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.
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:
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…
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.
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 SPd1wPOCpxgWVCF
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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