Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivers99 | Hacker News Reader

Small tangent: I wonder what people are seeing when they say they have "too many" tabs open.

I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox (macOS) and never noticed any problems. (Trying to clear them out. Down to 920 now.) 2.26 GB out of 32.00 GB is used by Firefox. I have about 70 open in Chrome (since only a certain number fit on the screen) and it's split across 12 processes which are between 12 MB and 158 MB each. I have nearly 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone and iPad each, in Safari.

View on HN

Just curious: what kind of workflow results in having over 1000 tabs open? (Oldschool Unix hobbyist here, so I always feel like drowning when I'm nearing 20+ tabs. :)

Not OP, but opening almost every link as a new tab, and keeping old tabs around because you don't have a great bookmark organization system.

I am trying to break myself of these habits, but they do have some benefits. For instance when I do a web search on a complex topic, I often scan the results, opening the most promising looking results as tabs. Then I look through the tabs comparing them. The trouble is I never remember to close them when the task is done.

I'm not a 1000+ tabbed, but I can relate to what you're describing. I'd add that it seems like it's getting harder all the time to find what you're looking for with the current state of web search, so when you come across a good page you don't want to "lose" it. Sure you could bookmark it, but you probably won't want it forever, just until you're done with whatever you were working on that prompted you to search for it in the first place. So bookmarking just moves the mess from the tab bar to the bookmark folder. Kind of like cleaning your room by stuffing all the mess in your closet.

That feeling completely disappeared with workspaces in Vivaldi (though for me the discomfort started with maybe around twice as many, vertical layout with more smaller tab height helped)

For work:

Mainly just not having a workflow of going back to close them. So it's just previous work like a view of some logs, a merge request, a link to a file in a repo, a monitoring dashboard, an alert in a monitoring system, etc.

In Chrome, I do end up closing them eventually because there's no more space to work.

For personal:

it's more like a bookmark, but don't often review them rather than open a new tab to research whatever I'm currently curious about.

Certain sites are absolute murder. A single wikia (now Fandom) tab or new reddit tab left open can sometimes bring a browser to its knees. I've seen google mail do the same when they screw something up.

edit: That is, I think people sometimes attribute the lag they're experiencing to the number of tabs they have open, when only a handful of their tabs are to blame.

huh... WTF do you have 500 tabs open for?

I usually carry 3 sets of tabs, typically around ~10 each:

Personal info sites, like reddit and its links...

Tech Sites, like HN and its links....

Video Sites, like Nexflix / Prime...

EDIT:

Also - what tab-mgmt extensions do you use? Like Tab Grouping etc...

Also - one of the things I attempted to do, but failed to do so consistently, was to swipe to a different desktop between, work, person, and learning/browsing... instead of tab groups I had "workspaces" but that is a hard habit to build, for me, it seems.

i ususally keep tabs open to retain the context because i am too lazy for bookmarks.

yea, tab-grouping is essential. (tabkit in the good old days, sideberry currently)

>i ususally keep tabs open to retain the context

This is the way I do it as well - but I cant hold ~500++ 'context' threads in my head...

I typically hit a tab and wind up here: https://i.imgur.com/KWmVAD0.jpg

> what tab-mgmt extensions do you use

I didn't answer before because the answer is none. Not sure if anyone will see this but today Firefox recommended some extensions and one was OneTab. That let me turn all my tabs into a list. Then I could search those and (manually, one by one) open all of the tabs from a given site as long as it's in the title. I'm already down to 264 tabs (from 900+) today in just a little bit of time, and still going.

This is what I see on a linux machine with only 6GB of ram: https://blog.imraniqbal.org/ram/

(TL:DR OOM errors and the kernel starts reaping processes)

Just seems so odd as I remember playing gta vice city on a pentium 3 with 128mb of ram and now I need 6GB+ to just browse the web

Technically, all the bookmarks you have are hibernating tabs.

There's a whole spectrum of activity you can have on a tab, and to me I see really no difference between "unhibernating" a tab and just reloading it from scratch.

Either one is very slow in modern crap software.

Unless it happens under 150ms, it is slow.

I would expect thawing a tab to present me with the tab as it was last time I saw it, no reload; whereas, being a link, I'd expect a bookmark to load the current version.

... Actually the latter is incorrect, in truth I'd expect bookmarks to present me with the exact version I had in front of me back when I bookmarked it, including if the site is temporarily down, has vanished, or if I navigated a more recent version.

> I had over 1000 tabs open in Firefox

this is me

> 500 tabs open (because that's the limit) on my iPhone

that's my wife

Same, I was around 1500 tabs across three windows when I finally moved from the HP Z420 workstation I'd been using as my primary sometime around JAN 2023. Machine was fine with it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com