45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time | Hacker News Reader

45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time

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26 pointscborenstein30 comments

It brings me peace to close tabs. I try to aim for having 4 or 5 open. Then I look at my girlfriend's screen and the favicon doesn't even fit it in the tab anymore and it kills me.

I really don't understand how people can stand using their browser in that way. The only time I ever have more than two tabs going is if I'm actively researching something -- and even then, I'll have multiple instances of the browser, each with 4-5 tabs, and at the end of my research session, they all get closed down.

But I don't think that people who have an insane number of tabs going are doing it wrong or anything. I'm just amazed that people find doing that to be useful.

For me at least, it's basically a substitute for a good bookmarking system. I want to get back to that tab eventually, but if I just bookmark it, it'll get lost in the churn and forgotten forever. I hope some day there will be a holy grail of bookmarking software which somehow solves this, but I don't even know what that would look like.

If I'm working on a specific project and find a great resource, I'll definitely paste the link in an Obsidian note and close the tab. But there's plenty of stuff which doesn't quite fit that workflow.

I dunno dude, if you want to save the tab but it gets forgotten if you save it then it probably wasn't all that important. I'd argue that most folks that save tabs or thrive on tab bloat are doing themselves a major disservice and are overly invested in passing fancies rather than meaningful consumption they purport.

sometimes I open 5 different documents for reading, and I still searching another help on stack overflow. It is easy to reach 10 Tabs on my browser:(

Well, that's easy. You can't read 5 documents at once. Chat-GPT summarize four of them and read one. Easy.

Half joke aside, I think it's easy to get to 4-5 tabs depending on what you do but I don't understand tabs so small the favicon barely fits. That just seems like you've got psychological hoarding issues. You being general and not you-you strictly speaking.

I expand this idea a tad. 4-8 tabs per window. But then I organize tabs based on context. Then I can switch around contexts and still have my handful of tabs open.

Sometimes that means 1 window, sometimes that means 4 windows. Just depends on what I’m doing.

20? I'm up an average of 200.

For those wondering how that is manageable I use Firefox with multirow tabs. And how it gets so high is that I always open links in new tabs in the background when doing any research.

The research did say 20+ (HN took out the +) so you may not be alone. That sounds hefty though! Do you feel like it works well for you?

At my job where we can only use MS Edge, the Vertical Tabs feature helps me immensely with ~1000 tab sessions. I'm not sure about Google Chrome, but Brave also adopted the feature this past year.

My browser windows are like literal trains of thought where each tab is a station. I only close them when the journey is finished, so to speak. If possible, I like to preserve the tab structure if I ever must save them for another time. The problems with doing so are 1) no browsers support this natively, and 2) the add-ons/extensions/plugins which do this are either clunky or closed-source software.

Ooh interesting - I'm not too familiar with vertical tabs. Will check it out!

What advantages do you see to keeping a large number of tabs open at a time? Do you find that you return to them?

>What advantages do you see to keeping a large number of tabs open at a time? Do you find that you return to them?

I edited my comment to expand a little on that. Adding to it, tabs for me are a crude thinking tool. I usually open links as new tabs so I can see how my search for information has branched out. The practice is unwieldy and results in my browser being the highest consumer of system resources, but at least I can see how I came to research a particular thing. It's more insightful than browser history, which only tells a linear story. Browsers these days will also try to direct you to open tabs if you type something similar in a search bar, which can be interesting for connecting previous inquiries with new ones.

I should dive into the Next browser. Apparently it has a tree-based history, which might be an efficient solution for my needs: https://nyxt.atlas.engineer/

I’m similar, I have around 200 tabs open at any given time on my work machine. I use Firefox and a plugin called Panorama to manage them.

On an ongoing basis, I am typically working on 4-5 projects plus some utility functions. I use Panorama to group the tabs by project. Each project has 10-20 tabs open. Panorama only shows the tabs from a particular group at a given time. By grouping the tabs, the cognitive load is reduced.

Over the course of a day, I will visit most of these project groups and interact with the tabs in each. Some of long running tabs like the main project page. Others are tabs for current open issue. It is helpful to me to be able to treat each project as a browser workspace and be able to return to that workspace at will. Using bookmarks and closing tabs would add more overhead. Often I am switching quickly between projects and I may have open editing sessions on one or more tabs that are not ready to close.

The browser+OS (MacOS ) handles the RAM usage gracefully and swaps tabs to SSD when they are not recently used and more memory is needed. I’ve never seen an “out of memory” message even though I’m running Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other apps like Affinity Photo at the same time.

I've been using a newish browser called Arc (OSX only at the moment) for a little bit and it's perfect for this sort of workflow.

They've basically have two types of tabs. Pinned tabs which persist and nonpinned tabs which do not.

https://resources.arc.net/en/articles/6449654-pinned-tabs-ta...

200? I'm an average of 1-2k with TST on Firefox...

2K ? I learned the hard way that Firefox has a limit of 8000 tabs per window when reloading a previous session. Wrote a small app to split the tabs to save my decade-old session. The day I close a tab without having read it hasn't come yet !

200? You gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket.

My tabs are a convenientish curated list. It is wasteful and I hate it. At worst (best?) I've taken to sending a tab to another device as a way of dismissing it for later.

I hope someone jumps on the language model hype and makes an extension that summarizes what I have read, seen, and done on the web. Perhaps with a choice screenshot or two.

I don't need a tree of pages, a spreadsheet, or a pie chart of time wasted on hn. I spent my time here on purpose, show me or tell me why. Remind me of the topics so I can close the tab and come back to it easily when needed.

OneTab and Pocket seem like they might be a good fit for you.

I am using OneTab, it is good for let my yesterday workspace go back.

I would very much like my browsing history graph not the list. I feel like I should never have to make bookmarks.

I close everything each morning. There is some sort of relief this provides me. Like clearing of noise in my visual field. It makes it easier to get started with work and stay working.

edit: For my personal machine, this rule doesn't apply. I just close stuff I don't "need" open anymore.

This is still like chaotic neutral at best.

I refuse to believe computers can stay on overnight (spot the Windows user). I shut my computer down completely every afternoon so it can have a rest and start up refreshed tomorrow.*

*What actually happens is some bug in MySQL on Docker irreversibly corrupts my database every week or so. (Again, spot the Windows user).

I also try to close things out each evening - and any tabs that I "need" I at least jot down in a notepad for later.

My main motivation is keeping the performance on my computer strong but there is something really nice about getting to start fresh each day.

Hmm. I appear to have 15726 tabs open at the moment, in 35 windows.

These research sessions get a little out of hand sometimes.

I'm trying simple tab groups on Firefox so they're more organized. Used to let them fill the screen until I got sick of it and deleted them.

I generally have 200-500 tabs open at a time, appropriately sorted into groups and hierarchies using sidebery

Our telemetry says 98% of Firefox users have fewer than 20 tabs open. And that's Beta data so heavily skewed to more sophisticated users. I wouldn't be surprised if it was closer to 99% maxing out at under 20. 95% have fewer than 10 tabs open. 75% have 3 or fewer.

This post made me realise that at some point In the last few years I stopped consciously managing tabs. Three windows on boot, two work one personal - usually about 3-15 tabs each. Feel overwhelmed? Close all except the current tab.

20? That's rookie numbers.

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