No matter how many people's explanations of this I read, I still can't grasp it. I typically have 3-5 tabs open including mail. On a really busy day, maybe 8?
Outside of work, you might sign up for several emailed newsletters with various links to articles per email. If you get about 20 newsletter emails, and you choose to read 10 of them with 2-3 interesting articles each, you end up with 20+ tabs to read through.
However, if you don't need to do that much research for a particular task (or you can get the information you need from just a few resources like a quality book), you may not encounter a need to open this many tabs.
but why ? you can't read them at the same time anyway, why not just save the links and open them one by one ?
When I want to binge watch a whole series of a show I don't open all of the episodes at the same time in separate windows because I'm planning to watch them all in one session.
thats how we use Tabs, after browser restart the Tabs dont reload, they are suspended and act as a bookmark that you can constantly see to remind you.
>binge watch a whole series ... don't open all of the episodes
erm, I download whole season/series, so that I do have 'all of the episodes' in a folder under my fingertips.
I can understand that, but I would argue that you can just use a separate browser window for that, as I do.
What I don’t understand is why someone will have scores of tabs open _all the time_. And at work these same people are always leaving work for the day while still logged in to shared assets which prevent others from accessing or weekly backups. Same with shared Excel files. Oh! And they leave those annoying app launchers on their desktops like it’s 1997, rather than using the toolbar.
I think if I could see their desk it would be buried with old food wrappers and coffee cups.
Yes. These will pile up for days too before one big cleaning. Or at least did when I went to the office.
I usually don't have any tabs left when I'm done with the day and usually don't exceed more than ten tabs.
My main browser is Safari, but when I use Firefox (on my work machine) I also use tab-less and Amethyst to have all of my pages on my screen. This way, I'm more aggressive about only keeping what I need and closing what I don't.
Tabs are a live TODO list.
Many of my open tabs are write-ups of topics that I hope to learn about some day, but I have not returned to in years since opening (cumulatively 1000+)
My "workflow" usually consists of: open new window for the topic/theme (whatever it may be, research, study, reading news) and go opening tabs, searches, articles. When I get to a point where a window hasn't been active for a few days I close the useless/uninteresting tabs and save the rest as a collection in Toby.
It's been extremely helpful to manage my fear of missing knowledge or closing something I could get interested, the curation after a few days really helps.
I use Sidebery to classify my dozens of dormant tabs, but the net weekly balance is a few tabs positive because I've become less selective with this power.
My PC has 64Gb of RAM.
Why should I ever have to close a tab if I'm not ready to?
Its probably the same case if you have thousands of tabs and mechanisms to hide them, but maybe 30 tabs or so spread across a few windows gets crowded, your forced to prune them regularly, either by doing the thing you had the tab open for or deciding its not worth your time right now.
I wish there was something better, but I've never found it.
As I said above, this is how I work, and it's not negotiable. If it bothers you to have that many tabs open, then fine, kill off your tabs. That's fine with me. And my way should be fine with you. (You're probably one of those persnickety inbox zero people, too :-), aren't you?) (My Inbox has 38K unread messages, and I reset them at the start of the year. That's after the many thousands that Google already threw away. It's just not worth the effort to throw away all that stuff one message at a time...)
BTW, I have probably 100K bookmarks, but have no good way to merge multiple old bookmarks files and convert them to the new format, so unlike the tabs, the bookmarks are now useless. I stopped using bookmarks in favor of tabs years ago now.
Now let's talk about power tools for handling large numbers of tabs!
Searching trough open tabs is way more inefficient than searching trough topics/folders and tags in Obsidian. Working against complexity is a habit, I guess. It comes with realization that time is precious:)
I use this script: https://bit.ly/3vyA9on. Big thanks to the Author.
Usually at the end of the day, I refine all collected information with tags or specific folders/links.
If you want to export your clipped content, there is a plugin called Obsidian Enhancing Export (requires Pandoc) https://bit.ly/3cZFmzl
P.S. This approach has saved my skin many times. I can sync to my Obsidian folder, which I sync with Synology NAS.
Can you explain this a bit? How do you use the encrypted folder in your browser?
I usually generate my passwords with pwgen (you can install on Mac with brew and use this command pwgen -s 20 -1 -v -y -c -0) then store in plain text within an encrypted folder on my NAS.
In some cases, I use 2FA. In some, a lengthy "mumbo-jumbo" passwords that are easy to remember. :)
P.S. This is just an old habit and I have nothing against using a password manager like https://keepassxc.org/
There are apparently 2 kinds of people...
But I'm confident they exist, we should put a bounty on the location of a prime specimen and see what happens when we breed them with the third kind to establish if there is a genetic component to this.
I'm a tab maximalist, with probably a few hundred open right now.
I also have a very messy desk. In fact, I bought a second desk just so that I could fit the detritus of more concurrent projects.
I would be curious to hear if anyone with a clean desk uses many tabs, or vice versa.
With the desk, the “this bothers me” moment is very physical/spatial, when I realize I’m now working around the mess (most often, mail I haven’t yet been bothered to look through).
With the tabs, the mess always builds up when I’m in the early phases of starting or investigating something, but as I get going, the mess becomes a distraction I’m mentally working around. So I’ll start dropping tabs that are no longer relevant. I have a tendency to “group” my tabs in separate windows by topic, and eventually I’ll just start closing a window with a dozen or more tabs at a time when that topic is handled or otherwise irrelevant. It’s like finally going through my mail that’s been piling up.
Most of the tabs are not active at any given time and tend to be swapped to storage so they don’t clog up the RAM. If were to try to just close everything every time I switched projects, I would be spending way to much time and mental focus just managing tabs. This works for me.
Admittedly only a hundred or so tend to be actively in memory at a time, mostly they get lazy-loaded as I go to use them.
And call me insane, but I managed to visually remove the tabs from the web browser I use (Falkon) and I just switch between them with Ctrl+<0-9>, Ctrl+PageUp or Ctrl+PageDown. I have a silly idea for a tabless browser interface (managing and visualizing all of them via the "magic" URL bar) but as I am no developer can't do much.