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Comment by aidos | Hacker News Reader

I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality.

When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.

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As someone who often carries a lot of tabs, I often keep the tabs around because the cost of evaluating whether a tab is worthwhile or not is high. It usually pulls me out of flow and pulls me into whatever article is bookmarked, which slows me way down.

It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.

Looks like I've 81 tabs open in this Firefox window. It's not uncommon that I'll be over 1k (across one window per monitor).

With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and it'll get cleaned up in due course.

> With `%` to search across open tabs

...No way. That's my TIL for the day. Am I the only one who didn't know about this!?

Woah that's pretty cool. I expected it to be a vimium-style modal if I just typed `%` at any point in time - so for anyone else who was confused like me, it's a prefix in your address bar so ctrl+L then % and then type your query but still, awesome!

Seems like 1k is well beyond the state of usefulness for most people. Isn't it faster to re-google something than find the tab? And if there is a nice tab search.. is it better than google? Why keep a local cache?

For me, the problem tabs solve isn’t finding the thing, but remembering the thing to find. Bookmarks solve the former, but tabs act as a collection of topics that I care about at a given point in time.

While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.

All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.

Interesting explanation, thanks!

For me, tabs are very much a manifestation of what’s going on in my mind at that very instant. Basically a cache. But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.

The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.

>But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.

That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt.

Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation.

Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.

> But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.

What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.

Keeping every tab in your trail of research is like using a highlighter on evert page of the book you’re reading because “it’s all important”. I don’t believe it’s ultimately productive for the actual goal.

I also use a window and the tabs within it similarly to the OP of this thread. They're usually used to complete a task and then the entire window gets closed.

Bookmarks for frequently visited recurring links.

Bookmarks that I visit multiple times a day (Calendar, Email, etc) get pinned.

For me it's a todo list. If I'm playing a game, researching a topic, and so on I have a window with tabs in it for that one thing. This works well enough and it feels nice shutting the window for closure when I no longer need it.

The problem is when I have stuff that sits around for longer like the Fast AI course I'm doing. That window is taunting and mocking me.

Edit: Looks like I have this in a tab because I meant to finish reading it. 7 months. I have a problem.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026

I avoid browser tabs if possible. I currently have 5 browser windows open, and have hacked userChrome.css to hide the tab bar:

  #pageActionButton {
    display: none !important;
  }
  .urlbar-history-dropmarker, .urlbar-history-dropmarker:hover   {
    display: none !important;
  }
  #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }

I currently have 12 visible windows open. I prefer a spacial interface where I can see and change everything vs. a modal interface of only seeing one task at a time and having to constantly switch between each task/tab.

for a lot of people you search for something to solve a problem. for instance debugging an issue. you middle click on a bunch of promising tabs and then go through them. if there is some useful information on that page you leave it open but it's rare that it's the only thing you need to know to solve your problem. another use is some API you need to use so you'd open up a bunch of tabs on the functions you are exploring how you need to use them.

I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full bookmark but not finished with.

I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

I used to use tab groups and have hundreds of tabs in Firefox some years back. Now, like you, I close things as soon as I don't need them.

Anything unpinned is temporary, and I only pin a few tabs. I also heavily bookmark and quickmark (qutebrowser) things and can usually get back to them easily.

I don't remember what changed my behavior, but I had incidents in the past with running out of RAM and swap and my whole PC hanging despite having 16GB of RAM, so I probably just scared myself straight.

Things feel cleaner when I have fewer tabs, which I think contributes to my mood being better. If I'm ever partway through a deep-dive or project that involves a lot of open tabs, I find I feel stressed. Sometimes I even decide enough is enough and close them all, feeling near-instant relief.

It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between how many tabs you like open and when you started using the web. I used it for a long time before tabs were even a feature, and I find it easy to keep my tab count down. Compared to having to keep things down to "preferably 1, but maybe 3 or 4 if you're in a real pinch", keeping the tab count under 100 is no big deal.

(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)

I’ve been using the web since NCSA Mosaic, and regularly have hundreds of tabs open

I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at work.

Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm at 20.

I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for instance when opening new tabs from other apps).

I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them, so I tend not to fight it.

I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at work.

How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well, but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this site.

Do you really need 14 pinned tabs? I use plenty of apps too, but they don’t need to be sitting there all the time.

And multiple day tasks, I still can’t imagine why you need all the tabs. For me, I get in, get what I need and get out again.

Well, "need" is a funny word. I guess I don't "need" any tabs, or even bookmarks. I could just type URLs all day and have a very pretty browser.

They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.

Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come back.

Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all the way to the left first.

There’s nothing to like about it. I don’t. I still have about 200 tabs open.

Someone should develop an actually good Alfred like tab finder for Firefox and I’m golden.

Same. I tend to use my tabs as a stack. On the left side I have the tabs I never close; like my Jira dashboard. Going towards the right I have my tabs that are todo -> in-progress. As I get through each thing, I close the tab. This tends to keep it pretty lean.

I'm completely the same, I might have a dozen active tabs but everything gets closed down asap, and in general I'll have multiple windows for different contexts each with just a few tabs.

I had hundreds and I use all of them at least once a week

Let’s call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that’s 40 tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour, just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all those different things - you know what they are and you want to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type ‘app.i - enter’. Why would I want it open?

I keep open 200 and more tabs, especially when I can't finish a job before I start or continue another one. It's a matter of efficiency - closing a group of tabs found after painful and time-consuming research is unreasonable IMO. To find a specific tab after a day or two I use the tabFX Firefox extension. It allows searching for the tab containing keywords in the title/URL or tabs similar to the selected one. Also allows closing tabs directly from the search result list. Extremely useful.

I just opened HN 20 minutes ago, from there opened 5 tabs into comment threads, and from each comment thread opened the linked article in a new tab. This is a new tab I opened to reply without losing my place in the thread. That's 12 tabs.

In April 2021 I visited 5036 pages, 167 pages a day average.

In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've spent more time in head-down coding.

5 tabs an hour, hah.

I feel you. April 2021 : 7752 pages visited.

Generally 300+ tabs in firefox. Mostly in chunks corresponding to home or work projects that take months or longer to finish.

I feel like people are deliberately misreading the scenario we’re talking about in my parent post. The GP wasn’t saying there were one off tabs, but ones used at least once a week. My point is more that to just get through these regular ones you’re in a bit of a doom cycle before you visit anything new.

The problem seems to be that all browser development teams consist entirely of users of the second group.

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