Your situation might be completely different from theirs but your post reminded me of this. Can you explain how you get there and why?
O1: Reminders and Resumption
O2: Revisiting References
O3: Avoid Costly Re-finding
O4: Sunk Costs and Aspirations
O5: External Mental Model
O6: Uncertain RelevanceO1 sure I leave stuff open to remind me too. Like the PR I didn't finish reviewing. But once I'm done I close the tab.
O2/O3 I get that but I don't need a tab open. I use Firefox and no bookmarks. I just type what I remember to find something specific. Let's say I need to revisit a google doc about a certain topic. I'll type "docs <topic title part>" and most likely it'll be one of the top 3 results shown from my browsing history. I find _everything_ that way and I just don't get why I'd need to leave the tab open or sort things into bookmarks with categories and such.
O4 I am particularly talking about work so I wonder how this would play a role but who knows.
O5/O6 this seems largely to correspond to O1 if you ask me. I do sometimes find duplicate tabs open and close them or I find reminder tabs that I no longer need because something else reminded me of them but I did that task in a new tab, which is since closed. The point is that if I have only maybe 20 tabs total open it's easy to clean up. I would agree that having 500 open would just be overwhelming. Then again I'm known to go over our 'backlog' and just close 500 tickets in an hour long session because our product managers can't apparently keep the backlog at a reasonable size.
As an example I get that some people just have to categorize things. That's ok. But why then use these insanely nested bookmark folder trees to try and find stuff and failing? If it doesn't work, try something else.
I didn't figure out the current (as you say very specific) way of doing things overnight. It's a constantly evolving thing. I get that someone might not know for example that some of this is possible and thus can't bring themselves to close tabs for fear of not finding it again. Once you know though how powerful and easy the search is, is there just a psychological barrier some people can just never break through?
Can you provide any insight into that?
It ignores people have different needs too. You work with reasonably named Google docs. Other people work with reports with only different query strings. Or PDF data sheets with no titles and inscrutable names. Or they just have to juggle more tasks.
The person you replied to doesn't seem to worry about losing pages. And the paper implied people who keep tabs open don't use nested bookmark folders.
Your system is specific. But the methods aren't special. Consider others tried them and found them lacking before imagining they have psychological trouble.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
Much more powerful than panorama especially if you use container tabs.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-...
Close your tabs. Type keywords you remember to find things from browsing history.
It's like using Gmail search vs a folder structure and 'filing' things.
Like this one dude I know who'd have organized bookmarks. He wants to watch something on Netflix. The structure goes something like this Top level->Media->Streaming Services->Paid->Netflix (also has Prime Video in there). I just type 'n' into my location bar and hit enter because my browser has learned that if something starts with n I usually go to Netflix.
Also the default history UI is rubbish about surfacing connections between pages – when searching history, you can't get the browser to take you from the search result back to that actual point in your browsing history that search result is coming from, then then browser only shows you the last visit of each URL anyway even though internally it stores older visits, too, and it doesn't allow you to see connections between pages (I opened that link from this page etc.).
So if you know the right keywords to directly find a page again it's fine, but if you only know that before (or after) visiting that page you visited a different page, and you can only find that different page in your history you're sort of stuck.
As usual, the best extension for dealing with that problem in Firefox (Norwell History Tools) was nuked by the 57 update, and last time I checked none of the possible webextension replacements included all functionality of the original add-on – although it seems that there is some hacky way of running the original add-on even in a current Firefox, if you dare (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/)
And yes this only works if you know some 'keywords' that are part of the URL for example, page title etc. It definitely doesn't really work for random personal stuff that you want to remember for a long time. I do use bookmarks for that actually. But I usually don't use the actual bookmarks, but Firefox takes the bookmarks into account when searching. It sort of "cements" it, saves it from expiring :)
I never actually use the actual history UI. I literally just type into the location bar and let it find what I need. Not sure what the default settings are any longer and whether history always comes before search suggestions or if that's a setting I changed, but it very much enables this too.
I'm taking this mostly in the context of frequently-ish visited stuff or stuff that's not 'too far into the history' that it's been purged (except for what I mentioned above about bookmarks I do make, but I don't organize them very well). It's definitely mostly for work stuff, though same also applies for frequently visited personal sites, like say Hackernews. Since I watch Netflix more on the TV "n<ENTER>" nowadays goes to Hackernews :)