And remember… it’s not a race!
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…
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.
my firefox app gave up counting and just shows an infinity symbol :(
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.
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 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?
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.
