Zero. I think I’m the odd one out here. I have a habit of closing all tabs once I’m done, always have.
Exactly. I cannot comprehend people with dozens of windows with thousands of them. How do you find literally anything at that point?
I usually close all, sometimes if I start a long video I'll keep it open and paused until I come back to watch more of it. But that's just one, and just because that site won't remember where I left off, and I don't want to memorize what the timestamp is. I will have to refresh the page to get it to resume loading the video, but I can remember the timestamp for the 2 seconds it takes to reload and click back to it. But I'll forget if I have to come back hours later.
How do you find literally anything at that point?
I got so used to the Safari tab system that I decided to replicate it in Firefox (recently switched).
For me Three Styles Tabs and Simple Tabs Groups have helped me enormously to keep track of all of my tabs, additionally, I think you can search your tabs within the search section.
As almost all crap I have, I keep categories/groups of it:
Random searches
NAS related stuff
Mac related stuff etc.
The part I can't figure out is why?
Bookmarks/favorites are designed specifically for managing large collections of more or less frequently accessed sites. They have descriptions, tags, folder structures, etc all built in and requiring a few kb of disk space each instead of 100MB of RAM. I'm wracking my brain for a reason why deliberately keeping hundreds or thousands of tabs loaded could possibly be more effective at managing a collection of resources. I got nothing though...
Well, using the aforementioned add-ons is way faster IMHO.
Have you ever given a look at Vivaldi browser? That is power user tab management indeed.
I only use bookmarks to, well bookmark links that I really like a lot, not anything related to "ongoing projects".
On top of that, browsers can offload the tabs thus making the ram usage minimal, but yeah that would only be useful if you have a ton of stuff opened.
On linux, with kde, there is usually a browser extension preinstalled called plasma integration.
It makes it so that when you search from the KDE equivalent of window's start menu, you can also search open browser tabs or history.
I close all tabs once I'm done, but when trying to solve a programming/devops related problem, having lots of tabs open lets me see more than one approach to a problem, along with opinions, side by side.
And research in general requires a lot of tabs, in my experience.
That's all I ever see on my wife's phone in Chrome. Just a smiley face. Personally it bugs the shit out of me. I close any unwanted tabs.
phone in Chrome
I was so confused when I saw that face in my parents phones, I thought it was some kind of easter egg, well, maybe it actually is.
Chrome in Android behaves very similar to Firefox, perhaps a bit more aggressive due to being a system app.
Firefox in macOS keeps all my tabs open, and that is a huge perk for me, Safari would just randomly unload them because of high resource usage crap, like dude, I have 16 GBs or RAM, let me hoard enjoy it.
5k tabs
At 1k tabs firefox was snappy and responsive, but at 5k tabs it was bad, very unstable, buggy and sluggish.
Firefox would crash often even doing simple tasks, some times it took 2 or 3 tries to open firefox. scrolling through all the tabs a couple of minutes.
But all good things must come to an end. Now I close any extra tabs, have 5 - 30 tabs open.
Legitimate question - just how do you accumulate 5K tabs? Did you just never close any tabs, like ever?
Something like that. At first I opened tabs for ”This sounds interesting I will read / watch it later” or ”I'll probably need it later” This got me to ~300 - 800 tabs but then it became a joke, I just left tabs open knowing full well where not needed. Some times keeping all tabs open payed off like, using the search feature to find back to a project I left off. This happened very rarely.
•
Fun fact: if you open more than 100 tabs in chrome (at least on android), it no longer shows the number of open tabs, it just says ":D".
If it's incognito tabs, it says ";)".
I haven't seen a number in years. This means I'd have to count manually which I'm not going to do. Hope this answers your question sufficiently.
•
I didn't know about that feature. Kinda snarky of the devs if you ask me. Good luck with your tabs!
I think this is a generational question. I'm anal about tabs being left open like a light in the house being on
Which generation leaves them open/closed?
I haven't noticed a pattern, but I also haven't really explored
Both of my parents are/were notorious for leaving roughly 655489357 tabs open at a time. I get stressed if I have more than a couple at a time. We're boomers/a millennial, respectively. But it could also be a result of my severe anxiety. Who knows?
Interesting
I think my whole family uses few tabs. For me, once I can't read the titles easily, I start splitting them into separate windows and virtual desktops. Once I finish a task associated with a window I close it
It's so nice when I can restart the browser clean
My ex and I were the same age and totally different on this. I open tabs, close them, don’t leave any open long term. She’d have Safari open with dozens or hundreds as far as I could tell. But I operate like an older millennial and she has the sensibilities of a boomer - TV on 18 hours a day, etc
It particularly drives me insane. I've known people of that age to act super worried if they go somewhere and there's not a TV they can have on. My ex would call it 'background noise' which is exactly what I don't want... annoying and repetitive commercials, concerning and distracting news broadcasts, fictional people engaged in trauma - why not some music? or silence? I've also wondered, what's the psychology of having dialogue playing on a loudspeaker all day and just tuning it out? I pointed out to her that no wonder she seemed to have a hard time listening to me in conversation when she has trained herself to hear people talking all day and not pay any attention to what they're saying. Leaving TVs on when nobody is watching them seems really improper to me too.
If I'm not actively using a tab, I'll close it, unless I'm working on a longer term project. Right now I'm planning a fairly long trip to South America, so I've had several travel sites up for multiple weeks.
Edit: am X/millennial cusp.
You should get vertical tabs on your browser. Tree style tab for Firefox is pretty good.
100's. It's easy when using a tool like tree tabs.
I have several different ongoing projects with different avenues of research and I use it like a temporary store until I organise and store them.
•
I should go back to tree tabs. On my old laptop I got firefox properly messed up and got rid of a lot of addons.
Had 300 on my laptop a while ago, finished up a project which let me drop it down to 160.
On my desktop I have 1,300 or so. Both of them on a single Firefox window with Sidebery
I started with TST actually! I can't remember the exact reasons but I thiiink I switched over to Sidebery for better/faster session restores
Cuz I use them as a way to keep tabs (heh) on different projects I'm involved in. Tree tabs are much faster for me to organize into folders compared to bookmarks since they're already part of my flow of using tabs in the first place :)
That being said, I end up using them more as a way to search through pages I had opened before, using the URL bar. Browser history is a little more finicky to search in that regard
As for how many I can close, I tend to close tabs once I'm done with something in a project (though some tabs I keep around if i find them to be useful beyond that specific project). I also have a bunch of tabs open for music and videos that I want to share with my friends when they get time which could be closed once I share them
I do when researching buying a product, having different tabs open comparing different models, with each their different stores and a bunch of reviews. You can easily get more than 20.
Same with researching a science topic.
But after being done, those tabs get closed. I rather start with a fresh browser each time.
As soon as I can't see letters anymore I just burn it all down and start with a fresh window
•
Very similar 153 tabs currently, had to check with Tab Session Manager for the count. Linux with 32Gb Ram. Firefox gets restarted maybe every 2-4 weeks. Occasionally I kill a tab that takes more then 1Gb of memory.
•
Zero. Maybe it's the OCD, but I never ever leave open a tab I'm not actively using, even if it means I open and close the same few tabs every five minutes for 8 hours every day.
Yeah, probably the ocd lmao.
How can anyone even track them? Like is there anyone out there with that many tabs open who actually knows which is which?
I don't need to know which is which, they're more or less sorted by recency. So I go through the most recent tabs and get the info I need or do the task associated, then close them, until I get back to the previous task or subject.
Sometimes I get interrupted with a new thing to look up or do, and more tabs get made and the cycle begins anew, regardless of how many already exist.
Some projects last days or weeks, and tabs related to them end up being longer-lived. If I get on one of those tabs and don't want to work on the project right then, I'll continue going back (leftwards) til I find something I can do or read in the time I have available. So I definitely have tabs that have been open for months but I do need to get to eventually.
Also, sometimes when I need to look at something I know I have (or had) open in a tab, I'll just search for it (literally, i.e. Google) again in a new tab and handle it there. Then if I do come across the old tab, it gets closed quickly.
I'm "done" when I'm back at my inbox or calendar (first or 2nd tabs, pinned). This rarely happens and when it does I'm sure there is a something in my email or a new ticket in JIRA for me to start on...
So overall it's not about knowing what's in each tab, but having a system to navigate them that works for you.
Your reason is actually totally justified, and I do the same at times, but I have never needed too many tabs. I think the max I've ever needed was like 7 or something like that. I'm talking about people like my wife where her browser on her phone shows an infinity sign from how many tabs she has open 😂
I just closed 47. All of them Amazon...
My best friend is having a babby...
Xmas...
Starting a small business and tools are needed...
I just moved to south Florida, and the bugs are the size of house cats, so I require a salt shotgun...
SO. MANY. HOLIDAY. DEALS.
Like I've never been a shopping addict, but I had a budget of about $1000 for all of that, and I blew through it QUICK.
I could see how it could be addictive, but I do know when to walk away.
the bugs are the size of house cats
Lmao, I feel that in my soul
When I first moved to south Louisiana, I encountered a giant (black and orange) grasshopper. My first thoughts were along the lines of, "Wtf kind of grasshopper is that!? Did I move to fucking Jurassic Park or something!? Fuck!"
It was very jarring to see insects so big (milipedes that excrete some kinda fluid when touched, ground spiders, thunker af orb weavers, wood roaches flying)... now that I actually type it out, it still seems like Jurassic Park almost 20 years later lol; but I'm not much bothered anymore by most of them.
But the electrified tennis racquet for killing mosquitos... that shit is priceless. Wish I could find the $5 walmart ones still, because I would dual wield them and have extra for guests. I've gone from mosquito prey to predator, and it's a joy
- The way people use tabs is bizarre to me. My ex would have so many open that it was really difficult to navigate between them. Seems like a better idea to use features like bookmarks or reading list.
•
It depends on what you are doing.
I do programming and I need access to project management sites, communication sites, documetations (language and library) and tools sites opened.
When I am researching the topics I am not very familiar I usually read 4 or 5 sources. So in the middle of developing a feature I have at least tens of tabs.
When it combined with home lab servers, entainments, side readings and related readings I usually tends to end up with hundreds.
I used to have 20-30 open at a time when I was doing the same things, but I can't imagine building up to hundreds. Maybe I'd leave them open for the next day, but generally I try to stay more organized than that. When you have hundreds of tabs open you can't even see the titles so I find it a lot more difficult to navigate between them.
•
Firefox and Sidebery let me do that.
Before that I have tabs opened in 3 or 4 windows each with 20 or 30 opened.
•
This one. I used to have a bunch of tabs pinned but having to restore them frequently just became a hassle, so I added them to my bookmarks.
When I start up, I right click on a folder and "open all in new tabs"
Then shift click to pin them again. Makes it easier to restart when I need to
At current count, 911. I used to sit around 3000 but managed to shave it down, now it's creeping back up.
Too many things I want to download or read later and not as much time as I used to have. I have been making an effort to use alternative methods though such as bookmarks, YouTube playlists, or just, you know, doing the thing in the moment.
Bare minimum is 7 cus they are pinned. These are tabs I reference constantly. 2 for monitoring servers, 2 for emails, 2 for chat, 1 for lofi girl.
After that it's just based on the current project. So anywhere from 1 for browsing to 20 while doing research.
Add another 7 if you include my work computer for the various sites I work out of.
I try to close anything not currently used quite often and just store things in bookmarks.