This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?
Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?
Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.
The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.
How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.
> Do you just not have any interests?
Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.
I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.
An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
There is absolutely no technical reason why bookmarks and tabs are separate concepts: if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs, and the idea that a tab has to be some kind of constantly-open running program burning RAM and CPU is essentially a mistake made only by Google (and we can probably guess why they like that), as the only permanent state of a tab is the history of URLs it represented (which can be easily verified by rebooting: if the browser doesn't save it to disk it isn't part of the semantic state).
> if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs
That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.
It's a completely different view of what the tab bar is.
To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.
When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.
> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?
The problem is that some people don't have just one thing they are doing at a time: they have long-term projects that overlap in scope. I am a teacher at a University, where I am teaching multiple classes and helping multiple students. I am also an elected government official, where I am sitting on multiple committees and making decisions on multiple topics. I am also a software developer working on multiple projects and doing research into multiple algorithms. I am also a human being having fun in multiple ways and talking to multiple other people. Do you really insist that I finish, shut down, and serialize the state of every single task I am working on in order to work on some other task? That is probably the least efficient process I think you could come up with; every single sub-task I have has its own working area, and each of those involves maybe 12 tabs... so the result is many hundreds of tabs. If you only own one table, which you have to share between work as diverse as soldering and cooking, I highly recommend trying out a life with two tables for a while, as you might be shocked at how much more efficient life becomes when you don't have to pack up everything you are doing every time you get hungry. What makes a computer interesting is when you then realize you have an effectively infinite number of tables.
Hence, multiple windows (and because windows UX is broken, multiple browsers)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
> And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task?
No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.
> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.
> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.
Exactly true. I use chrome as my secondary browser. I have max 5 tabs open. But my primary workhorse(firefox) has close to 30-40 tabs.
I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.
The use of what most HN users would consider an absurd number of tabs is shockingly (to me anyway) common among the non-tech-worker crowd. I'd say about half of my family members that don't work in tech have at least dozens and probably hundreds of tabs open at any given time.
I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative).
It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
I think this is a pretty common practice. I know I have hundreds of tabs open as a temporary bookmark system over many windows(48 windows, 354 tabs right now) ... to the point that I made a simple extension to find what I am looking for visually and have links on the page that focus that window and tab. I find it pretty useful in practice.
I can understand opening 20-30 tabs but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history.
I went from Netscape/internet explorer to Firefox then because of the frequent crashes and how slow it was to Chrome. I am to entrenched in the Google eco system to change now so just can hope this will make Chrome cut down on the bloat.
1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before.
2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it.
3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.
4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...
5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.
6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.
I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.
I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
tabs combine bookmarks with back and forward buttons. if i open a new tab and want to go "back" I switch tabs. now i have both states saved, which is good for speed and keeping my location on a page. tabs dont do a good job of showing me "how" i got somewhere", especially once I convert them to bookmarks.
to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.
tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.
i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
Tabs seem like a poor visualization of your browsing history. A history tree of your last N sites seems like it would be a lot more useful and informative (not to mention compact). Tabs don't show the tree relationship.
This single extension is most of the reason I use FF as my daily driver. Can't live without it anymore. Being able to build out a tree, rearrange the subtrees, close out whole subtrees at once and have history maintained on each tab has ended up being central to my whole browsing flow.
You really need a graph with a timeline / histogram or similar. See my previous comment which has more ideas. I hope someone builds this, but I know that the way to see it happen is to go do it.
I was trying to get the Chrome team to understand this and implement a bookmark manager which took this into consideration. We have the compute power, the memory, and the understanding to build such a thing. Just a bookmark isn't useful. I want a snapshot of my mental map of how I got there, what it's about (auto summarization), other tabs I had open and their same histories, plus an easy way to pick that back up and dive in from that exact spot. I don't just want a saved session, but a place on a map of knowledge that I can jump back to. Then give me fuzzy search that can match the idea / meaning of something across these saves, so I can find it without remembering the URL or page title. Give me a topical timeline with a graph so I can see when I was thinking about something. The idea of a "bookmark" for a "page" on the web is cute and had a place in history, but we can do a lot better in 2017.
Yes, you are into something. However I think you can forget about getting the 2017 version of google to implement it.
You might have better luck with trying to implement it as an extension to Firefox although the extension API is (at least for now) going to be a shadow of its former self AFAIK.
My tab tree is the closest thing I've come to an effort-less mind-map that works for me. (Effortless as in ctrl-click to open a new sub-tree so I can always see what is related to what and how I found something really hard-to-find-but useful.)
Even though my current setup works well I'm quite sure I or someone else will be able to create something event better in the future.
- make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something
- open all outgoing links in new background tabs
so you can continue reading the current page
- leave several pages of reference material open
(e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing)
- open links that someone sends you to work on them later
And once the inevitable distraction hits you you might forget closing some.
> who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open,
I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer.
> and how can we get them the help they need?
Thanks for asking! Here is my idea:
Make an even better solution! What I need:
An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes
- multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.)
- possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.)
My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.:
- I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
- I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it).
- A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P
Feel free to suggest more great ideas here.
[0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
Tab trees would be pretty cool, especially if you list tabs in column view like I do. Opening a link in a new tab would list as a child tab, and the list of child tabs could be collapsed/hidden. Drag child tabs out of the tree to become parents themselves.
This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on.
From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that.
(Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
> - I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
This is tediously rehashed in every. single. thread. about tabs (someone's always gotta have a problem with someone else), but the fact is that some people have lots of tabs open while others don't. For me it's because bookmark management is such a forgotten child in all browsers, so I leave tabs in order to read them later.
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
Well, a hundred is actually manageable. A thousand just takes up so much space, in any form, that you can't possible sort through them in any reasonable time.
I think you misunderstood. A tab per site, some kind of drop down-type interface per tab for each page on that site. So if you had 50 tabs, you'd have an average of 20 pages under each per tab.
From what I have seen, it is like RAM vs HD usage. You bookmark things that are going to be useful in the future, long term, while you keep tabs open while they are in current use such as when researching a topic. For example, when someting here breaks or I want to learn more about a given topic, it is not uncommon for me to use hundreds of tabs open while I triage what is useful and what is not. Some of those will be added to the bookmarks (or pocket, or pinboard, depending on how I like them).
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
I research many things (being a student and as part of my job). But I usually close useless tabs after reading them. I keep the main research tabs open, the trunk you could say, that trunk can always lead me back to the leafs.
No bookmarks are for things I want to save; tabs are temporary. If I'm reading hacker news, I'll open all the articles I want to read in new tabs (maybe with their comments in yet another tab) and then go through them one at time.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Tree tabs are godly for this because it lets you retrace your steps.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
Bookmarks are mostly useless for read-later tabs because out of sight, out of mind, and there's always new stuff to read. Open tabs force you to make a decision - read me or close me. And, as usual, Opera 12 was the best browser of its time, and even today is orders of magnitude better than the current offerings, at least in some respects.
Mental thing. By having the tabs open (pinned), it's a reminder that I need to get this shit done. Eventually the ones that didn't get done are sent to the graveyard.
Tree-style tab and middle clicking means that you can have a hierarchical record of your browsing when researching. Middle click three to five tabs from a search, middle click from each tab when reading through on the first article for any interesting subarticles, then when you get to the bottom you have a visual record of your path to that point.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
Most people that have tens of tabs open google something then open every result in a new tab and basically use the tabs as a very short term todo queue. When you close the current tab you get moved to the next item in the queue. Managing bookmarks for something you're only reading for maybe two minutes isn't worth the effort.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.
I know you're joking, but the "You're holding it wrong" mentality is one reason I'll probably never go back to proprietary software: The style of software which attempts to prescribe certain workflows and proscribe others inevitably reaches a point where it pisses me off.
Why do you think they need help? If their memory works differently and they have everything organized, what's there to fix? Just enjoy that Firefox is faster and less memory hungry for everybody.
I personally know many people with approx. 50 tabs open. The reason was that they opened the tabs, want to read but haven't got around to reading it yet. They wouldn't want to invest time in maintaining it into a Reading List software.
I tried reading lists, didn't work. I treat tabs as pieces of information fighting for my attention. Some win, some don't and get closed after several weeks or months... :)
I worked on a prototype new browser that understood this exact need -- visualizing browsing sessions -- so that you can quickly go to where you need. We used additional information, such as how long you spent on a page, to avoid cluttering it with less important information. Ultimately we were convinced by a former Mozilla C-type that getting people to switch their browsers was a herculean task (especially on the iPad where you can't change default browsers) and we moved on.
It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
I have >450 tabs open right now, so I guess this is me. I said this the other day, but I use the Tab Groups plugin, and I have a different group for each project I work on. For example, I have a keyboard group with pages related to DIY keyboards. I don't have the resources to make my own keyboard right now, but I don't want to lose the research I've done. My keyboard group lets me keep my research available in the state I left it, allowing me to quickly get up to speed when I have time to work on it.
It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
Almost. It is more like a temporary bookmark with an instant on feature.
It is so easy to use and useful (and doesn't use much ram 8n Firefox) that I frequently hit 1000 tabs open. In Chrome it was impossible.
I don't usually get to hundreds, but it does happen sometimes, and for me it's just a matter of forgetfulness or laziness. It's easy to open new tabs, and easy to forget to close old ones, so they tend to accumulate. Eventually I'll try to find something I already had open, realize I have way too many tabs open, and go through and close all the ones I no longer need, and then the cycle repeats.
Here's the help I need: make a button I can push to save the urls of all open tabs to a separate history, and close the tabs. There's too much noise in the regular history. Bonus points if the saved urls are grouped by the window they were in.
I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
You can create a "to read later" folder in your bookmarks, then right click the tab bar in each window and select "Bookmark All Tabs". That's fairly close to what you're describing, and also works with Firefox Sync (though in my experience it's best to keep the number of bookmarks below 5000 for Sync to work well).
Well, for example when I go into Wikipedia frenzy, I can easily open 10-20 tabs, terminology, graphs, tables, nested articles etc. It's much faster to switch between tabs than close and open them constantly. Why should I limit myself to 5? And yes, after an hour or two I usually get them off the stack one by one, collapsing back to first one, knowing much more about the history of Parliament in Canada.
"I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
