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Ask HN: How many open tabs do you have and when does it become a problem?

12 pointsby julianpyealmost 12 years ago
A friend of mine visited me, looked at my browser and said &#x27;Julian, we need to talk about your tabs... &#x27;. So... I have 63 tabs open and can&#x27;t see the favicons. Do I need to see a shrink?<p>How many tabs do you have open?

25 comments

Pyrodoggalmost 12 years ago
At work i force myself to shutdown Chrome daily to prevent tab bloat.<p>Home is another story. I&#x27;ve got two instances of chrome open, split screened on my 24&quot; monitor. I constantly bounce back and forth between the two while pages are loading or watching youtube in one while surfing in the other. I haven&#x27;t seen favicons in weeks and frequently resort to Ctrl+Tab and Shift+Ctrl+Tab for navigating because the tabs are so small.<p>It&#x27;s bad, some of them are for things I read two months ago and wanted to reference to code something but then lost interest. Can&#x27;t stand to close them though cause I might just find the interest and time again and then wonder where that page was.<p>Bookmarks are never looked at, i have a very strong out of sight out of mind mentality.<p>I cry on the occasions that Chrome crashes and for whatever reasons the session can&#x27;t be restored. But I purposely don&#x27;t have any extension to save tabs. It&#x27;s my forest fire, a destructive but necessary part of the process.
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jason_slackalmost 12 years ago
right now I have 326 open across 6 windows.<p>I started using Readability to add things that I wanted to read later.<p>Chrome is currently using 6.3GB of RAM<p>EDIT: I use CMD + OPT + Left&#x2F;Right Arrow to navigate through the tabs<p>EDIT 2: Chrome handles this. I have never been able to accomplish this in Safari and&#x2F;or Firefox. Even Chrome has issues with this type of abuse.<p>Edit 3: Doing a quick look over misc tabs it is mostly articles I wanted to read, Cocos2d-X and other programming documentation, e-mail, calendar, Readability a few Tumblr&#x27;s I follow, SO, etc.
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davidyoung604almost 12 years ago
This is a shameless self-plug, but it&#x27;s relevant to tab hoarding. A while back I created a Chrome extension called Tab Flow to deal with my own troubles with this. Grab it from the Chrome store and feel free to hit me up with feedback&#x2F;suggestions if you can think of a case it doesn&#x27;t cover.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-flow/pfhnncnieignceheeojlnpfhkblicdjd?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;tab-flow&#x2F;pfhnncnie...</a>
IvyMikealmost 12 years ago
In chrome, the &quot;Tab Count&quot; extension gives you a quick way to find the answer.<p><a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-count/cfokcacdaonnckdmopmcgeanhkebeaio" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;tab-count&#x2F;cfokcacd...</a><p>In my case, 82. When the favicons start to disappear I open another window.
taudealmost 12 years ago
I have three different instances of Chrome open. Each with about 30+ tabs, each for different research and problem sets.<p>Since it&#x27;s Friday, I&#x27;m going to try and close everything by the end of day. I&#x27;ll do this by grabbing the URLs of the important things, save them to a text file and write a sentence on why I need to open that link again. For example, if I&#x27;m researching something on say, OAuth, I&#x27;ll have about 15 tabs open, stuff scattered everywhere. I&#x27;ll eventually close them all and have some cohesive notes on the topic that I can either act upon, or ignore. Regardless, the tabs will be closed and my mind&#x2F;task freed.<p>Edit: in addition to my own notes, some of the tabs I&#x27;ll add to a read it later service, and some I&#x27;ll add to Springpad (things like libraries that I have categories for, etc.)
dBlissealmost 12 years ago
Tabs are an extremely poor way of managing your space. In this case, your space is your screen.<p>The issue with tabs is that once you are past 10, you are significantly degrading the readability of your content. In order to reference &#x27;x&#x27; material, you have to parse through all your tabs until you find the right one. This is a valuable waste of time and energy.<p>Over the last year I&#x27;ve slowly moved towards finding a solution to the tabbing dilemma, and how to actually have a huge number of different windows open, and I found it&#x27;s already been solved. Workspaces.<p>If you&#x27;ve used a Macbook, you probably found out about 4 finger swiping, which switches between different &#x27;workspaces&#x27;, different, full-sized screens.<p>Similarly, on Linux distros, workspaces are usually enabled by default, and accessed via CTRL+ALT+ARROW_KEY.<p>On Windows, I found the free program Dexpot to be similarly as useful, except that the swapping is definitely not as smooth as on Linux&#x2F;Mac.<p>The main benefit of workspaces is literally to section off your activities according to workspaces. For example, I will have a text editor open in one workspace, and a terminal open in another. I swap to one to compile, I swap to another to write.<p>I will then have several workspaces of pure reference material. C++ documentation, other specific documentation, random .pdf files, stackoverflow on Chrome and similar things.<p>And finally I&#x27;ll have another workspace that&#x27;s more of a play&#x2F;irrelevant to activity theme. This way, tabs don&#x27;t really build up (30+) unless I explicitly ignore the way my workflow is designed. This has been part of my evolution from Bookmarks to Hotkeys to now, efficient workspaces. I&#x27;m working on Macros.<p>However, for casual business, I&#x27;ll usually have 20+ tabs open. :p
ivan_ahalmost 12 years ago
A couple of months ago I switched to Firefox for my daily browsing needs because of its smarter handling of tabs. The following two features made it worth it:<p><pre><code> &#x2F;1&#x2F; Tab groups -- I have a tab group for my work, another for general comms, and yet another which serves as a &quot;to read&quot; buffer. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;support.mozilla.org&#x2F;en-US&#x2F;kb&#x2F;tab-groups-organize-tabs The default shortcut is command+shift+E &#x2F;2&#x2F; Tab unloading. Firefox is smart about unloading from RAM tabs which have not been used recently. Upon focusing on the tab it comes back to life as it was before. </code></pre> Thanks to &#x2F;2&#x2F;, my Internet addiction can go on unabated for much longer periods now despite the fact that I have only 4G of RAM. With Chrome I used to &quot;max out&quot; at 20-30 tabs, but with Firefox I can go to 50+ tabs, especially if they are in a tab group that hasn&#x27;t been unloaded from RAM.<p>I still use Chrome for web dev though. The developer console, and tools are superior.<p>update: I HIGHLY recommend y&#x27;all try out this tab group thing. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like: <a href="http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/firefox-tab-groups.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gigaom2.files.wordpress.com&#x2F;2011&#x2F;03&#x2F;firefox-tab-group...</a>
julianpyealmost 12 years ago
Biggest gainer of tabs is what I call &#x27;stackoverflow&#x27; explosions. I have a problem, then I find 10 interesting entries to be read later, but want to return to the IDE. But I also have 30 tabs on the left that I always want to get down to reading one day. Basically I never return to my bookmarks so I use tabs instead.
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PencilAndPaperalmost 12 years ago
After 5 it becomes unmanageable for me. I typically have a little more than that. My remedy is similar to my data management strategy: If its junk deal with it now. Delete&#x2F;close the tab now rather than filter through it later. Anything I think I might need later gets tagged into Delicious.
rlt3almost 12 years ago
I used to use bookmarks when they were simple to use.<p>I&#x27;d find a page and click `add bookmark&#x27; and then I would go back to it later. Somehow bookmarks regressed even though they were fine as they were. If I bookmark a page now, it just goes somewhere.<p>If I click the `Bookmarks&#x27; menu, <i>I don&#x27;t see any bookmarks</i>. I don&#x27;t understand what happened, all I see are a bunch of folders of stuff I never added and don&#x27;t care about.<p>Anyway, since bookmarks are worthless now, I just have like 50 tabs open at all times now. I periodically go through them and get any code snippets I want or just close them if I read what I wanted.
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mcvalmost 12 years ago
Back in 2004, I had 200 sites open in Opera. Worked fine on my Pentium II except for closing Opera, which took 15 minutes.<p>Nowadays I use Chrome, Firefox and Safari on two different machines, and they all have multiple open windows each with dozens of open tabs. I&#x27;m pretty good at bringing any machine to its knees.<p>My biggest problem was when Safari gave up and decided not to remember what was actually in those tabs. That sucked. Or at least, it felt sucky at the time. I have no idea what was in them either, so I don&#x27;t really miss them. I suspect it means there&#x27;s something on the Internet that I haven&#x27;t read.
josephpmayalmost 12 years ago
I only have 52 today, but I recently went through a closed a bunch. I call it &quot;Tab Hoarding&quot;.<p>*edit: I also have probably close to 1000 open on Chrome on my iPhone (they&#x27;re hard to go through)
sys_argvalmost 12 years ago
Currently I have 267 tabs loaded in Firefox and in any given day I might load 50-100 tabs which I devote around 2 hours in a day to reducing down to around the 250 mark. I had about 420 tabs but in the last couple of weeks I have actively reduced them to the essential &#x27;must-read&#x27; one day. <a href="http://imgur.com/1K4s6MP" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;imgur.com&#x2F;1K4s6MP</a> (this was a couple of days into my drive to reduce my tabs). Oh and I use firefox on linux. Hands down the best browser I have ever used.
chewxyalmost 12 years ago
I used to do 30 - 50 tabs. Now I&#x27;m better: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/xhLmt2A.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;xhLmt2A.png</a> - almost all are work related (except those with that orange Y favicon)<p>I discovered that 30-50 tabs wasn&#x27;t conducive to working environment.<p>If there can be a solution - it&#x27;s this: if a tab has been open for more than say 3 hours and it&#x27;s been untouched (focus has not gone to it), it needs to be closed. I currently do this manually
saosebastiaoalmost 12 years ago
I typically peak out at 30 or so, but never keep more than 10 or so open for long periods of time.<p>My wife, on the other hand, regularly consumes 2-3 gigs of memory with her Chrome usage. Sometimes, when I&#x27;m doing some heavy lifting in R, I have to log into her account and close her browser windows, just so I don&#x27;t hit swap.
eitlandalmost 12 years ago
I sometimes have up to a few hundreds.<p>Pinboard extension lets me stash away sets of tabs and treetabs adds structure. Firefox lets me find back to tabs by typing in the (awesome) address bar.<p>Hardware ranging from 6y.o. hp laptop to 6 core desktop w&#x2F;ssd.
codequicklyalmost 12 years ago
I use Great Suspender extension for Chrome, which allows me to unload the tab, so it doesn&#x27;t tax the memory. Then I can selectively open the tab when I&#x27;m ready to read. Otherwise, my 100+ tabs will create havoc, and slow down the Chrome to a crawl.
true_religionalmost 12 years ago
Something like 60 or so, but Chrome handles it all without missing a beat. It&#x27;s only if I have 40+ tabs running flash that there&#x27;s a problem, and even then its only that flash might crash.
legacy2013almost 12 years ago
I can have fifty tabs open at any given time. Don&#x27;t worry about it
danielfernandezalmost 12 years ago
We are working on a solution for that, feel free to register if interested <a href="http://listboard.it/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;listboard.it&#x2F;</a>
VierScaralmost 12 years ago
When I can&#x27;t see the icons on the tab, and can&#x27;t see if it&#x27;s reloading - it becomes a problem, on my screen its probably 30+
iSlothalmost 12 years ago
Normally around 10, hardly ever over 20, never over 30.<p>Drives me crazy having loads open, I kind of treat them like a to-do list...
skeralmost 12 years ago
I used to have over 200 in Chrome until I discovered OneTab. Now I have 289 tabs in OneTab plus 20 regular tabs.
mathattackalmost 12 years ago
I frequently go up to 50+. It only (somewhat) becomes a problem when you have to reboot.
dsschnaualmost 12 years ago
sometimes it gets crazy. I try to keep it at 4-5 though.