45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time(opensource.com) |
45% of people have 20 browser tabs open at a time(opensource.com) |
Sometimes that means 1 window, sometimes that means 4 windows. Just depends on what I’m doing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What advantages do you see to keeping a large number of tabs open at a time? Do you find that you return to 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.
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...
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.
edit: For my personal machine, this rule doesn't apply. I just close stuff I don't "need" open anymore.
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).
My main motivation is keeping the performance on my computer strong but there is something really nice about getting to start fresh each day.
These research sessions get a little out of hand sometimes.
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/
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.