Extreme tab browsing | Hacker News Reader

Extreme tab browsing

glandium.org

40 pointsGarbage38 comments

Open tabs are like frozen functions (or even better, frozen stacks or trees). In addition to the content itself they also preserve the info about how I got there and, hopefully, some notion about what I intended to do next. This wont be captured as easily in a bookmark or evernote.

Right now I have 8 browser windows open and on average each one of them has 30 tabs open and this is on a laptop that has 512Mb of RAM. I can pull this of with FF 3.6 (some what tweaked), which of course I leave open for months on end. On another machine I am running FF 8.02a, it definitely seems lighter, but most of the add-ons that I use do not support it yet. Using Chrome this way will kill my box(es).

So yes I am one of those incomprehensible corner cases that many complain about. The one that expects that software should be tight and memory leak free. This is in contrast to what I get to hear a lot, "leaks dont matter, just restart your browser" or "memory is cheap, go buy some". No thank you, I would still like to retain control over who gets to decide (a)when to close an application and (b) where my money should be best spent.

Why do I do this ? perhaps because its is the most unobtrusive way of deferring or saving a thread. Tabs are my poor man's alternative to evernote, reminders, frozen trains of thought etc etc, that I do not yet consider permanent enough to bookmark and those that I can organize spatially and into groups and all that with minimum effort.

So essentially this is my way of maintaining two sets of bookmarks one volatile, spatially mapped, (almost) random access, higher priority and most crucially with a history that I can access with back&forth buttons, the other more permanent bookmark has a different set of complementary properties. Some of my tabs graduate to being bookmarks but not all.

To do all this I have to enlist the assistance of a few add-ons that keeps the inactive tabs unloaded. I use one called restore-control[1] (that or bartabs[2]). The other add-on I use is searchTab[3] to index the contents of the pages so that I can search for it based on a few words that have stuck in my memory. But usually I have a fairly good handle of where spatially they will be located so I dont really need to search.

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

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

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/search-tab/

Have you looked at Tree Style Tabs[1]?

I think it fits right in with your characterization of tabs as frozen stacks of information. It takes the concept even further by visualizing the relationship between tabs. I compulsively open stuff in background tabs, and it's very nice to have those tabs as children to the originating tab. In part because it lets me kill a parent tab along with all children, but without affecting anything else, with a few clicks. It also lets me drag a whole thread of tabs to a new window or bookmark it etc. etc. Finally, having a vertical tab list makes efficient use of wide-screen displays and you can still read useful amounts of the page title even with 25+ tabs.

Oh and here's another one that might be even more useful to you, with your emphasis on the browser history: Tab History Redux[2]. Tabs opened from links (e.g. via mouse3) retain the history of the originating tab. Yeah. This is one of those things which I can't understand why it hasn't been part of all browsers for years. It just makes sense.

Both addons work fine in Firefox Nightly (9) with forced compatibility using the Add-on Comaptibility Reporter[3].

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-history-r...

[3] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...

When I used Firefox, Tree Style Tabs was the first addon I always installed. It's wonderful, and it's one of the two things I most wish Chromium had (the other being good bookmark management).

The fact that people do this is a strong indication we're missing something fundamental with the browser UI. I'm not nearly as bad as the guy in the article but I do open ridiculous numbers of tabs at times.

It seems to me that tabs + bookmarks doesn't quite cut it. Perhaps with the exception of pinned apps we need to move away from the idea of 'open' pages entirely and really rethink how navigating the browser's history works.

I generally have between 5 and 30 tabs open, usually around 15. I am what I am.

Because I use my browser this way, I finally had to move from Firefox to Chromium. Chromium manages memory and CPU WRT tabs much better than Firefox.

I don't really like Chromium, but I got tired of listening to my laptop scream.

Actually, recent tests show that Firefox handles lots of tabs better: http://www.ghacks.net/2011/08/03/firefox-appears-to-handle-l...

(This may be a recent thing. I'm running FF7 and it's definitely better on memory handling.)

Tests... As the comments in the original article (and the HN-thread about it) shows that many finds that chrome is _vastly_ superior to firefox in this regard for real world scenarios (where you actually leave your browser on for long periods etc.).

Well, if someone would like to run some simple tests (Open the same test of, say, 50 tabs in Chrome and FF and leave them overnight) and then measure memory usage, then I'd be fascinated to see some concrete figures.

The Epiphany people had some interesting ideas about how to deal with tabs. http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/FeatureDesign/EpiphanyRedux/F...

The proposal is remove to tabs completely, replace with a richer, searchable and better cached history, improved bookmarks, which are better organised for returning to recent items, and a page queue for yet to read items. I would like to try something like this, it seems really interesting.

I particularly liked this quote:

Generally, tabs can be seen as a flexible mechanism that is used for a range of tasks none of which they are optimised to cater for.

Although, I'm not sure about their proposed solutions. The history is really lacking in context and could maybe be displayed better as a tree of thumbnails showing you not the order pages were opened but from where they were opened. I think the queue is a great idea but could probably be built into the same tree; just highlight queued and bookmarked pages in some way.

>The fact that people do this is a strong indication we're missing something fundamental with the browser UI.

When I hit the backspace key, there is a significant probability that I will have to wait for the old page to download and render again. (Wether the re-download and re-render happens seems to depend on how the maintainer of the web page set the cache-control.) Although I understand the advantage to non-technical users of doing things this way, as a technically-adept user, I would have preferred for the back button never to cause a re-download or a re-render. (I know that I would have no trouble figuring out when manually to cause a re-download (using e.g. the reload button) because that is the way Lynx did it years ago.)

My point is that the main reason I open new tabs is so that I can definitely return to the current page without waiting for the page to re-download and re-render. I would be happy with the back and forward buttons and the history menu if using these things did not often cause me to wait.

I switched to Opera for exactly this reason; it's way faster at jumping back and forward between previously rendered pages. As a consequence I open far fewer tabs than I did in Chrome or FF* but I still open a hell of a lot. So speed is definitely a factor, but I still think there's UI issues at play.

* Especially when searching Google or reading HN; I'm more inclined to navigate back and forward between results rather than middle click everything into new tabs

I browse this way. Here's my best guess as to why (which could possibly be useful in understanding why others do, too).

* Some sites (Netflix, banking sites, etc.) can be annoying to have to log back into and get to a certain page so I just keep them open. Yes, some of those sites will expire the login anyway, but I don't know when I'll want to visit them again.

* Keeping tabs open just feels abundant and allows me to ignore having a certain discipline for awhile (closing tabs when done). It kind of feels like opening the Sunday newspaper and tearing out each section and throwing them on the table. Yes, it is a little messy, but it helps you feel good for awhile. Further, at some point you can just discard it all and nothing was really lost beyond possibly feeling embarassed by people watching you or feeling inefficient.

* I think it also metaphorically better fits how I learn. I like to build connections between my previous knowledge and things that I read. Keeping something open after I'm done with it can be convenient in that I might discover it again later after learning related information (helping me to understand it in a different way). Or perhaps the page has been updated with new comments that I don't care enough about to subscribe to, but would like to see again if I happen to run across it. I think it also helps flow, especially if I'm working on a new project.

This only works if you have plenty of memory (which I do.)

If I had one wish for future browsers, it it is:

I wish there would be a good/convenient way to open several independent browser instances for different purposes. There should be a way to name each instance.

For example at work I really wish I could have one Chrome instance for research on project 1, one instance for project 2 and one for private stuff. When I close on of the them there should be a way to reopen it later exactly in the state I left it.

On startup I want to see a main browser window which list all my instances. When I click on one of them, a normal Chrome broswer opens with all the corresponding tabs (and perhaps specialized bookmarks).

Right now I have about 100 tabs open for different projects and private stuff. With the proposed systems I could put several browser instances on different workspaces next to the editor/console of the specific project.

If your using the dev branch of Google Chrome, you can setup profiles to accomplish this. To enable it you'll need to type `about:flags` in the URL bar and scroll down to where it says enable multiple profiles. Then you can setup a bunch of profiles with different bookmarks/preloaded tabs. Each browser will have it's own history, cookies, associated account, etc.

Firefox profiles?

Yes, profiles would be some kind of solution but I'd like to have something more dynamic where I create/delete/clone profiles/instances on the fly.

Shouldn't actually take more than 5 minutes of you writing a few scripts.

  open: firefox --no-remote -P <profile>
  create: firefox -CreateProfile <new name>
  delete: rm -rf <location of profile>, e.g. %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\<profile name> on Windows
  clone: cp -R <location of profile> <new name>

Firefox profiles do exactly what you want.

Makes me think of the alleged OS X philosophy that you should never worry about closing apps. So what if bookmarks and tabs are essentially the same? If you never worry about closing tabs, they are essentially just bookmarks that load really fast. It seems inevitable that things will head that way. So there should be better tools for managing tabs, similar to bookmarks (and there are no great tools for bookmarks yet, either).

When you're trying to use awesomebar to find a tab you already have open based on a URL, and the tab itself is not loaded into memory until you switch to it, and the page will load in <1s (ie. most web pages).

Why bother leaving the tab open?

I'm quite compulsive about keeping my tab bar tidy, getting back to recently closed tabs or commonly used ones is generally done through awesomebar or some TMP clicking shortcuts.

I used to think I was a freak for having, sometimes, as many as 20 or 30 tabs open. My kid looked over my shoulder once and laughed at me, said "Really Dad?"

But I see by the other comments that I'm not a freak. In fact I'm an amateur.

I can now hold my head up, and not have to slink around and hide my browser and its completely normal 15 tabs.

> Switch to an existing tab when following a link to an already opened url

I think this would be pretty jarring unless you restricted it only to tabs that had just been opened. A better approach would be to cache the URL you typed and any URLs it redirected to in the AwesomeBar lookup table.

I think it's possible that this extreme tab usage could be pretty common. I don't have 500 tabs like him, but I can get into the 50-100 range. For me, too many tabs isn't the problem - it's just that browsers can't seem to handle so many tabs without using up all memory.

Try Opera--my only multifarous-tab problem is clicking on one to select it without closing it when I have so many open that the "x" is the entire width of the tab.

Opening hundreds of tabs in different browsers across multiple 2560x1600 resolution monitors is the reason the computers I use have 16gb+ of ram.

(And running VMs, but that does not make it as extravagant)

People that do this are NUTS. Ever heard of Evernote, Read It Later, or the plethora of websites that exist for this very reason? Man up and shell out a few bucks...there is NO reason you should have more than 10-12 tabs open on a regular, consistent basis...

I agree, anyone who claims they need so many tabs open is flat out lying, you can't possibly be using them all. Bookmarks exist for a reason, and you can do a lot with them. In Firefox there are keywords you can set up as well as Awesomebar modifiers that allow you to do a lot of powerful things with the bookmarks system all without having to have tons of tabs in memory. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...

As long as there isn't a moral or ethical issue at hand (and here there clearly isn't), software should adapt to the user, not the other way round.

There are a lot of different ways to use different tools, because there are a lot of different people who think and organize differently. Yours is not the only way that people manage information in their head, but I'm sure it works great for you.

A couple scenarios for how I get a lot of tabs open:

- <ahem> Hacker News. Scan down the page, and for each interesting article, middle click the article and the comments link. Work your way through the tabs (maybe going back and forth between "work" and HN).

- Search. Middle click the most promising results. Work your way through the tabs, possibly bookmarking something that you know you'll want again.

ReadItLater or any other temporary archive seems like procedural overkill for something you intend to come back to in a few minutes to half an hour.

Bookmarking the same sort of material seems inappropriate since most of what's in those tabs isn't yet determined to be bookmarkworthy.

I didn't dream this up, it's just how I naturally organize my short term browser use. I think "short term" is the important phrase there.

Finally, there's a middle ground between lots of tabs and ReadItLater. Chrome has a nice extension called Session Buddy, that records the tabs in your current session. Hit the button and another tab (ironically) opens, showing your current and recent sessions. Now close as many tabs as you like, get back on task, and gradually work your way through the sites listed on the session buddy tab.

Lots of ways to do everything. I really don't think I'm nuts for doing it this way.

Yup. I tend to do this with Google News. I scan through it, clear everything down to zero, and open any interesting stories in tabs, and then work through them.

I also have tabs open for multiple build servers, internal wiki pages for the work I'm doing, and some reference pages for the actual coding I'm doing.

A few minutes or half an hour are different...this guy has upwards of 500 tabs - you can't come back to that in a few minutes or half an hour...

I said 10-12 tabs consistently - and by that I mean app tabs that remain open. The rest should be opened for research as needed AND THEN CLOSED WHEN FINISHED. For everything else that you need to consistently check updates on, you need to find a way to turn it into an RSS feed or Twitter feed or whatever that feeds into an existing tab for an app you already have open (e.g. Google Reader or your social media aggregator of choice).

This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once. You would be overwhelmed by 500 tabs of information...that's why most of us have 1 site where all our information aggregates and 1 email address where the rest forward and 1 cell phone rather than 5-6, etc. I'm saying that people that do this type of EXTREME tab browsing are inherently disorganized and lack focus and attention to anything they do.

Yeah, downvote it to hell, I really don't mind. If you do this on a regular basis though, I'd love to hear from you and how you feel about whether you are an organized individual and one who adequately focuses on the things that are important to you.

I tend to have about 100 tabs open in my web browser. Of those, 10-15 are for pages that I always have open, ~50 are for pages that are relatively temporary (as in a few weeks), and another ~25 for more temporary (days), and then up to 50 for very temporary (like when I'm browsing through hacker news and so on).

I would say that I am relatively organized, but apparently in another way than you are. As an example of how I organize my tabs, I have 8 tabs open with minecraftwiki/forum, 5 imdb tabs with bad '50s horror flicks for a movie night I'm planning, 4 tabs with articles about an emacs customization that I'm planning, 10 tabs with doxygen generated documentation for a C++ project I'm doing, 6 tabs have arduino documentation for a hardware project I'm halfway through, a few appdb.winehq pages for games I have problems running, some wiki-pages with books I'm thinking about buying, and a few with articles I'm thinking about sharing with my friends. This is in 3 windows on 2 virtual desktops (on my main machine, I have another 20 tabs open on my laptop).

I don't get "[1]00 tabs of information", I get perhaps 10 different topics that I can choose between, and when I have done that I can just scroll over the group of tabs that make up a topic to get a quick overview. After this, I'm usually synced up with what I was thinking the last time I was working with the project.

Btw, I use 2 rss readers (google reader and akregator), the akregator one for things I shouldn't read while working. I have 2 cell phones. I also have 3 email endpoints, one for studies, one for personal mail and one for work.

There is nothing inherently disorganized about this (IMO), since it gives me a very clear distinction between my different tasks.

I prob dont get up to 100 tabs. but I do like to open different browser instances, one for mail, fb, twitter, etc. one with a bunch of news articles (and of course, for evert hn article, the comments) one for whatever prog language im currently in. which is usually thw biggest, that contains multiple how-tos, searches for commands, at least 10 tabs from the 'official' site, and its this one that needs to stay open for days/weeks as im working on a project and constantly refrencing info i previously knew id need. also, each browaer instance is usuaaly in a doff workspace, to keep work and play seperate.

"This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once."

Exactly. So he offloads that memory into tabs. If the browser will handle it, it's as good as file cabinets, in/out trays, ReadItLater, or tall yellow stacks of National Geographic.

+1 for sixtofour's tip on Session Buddy,[1] which looks nice.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edacconmaakjimmfgn...

Right. And who in his right mind would use an ancient emacs setup if you just need to pay a few bugs and get a _really nice IDE_, eh?

Or - why would anyone have a problem storing a huge collection of records/cds if you just need to throw a couple of bucks at Apple to get it on your iOS device?

People are sick. Let's call them out.

(Careful, this post might be mocking and contain a good amount of sarcasm)

I go offline for days at a time. First, open every webpage and document I think I'll need to finish The Big Project. Then disconnect and work. Stay offline* until the project is done. If projects are overlapping, hitting 300 tabs is easy.

I also have several gigs of saved PDF and HTML files, but one-off information goes in a tab.

What good do your "online utilities" do for someone with inconsistent internet?

* Maybe every three hours I'll connect for a few seconds to check for voice/email.

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