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Ask HN: To those of you who have 100+ browser tabs open: Why? How?

3 points by ColinCera ↗ HN
Genuine curiosity here… maybe I’m missing out on a productivity booster…

I keep reading people who mention in passing that they routinely have 100, 300, 800(!) tabs open in their browser.

I very rarely open more than 50, and then only temporarily, e.g. I may open a whole slew of articles from a list/search, but then I'll read through those open tabs and close them as I go.

Ordinarily, I have 5 pinned tabs (email & project management functions), plus I’ll have maybe 10 or 15 other tabs open. Average is <10.

For those of you who routinely use 100+ tabs open —

What are your use cases for having that many tabs all the time?

How do you even find the relevant tab for the task at hand?

How do you keep them organized?

Does it take forever for your browser to restart? (I’m assuming you save and restore your session, rather than manually re-opening 100+ tabs.)

I‘m interested in both specifics and general pros & cons.

12 comments

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mmastrac
They pile up for me because I generally open a new tab rather than re-using an existing one. I've been better about closing them in Chrome because it doesn't do tab scrolling like Firefox and at some point they become unusable.
antino
God... I can't work with more than fifteen (at a stretch) The cognitive load literally drives me insane. I have the usual suspects pinned, much like you, and use them routinely - but anything else is merely temporary. I also have a less than adequately powerful computer, so I couldn't keep many tabs open, even if I wanted to.
danish_siddiqui
I use the following extensions on Chrome:

1. Tabs Outliner -- lets you cycle through the tabs in a nice list format. You can jump to a tab or close it directly from this list.

2. Session Buddy -- lets you save all tabs. Even if the browser crashes it remembers which tabs you had opened!

omnray
Why need to use Session buddy if Tabs Outliner also can save all tabs, and it' also preserve all tabs on Chrome crash?
danish_siddiqui
Better organization. It auto-saves windows / tabs by date and I can save them manually.
omnray
We use open tabs as reading latter list.

It's actually very handy, if PC have sufficient amount of RAM and with a help of mentioned there Tabs Outliner extension it's not a problem at all.

TO basically remove distinction between open and hibernated tabs and also preserve everything on crash. So i sometimes even crash the browser (by killing its root process) as quick way to free memory, without losing all open tabs and work, it's even faster than by using TO close-save all functionality. On restart TO allow reopen only now needed items, and everything else - latter.

kovrik
This. I find interesting site/article/paper but don't have enough time to read it. I just leave tab open and read it later. Yes, I can bookmark this page or save link somewhere - but why do extra actions?
gbrhaz
I normally have 100+ tabs open. I use Firefox, with TreeStyleTab (vertical and collapsed tabs) and another extension (which I've forgotten the name of) that greys out unloaded tabs.

I pretty much use it as my reading list. I always forget to check Instapaper or whatever else I would otherwise use, so this at least keeps the names visible to me at all times.

vishalchandra
Cause: Involuntary context switch from what I am doing. Reasons could be an email that came in, a colleague who asked me a question, I started writing a new blog article etc.

Eventually for every context switch I have now 5-7 tabs opened and before I close them I have switched context again.

How do you find the relevant tab? Either I find it in one quick skim ~ usually a separate window corresponds to a specific context switch ~ or I open another tab.

Bypass any organization. Just need to periodically do garbage collection i.e. close tabs / windows no longer relevant.

Browser restart probably happens once in ten days. I do not shut down my macbook.

Someone
"Cause: Involuntary context switch from what I am doing. Reasons could be an email that came in, a colleague who asked me a question, I started writing a new blog article etc."

To me, your description sounds like you don't want to have zillions of tabs open, but it just happens to you.

"An email that came in": configure your mail program to not interrupt you, or interrupt you less often, or close it altogether.

Worse, if starting a new blog article is an involuntary context switch, shouldn't you seek counseling for that?

vishalchandra
Counselling is for problems one does not know about. But yes a better personal time tracker or something similar would help.
attilagyongyosi
I often find that I am the only person among my friends/colleagues who can manage tabs. At work I have Firefox open for casual browsing and Chrome for development, and I usually don't have more than 15 tabs open altogether.