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Comment by NavinF | Hacker News Reader

That's not a lot tbh. I'm usually at ~1500 tabs (13 windows across 3 win+tab desktops) per machine on both my desktop (64GB 5800x3d) and macbook (32GB M2 Pro).

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Why on earth would you do this? Genuine question.

I do something similar, because I can. Why waste time organizing & pruning them when I don't need to? I can just search for open tabs that I need, jump to windows to resume sessions I was working on earlier, etc. At some point it gets too much and I use OneTab to save all my open tabs and start over.

I don't go quite that excessive, but you can keep various projects and activities tracked pretty well. Instead of regretting closing a few stackoverflow pages (which will be a nightmare to search for even with local history) you can leave up the useful ones, so you don't lose them, and close it all once the current task / project is no longer needing them.

I used to make fun of people who hoarded them, but honestly sometimes just keeping that one tab open until you've exhausted its use is worth it.

I can't even imagine trying to locate that "useful tab" amongst 1500 open tabs. My bookmarks by contrast are nicely organized into folders. I can also open an entire folder of links at once, for example, my favorite blogs.

So typically what happens is I'll split out browser windows with tab groups, Firefox used to have a way of doing this from one window, but they scrapped it or its just not default anymore, it was like "Virtual Desktops" but for tabs. It was insanely useful, I think the tabs that were hidden were not even loaded in the background, so they were on standby until you can back to them.

Each project has its own window. Ctrl+tab moves down the call stack and ctrl+shift+tab moves up the call stack. Exploring a topic often requires depth first search and a lot of ctrl+w and clicking "close tabs to the right" after researching subtopics. I've used this approach for over a decade and I've always been able to upgrade my machine fast enough to keep up.

Of course I also use ctrl+e (QuickTabs) to jump faster with intellij-like fuzzy search. It's kinda like Chrome's built-in ctrl+shift+a, except better.

Bragging rights.

Good lord. Now I'm hesitantly curious to know how many unread messages and unopened emails you have.

0 unread replies on the sites I use regularly (HN, reddit, twitter, messenger) and 0 unread emails in the Primary tab on gmail.

I used to be inbox-zero in all gmail tabs a couple of years ago and I will be yet again some day. The main limitation I'm running into is that a lot of useless emails ("We're making some changes to our PayPal legal agreements") have unpredictable subject lines and are sent from the same address that sends useful emails. I already have hundreds of gmail filters that auto-archive useless emails with predictable addresses or subject lines ("Your statement is ready") that I can't unsubscribe from without closing the account. LLMs should solve this problem some day.

Yeesh. I have a 32GB M2 Max and if I hit 15 (that's fifteen) tabs, I'll habitually quit the browser and restart it, if not the whole computer. Any apps in the background get force quit after the last window is closed.

Windows 98-brain is hard to get rid of...

My Windows 9x brain opens as many Netscape/Opera/MSIE windows as I want till 'it' crashes. Nowadays swapping heavily just slows down the machine.

It’s quite clearly a lot. Just not as much as you.

I meant that for a modern machine 1500 is nowhere close to the maximum amount you can have before TLB misses (and later page faults) slow down the entire machine. If a machine with similar specs can't handle that many tabs, something is misconfigured. Eg maybe memory timings are way too conservative or the wrong power profile is in use.

Remember a website can do anything it wants, and that includes leaking 32GB memory.

Browsers have been implementing background tab killing recently though, so just because you have a tab doesn't mean the process is actually backing it anymore.

I've seen the occasional memory leak from Youtube and Twitter, but only once a month. Not a big deal since I try to reboot for security updates every 3-6 months anyway.

1500 tabs easily touches enough RAM that average computers will keep swapping if that's actually your working set. Which is why any good browser should be completely freezing tabs that haven't been active in a while so their memory can remain swapped out, or even completely unloading them.

Though, 1500 tabs in one window is beyond the point at which it impacts Safari's responsiveness, but that's completely unrelated to the contents of the tabs and is instead the fault of taking way too long to update every NSView in the tab bar.

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