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Comment by DanteVertigo | Hacker News Reader

Is it even good practice to have a dozen of tabs open? Maybe it depends on the type of websites open? Travel related with 10 SO questions and 3 Youtube instances? That's not focused work right? The point is I am very confused why people have dozens of tabs open at once. Please share with me the reason behind this habbit

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I use tree style tabs[treeee] in Firefox and often open 5-10, process them (which may involve opening several more each). Eventually I find the information I need, but this makes it easy to group the depth of my search. This branch is from the API docs, that branch is from StackOverflow (and usually has a subbranch of questions that catch my attention from the more fun StackExchange sites, whoops), and then another branch with language specific questions. I try to clear everything at the end of the week, but it's really not a huge burden because I can collapse a tree and just mentally ignore it until then. Average day with lots of coding? 100+ tabs easily.

[treeee]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

1. Before I finish studying a subject, I'm unable to identify the best sources of information.

2. Before I identify the best sources of information, I'm unable to adequately determine which information I should act on and which sources I should make note of in my personal wiki.

3. Before I make note of the best sources of information, I shouldn't close any tabs.

So when I study a subject, I keep all tabs open except for those resources that are clearly of low quality. After I finish studying the subject, I process all tabs, often hundreds, and I make note of the best sources of information in my personal wiki.

One reason is trying to follow a HN discussion. I do not see a better way to do this than keeping several tabs open with topics I would like to recheck a few hours later.

There could be other ways doing this and I have some ideas, but right now multiple tabs seem to be most practical solution for this.

Not everything I do is focussed work.

Some of it is idle browsing and reading of interesting things.

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