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Comment by narkee | Hacker News Reader

Anyone care to share how their usage patterns lead to having hundreds of tabs open at a single time? How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search?

I rarely have more than 4-5 tabs open at a time, so I'm honestly curious.

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I use Firefox with Tree Style Tab. Tree Style Tab is actually the reason why I never switched to Chromium, as it IS impossible to keep more than a few tabs organized without such a plugin in my opinion.

Having many tabs opened at once and being able to keep them out of sight with Tree Style Tab makes it much easier for me to keep my browsing session organized and stops me from accidently closing websites I might need later/tomorrow. Bookmarks on the other hand never really worked for me the right way, so instead of bookmarking a link, I just keep it open in the background until I don't need it anymore, and my favorite sites stay open all the time.

I also run multiple instance of firefox to seperate my browsing sessions (private/work/social/etc), as I don't want my google searches or cookies to mix, and I tend not to reboot my machine but to just use hibernate. When I have to reboot because of updates, I use BarTab, which makes it possible to only reload specific tabs when a firefox session was closed.

That's one of my favorite plugins too. In combination with something like Session Manager it's really useful.

To give some stats: I normally have around 30-40 tabs open, my peak so far was at 97. Yes, there's even a plugin for that ;) ("Tab Counter").

I usually run around 50 (44 right now) and have them grouped with opera's tab grouping so it does not normally feel like a lot.

Most of these come from sites like this one. I will go down the home page and open every article I want to read as well as its comments page (middle clicking). Thats easily 20ish tabs. These tabs will then stay open most of the day as I slowly read them.

Then I have some that are used sort of as a todo list. These can be a page where I need to fill out a form, read an article, etc.

I also have a bunch of tabs based on a group. For instance since I do a lot of web programming I may be working on 1 site and have 1-8 tabs associated with it, but then I need to switch to another site and open another set for it, but I don't close the previous until I am done with the site.

Then I have the normal "apps", pinned tabs or whatever they are called. Usually just 2 though, gmail and grooveshark. However sometimes it grows a bit more to add calendar, docs and whatever is is needed.

Add it all up and its quite a lot of tabs, and they just add up quickly. But with the ability to place tabs on the left of the screen and group them its easily manageable. I couldn't work with this many tabs without those 2 features.

I must admit to currently having 280 tabs open. In my case, I open a bunch of things I intend to read (by browsing reddit or the like) and defer the reading of them indefinitely.

In practice, most of the tabs are `legacy' tabs that I don't use, but which I still retain some nominal interest in when I go clean out the tabs every couple months or so. These tabs range from youtube videos that I don't want to forget, to tips for Vim, Wikipedia articles, blog posts on machine learning, instructions for DIY haptic compasses...

About 1/3 can be traced to one or two websites with interesting articles that I intend to read in depth (at some point).

Your browsing style is very much same as mine. I suppose you are using firefox with vimperator + tree style tab. If you have a fear of restarting the browser again then install bartab[1] extension and forget the fear. It unloads the tabs from memory, so memory consumption is too low and restarting browser takes little time.

[1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bartab/

That's what the bookmark system is there for.

I'm guessing people are mostly just using them as a reading queue. (Middle-click everything, then Ctrl+W to advance.) Of course, tabs aren't actually built for this (mostly; I think Apple has realized that people do this, as the newest Safari seems to unload the render state for tabs that have been in the background of a window for a while; everything reflows when you actually switch to the tab.)

I wish Chrome would do that. If it is memory crunched, it seems to swap out the rendered page image, and then it very slowly repaints it when you switch back to that tab.

> How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search?

Firefox's awesome bar searches open tabs. So, "C-l ann" gets me to this tab as "annihilate" is in the title of this post.

Like everything the awesomebar has done since 1.5, at first that feature seemed kind of annoying to me, but now it has become super handy.

I'll give you one case when this is useful. Let's say that you have to select 20 titles out of hundreds of books. [1] If your browser allows it, it would be convenient to open N amazon links (for N in (100,999]), and then eliminate books as you go through them by closing tabs. In the end you may remain with 20 books or so you shortlisted.

1. I have a similar usecase for http://anynewbooks.com, even though the process is quite different thanks to a ranking algorithm that preliminarily sort the books in a sensible way.

I use virtual desktops ("Spaces" on Mac), and typically have 16 open, with one window per desktop. Each "desktop" represents one unit of work, whether that's a project, or bugs that I work on in parallel (waiting for reviews, etc).

In general, each window starts with one tab, but as I do more research into something, more and more tabs open. I religiously close tabs I'm not using, and the ones I keep open tend to be API references and similar.

I also use tabs as a TODO list, so any open tab is something I have to do. Closing them means my system breaks.

This would all be completely unmanageable without a few optimizations:

- TreeStyleTabs makes managing 25-30 tabs per window manageable. I almost never have more than that.

- Firefox Nightlies use considerably less memory than the release version, mostly due to the MemShrink effort within Mozilla (where I work)

- I set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0, to prevent a restart opening all my tabs and sinking memory into windows that aren't in my regular rotation.

Even so, Firefox typically uses 1.5-2GB of RSS, and slows to a crawl after a few days. This is due to fragmentation, and I'm working on fixing it.

On average, I have about about 20 tabs open. I use the Tab Mix Plus plugin installed that gives me multi-row tabs. After 10 tabs are open, it adds another row of tabs and it gives me 3 rows before I need to scroll the tabs. So having 30 tabs open is pretty manageable.

If I'm doing heavy research I can easily end up with over 100 tabs open. I just open every single page I'm going to look at in a new tab over time and just lose count.

I have my todo list in the form of tabs. I typically go through them fairly linearly as I work on things on the list.

That said, if I start typing in the url bar, already-open tabs whose title or url or tags match what I type show up in the dropdown search results and can be switched to by selecting that option from the dropdown (that includes tabs in other browser windows, etc, so I can just grab any window, type a few words in the url bar, and then be in the tab I want to be in).

This is in Firefox; finding a tab you want in Chrome is indeed a huge pain.

Opera has tab stacks where you drop tabs on top of each other, which groups them together. Then you can collapse and expand the groups.

I don't use it that much (mostly because there are no shortcuts and command line interface for adding to a stack or expand / collapse), but it is nice sometimes. I might do some research for a blog post, end up with 5 sites that I know I will need to consult when I write it, and just put them in a stack and have it sit there (collapsed, so it doesn't take up much space) until I do write it.

Having said that, I rarely get over 50 (usually in the morning after clearing out my feeds, or when programming against some API / library, when I open lots of documentation pages).

Once I get to the point where I can't see the favicons anymore, I start looking for something to close.

I usually place Opera's tab bar on the left and set it to wrap to multiple lines, so I have plenty of room to hoard an obscene amount of tabs. When the count gets too high I sometimes hide the tab bar altogether and ctrl+tab+click between the tabs. Works great.

I have about 180 tabs open right now on my desktop. They're spread across multiple windows and multiple Firefox profiles, grouped by task. It's not at all hard to find a specific tab, and I use multi-row tabs so they're not tiny.

There is mine: my favourite photo site is http://www.photoline.ru/ (you can find my photos there: http://www.photoline.ru/author/4949). If I don't visit it for a couple of days and I want to see all the latest photos, I just go through index pages middle clicking on thumbnails, so each photo opens in new tab, and then go throu them. Sometimes I do open a few hundred tabs. Funny, but this was why I went back to Safari as default: it just performed best for this use case.

I don't go that high but I can easily have 4 windows with 6-10 tabs each. They are grouped by purposes (work, type of dev I'm doing (server/client), personal, personal project). At any one time I use 1-2 groups but switch between them depending on the major task I'm working on at the moment.

> How is it even feasible to find a specific tab without doing a time consuming linear search?

Firefox searches open tabs in the awesomebar; selecting one of those entries switches to the tab.

Agreed, I rarely have more than a handful of tabs open. Less often, but not unfrequently, I don't have a browser open at all. If I want to (re)read something later, I use instapaper.

Go to 4chan and find a funny or creative thread with a bunch of image replies. Use the Linky Firefox extension to "Open All Image Links in Tabs". Voilà.

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