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Comment by Flam | Hacker News Reader

W.T.F. I can't go over 6 without feeling messy.

How you feel doesn't really matter when you're doing anything other than idle browsing.

This morning I had about 30 tabs open when I came into work, all documentation or reference of some sort that I will use in the next few hours. And thats about the lowest I ever get, if I'm looking up something new to me or complex it will easily shoot over 100.

I'm afraid I disagree. There's no way you could multi-task all 30 open tabs at the same time. Read what you need and close the tab when you're done. Leave only the topmost page of the documentation open so you can find your way back down again if you need to. You should be able to tell whether a page has value to you or not within the first 30 seconds of skimming through it. Do you open every result on google for the first 3 pages of all your searches or something? Baffling.

It's called context / state.

The more state I can leave up on my desktop, the better.

If there were better management within the browser -- non-visible tabs were eventually unloaded, with any page-state (forms data, etc.) saved -- then you wouldn't have the memory bloat problems that occur.

The thing is that it's a very large virtual workspace to spread things out over. So long as it's organized, it's really useful.

Look to movies especially of researchers in the 1970s or 1980s who'd spread clippings and papers over all horizontal surfaces in an office, tape/pin them to a wall, etc. You want to be able to scan quickly through the space at eye-speed, not have to dig into files / organizers / storage / regenerate the information every time you want to look at it.

It's why you'd rather have a large monitor -- you can strew windows over it and see more, rather than have to manage windows and go through them repeatedly.

We don't "multi-task all 30 open tabs at the same time" whatever that means. Just like you can have many apps running but maybe only one or two windows visible at any time, you can have many tabs open and only focus on one or two at a time.

For those of us who write software being able to discretely switch to a certain doc with ctrl-tab or ctrl/cmd-# is much quicker and efficient than navigating N times throughout the day just to reduce the # of tabs.

If I'm working on a Twilio web app I might refer to the Twilio docs, Ruby docs, twilio-ruby source, and some web related docs all throughout the day (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). Oh yeah, don't forget the JavaScript library docs. Why look them up each time you need them? Open them at the beginning, close when you're done work and that's that.

Your tab related OCD shouldn't enter into our workflow ;-)

You're right. My workflow sucks and there is no way it could be the most efficient way for me to work. All those tabs are useless. Re-navigating to a document multiple times a day is easier than leaving it open scrolled to where I need it.

I guess I just suck at my job.

Well I don't treat them as individual tab, I treat them as a set of groups. Thanks to tree style tabs my tabs are organized as groups manner.

On average I have 5 groups hacker news, reddit, slashdot, google reader, google searching and documentation group. When I work I frequently move around google searching and documentation group. In my leisure time I go to other group.

For example during working I need to search about some feature of a library. I open the top tab of the google searching group middle click on the link I am interested which opens in the new tab in the group. If some time later I need to see the page again just go to the google searching group and get the tab. This way I can easily organize my tabs.

"You should be able to tell whether a page has value to you or not within the first 30 seconds of skimming through it."

We don't read the same things apparently.

I operate similarly. I have my FF set to open up the previous session on start (though I don't usually close FF). Tend to have 70-100 tabs open always.

I recommend a vertical tab addon (I use Tree Style Tabs) else you'll wear out your scroll wheel on the tab bar :)

I recommend a vertical tab addon (I use Tree Style Tabs) else you'll wear out your scroll wheel on the tab bar :)

Thats exactly the extension I use! I'm really happy with it, it gave me the ah-ha moment that working with multiple tabs doesn't have to be prohibitivly painful. Thanks to it I decided to change my taskbar to be vertical too and haven't looked back. It makes for more wasted space if you're not busy, but is worth it, as UI wisdom tells us scanning horizontally is a lot harder for the user than vertically (and thats when everything fits on the screen).

I'm in both camps. Typically I'll have a window with about 6-10 tabs. But I'll have maybe 4 of these windows. 2 will be for work, 1 will be personal and the last one is either personal or my personal project I'm working on. That's easily 24-40 tabs.

Lately I've been trying to keep them down because of memory constraints (tab/process model in Chrome).

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