Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why? |
Ask HN: How many tabs do you have open in the browser(s) and why? |
Far fewer on browsers I use for productive pursuits, but hundreds across multiple windows and many tab groups. I have a lot of projects, and haven’t found a great way ‘shelve’ and ‘unshelve’ them.
About 20-50 open on the personal laptop at a given moment, bursting higher when researching or troubleshooting something. Work computer has more like 75 as baseline, bursting to a couple hundred. Every now and then I very briefly get that back below 20.
Hence, I could never understand how people have more than like 20 tabs open — what are you working on in this case? For myself, I only go to 20-ish territories when aggressively looking for docs or opening something for quick batch-like extraction, it's a very short-timed situation.
Usually it's just three pinned mailboxes and something I'm currently on, like 2-5 tabs, one of them is likely a search engine.
I used to have far more, but I learned the habit of bookmarking tabs that I've kept open for a long period of time.
Actually, now that I think about it, this would make for a useful browser extension: have an LLM that automatically asks to bookmark tabs that have been inactive but present for X number of days.
On my own computer, two maybe three - one for email, one for Nextcloud, and whatever one I'm using for browsing.
Most tabs are just “I’ll come back to this”, and they pile up because I never actually decide to either use it or drop it.
Mail, Hermes Agent Dashboard, ESPN draft tracker, HN
I harvest tabs mercilessly, I either read and close or if its something I want to keep I have the bot clip into my obsidian vault
My child usually has 50 or more, it freaks me out every time.
Bookmarks require organizing them; folders worth involve waiting for them to open. Also, both bookmarks and following links to reopen things require using the mouse if you don’t want to use incredibly slow, clunky accessibility UIs, and I aim to mouse as little as possible. Context switching is hard enough without having to locate your bookmarks and wait for all the pages to load.
At work I’ve typically got a half dozen ephemeral pull requests (mine and teammates) on both comment and diff view, GitHub actions in flight, a handful of frequently-referred dashboards, a dozen tabs for various AWS services and logs, another 1-2 dozen tabs each for APIs I’m integrating in some of said PRs, plus the relevant admin panels for those third party services; issue tracker with several tabs for projects and tickets in flight or upcoming or being written/fleshed out; internal documentation I’m writing or reading; and then a couple dozen for whatever other topic I’m researching at the moment.
That gets me through a typical day with a couple meetings; a bunch of PR review and revisions; a bug or data question investigation or two; and a few hours of good deep focus work.
(Stretch ask: including favicons.)