Ask HN: How do you use your web browser? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you use your web browser?

4 pointsmovedx7 comments

Do you use multiple windows? How many tabs do you use on an average day? Do you limit yourself in terms of tabs by closing them, or do you just let them run wild and clean them up when they're a problem?

What about bookmarks? Do people still use bookmarks?

What are you top five plugins?

Can we be friends? (this question is optional)

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Mostly one window, but I also use dedicated profiles for different purposes, so I should say one window per profile. Sometimes I'll branch off a search into another window. I also keep several different browsers for testing and for snotty websites. Tabs, but not so many I can't keep track of them. Up to a dozen at a time isn't bad.

Bookmarks, in categories. Lots of bookmarks. And I have a custom home page with quite a few links.

Plugins:Dark Background and Light Text because I can't stand the glare of white pages; I have . . . interesting eyesight :p. uBlock Origin is my usual sanity armor. Enhancer for YouTube also preserves sanity. Not much else I use regularly.

I'm friendly. More or less.

I use tabs all the time. Right now I have 29 open. I rarely use multiple windows, but sometimes if I'm doing something where I need to reference between multiple tabs, I'll open a new one for that. It's easier for me to go back to ones on my desktop browser where I have vertical tabs. On mobile things keep getting out of hand and I have 80 or so there now, some of them months old because they're going to take more than a few minutes to deal with and I never think to look at them when I can do something about it.

I don't really use bookmarks, but I did use Pinboard for a while. I do wish I had a way do to full-text search of my browsing history. Maybe I should just use Pocket more.

Top plugins - Right now I'm down to uBlock Origin, Tree Style Tabs, and Mute Sites by Default. I used to have ones that expanded links on Twitter and Google, but I don't know of any that actually work right now.

I'm on Firefox right now, but I don't know if I could recommend it over Edge if someone were looking to switch browsers today. I'm kinda stuck because all my browsing history is on FF.

Single window most of the time. I tend to keep the number of tabs open at 12-20 tabs. As soon as the tabs become too many I often rearrange them keeping only the ones I still need, and close all of the remaining tabs.

There was a point in time where I tended to keep tens or even hundreds of tabs open but I eventually realised that doing so was pointless.

I still have a bookmarking ritual though, where I bookmark anything and everything that is even the slightest bit interesting. Maybe one day I will be able to kick that habit as well.

The only plug-in I really care about is uBlock Origin on Firefox and Chrome. On my own computer I use Brave browser which has ad-blocking built into it.

Yes, we can be friends.

Multiple windows. Only if needed do I open tabs temporarily that are related to the web page I am looking at. I close and clear all sites. Ads and 3rd party domains are blocked by default. If your site comes up blank or I need to login, I usually move on.

Yes I keep bookmarks—I have a private “Link & one-liner” of the day. It’s a running history of what I thought was of note.

For sanity’s sake: uBlock origin, uMatrix, otherwise destroy all plug-ins.

Single window. Multiple tabs. Variable. Tabs get closed once dealt with. Tabs stay open if needed longer.

I use bookmarks. Sync with edge.

The marvelous suspender. Sometimes I'll use Chrono download manager. FFZ for twitch. Ad blocking takes place on my Intel 9900k pfsense router. I use an add-on that lets me Force pip on video content where Edge won't. That's about it there.

I have 70 tabs open - usually I stack them up when working on a project and then eventually purge when I'm done.

I use ublock origin and 1password.

I bookmark things on my phone that I want to do a deeper study of later (and then usually don't).

If you randomly popped in, I'd be likely to have 2-4 windows open, as I like to organize by topic. Sometimes a single topic will have 2 windows dedicated to it so I can have things on both monitors. There are usually at least 5-10 tabs on each window. I have a daily review in which I think about closing but inevitably keep most of the tabs around indefinitely because I'm a hoarder and I might need them later. In reality I go on a tab-closing frenzy about once every 2 weeks and just close everything not related to what I'm working on.

I keep tons of bookmarks, organized into folders (Projects, Learning resources, School (separate from learning because school is a drone factory), Shopping lists, political propaganda, and Entertainment stuff like YouTube/Hulu). I keep even more "bookmarks" in my org-roam PKMS in the form of link indexes.

Top 5 plugins (LibreWolf/Firefox):

- uBlock Origin, because I hate capitalism and brainwashing ads

- Dark Reader, because light mode people can go suck an egg while they shine flashlights into their eyes

- Tridactyl [1], because keyboard-driven is inherently superior to mouse-driven

- HTTPS Everywhere, because why the heck wouldn't you want that?

- Dimmer [2], because I really don't get why people want all these bright lights, I mean what's wrong with light mode people that makes them enjoy pain?

Yes, we can be friends!

Links to lesser-known plugins:

- [1]: https://tridactyl.xyz/

- [2]: https://mehmetb.github.io/dimmer

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