Ask HN: How many browser tabs you have open?

5 points by vladstudio ↗ HN

20 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 46.6 ms ] thread
I have 15 (5 of them pinned, the other 10 related to current activity).
2 on my iPad right now.

As few as possible on my PC. I look things up in history all the time so I don’t need to have tabs open.

interesting, thanks! It is not often to meet an active History user.
Yup. Personally I find having large numbers of browser tabs open as well as large numbers of application windows destroys my ability to do tasks.

I have heard the most amazing excuses from people as to why they don't use history despite the fact that it solves so many problems. I am never afraid to close a window because i won't be able to find it later.

8 (3 pinned), rarely go over 10
Roughly 8000 over 12 or so windows (FF nightly)
That's serious! If I may ask – how do you navigate them?
Start typing in the address bar and choose "switch to tab" if there's a match, and also scroll through the drop down list. Sometimes I "send to start" or end.
got it, thanks! Do you ever interact with the Tab Strip itself, and if yes, for what cases?
Yes, but only if I know I'm close to the tab I need. I may open 10 or so Google results in a set of tabs, for instance, and switch between them using the strip.
3 pinned tabs with my emails and calendar plus 8 or ten working tabs that cycle in and out quickly.

In addition to making things hard to find and bogging down your machine, tabs impose a cognitive load. Thats one of the reasons I'm building BrainTool. If you suffer tabs overload it might be worth checking out. Here's a recent post/video on Browser Hygiene:

https://braintool.org/2021/12/08/Clean-up-your-tabs-with-Bra...

BrainTool is one of the things I discovered today :-) thank you!
201 Tabs. May be down to 180 after I read through some news.
understood, thanks! How do you navigate them? Just scroll through the tab strip?
Well first I am on Safari. Which doesn't do much in terms of multi Tab navigation like Firefox and Chrome. Even current Tabs are not showed up properly in your address bar while typing. Safari wont recognise you have the same tab unless the tab is fully loaded. Which is not the case if you restart your browser from previous sessions. On Firefox and Chrome you have a list of tab to navigate them or search through it. On Safari you have Tab Overview, even though in Safari 15 they have finally fixed not to load every single Tab in Tab Overview which causes hundreds of GB of paging if you have lots of tabs. They still load non-idle tab, and again lots of paging. ( In worst case if you have hundreds to thousands of tab it could kill your SSD with Data Write )

Most of my current session stays on the right side of Tabs. I mostly finish reading all the current news and go back to do Garbage Collection of Tabs on my left. So they are more like Reading List.

2 - I get itchy when I go more than 5... if I'm digging into something, I save them all in a Bookmark folder.

I don't understand why people store email in their deleted folders, or why they keep hundreds of tabs open. There are better ways to store data.