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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6147272

by julianpye • 13 years ago

12 40 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

A friend of mine visited me, looked at my browser and said 'Julian, we need to talk about your tabs... '. So... I have 63 tabs open and can't see the favicons. Do I need to see a shrink?

How many tabs do you have open?

legacy2013• 13 years ago

I can have fifty tabs open at any given time. Don't worry about it

VierScar• 13 years ago

When I can't see the icons on the tab, and can't see if it's reloading - it becomes a problem, on my screen its probably 30+

taude3• 13 years ago

I have three different instances of Chrome open. Each with about 30+ tabs, each for different research and problem sets.

Since it's Friday, I'm going to try and close everything by the end of day. I'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'm researching something on say, OAuth, I'll have about 15 tabs open, stuff scattered everywhere. I'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/task freed.

Edit: in addition to my own notes, some of the tabs I'll add to a read it later service, and some I'll add to Springpad (things like libraries that I have categories for, etc.)

julianpye3• 13 years ago

Biggest gainer of tabs is what I call 'stackoverflow' 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.

jameswyse• 13 years ago

I'm the same way with 150+ tabs open just now. Bookmarks just don't work for me..

Every so often I go through the tabs and bookmark anything still relevant, not that it ever helps me find it again.

eitland3• 13 years ago

I sometimes have up to a few hundreds.

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.

Hardware ranging from 6y.o. hp laptop to 6 core desktop w/ssd.

mathattack• 13 years ago

I frequently go up to 50+. It only (somewhat) becomes a problem when you have to reboot.

josephpmay• 13 years ago

I only have 52 today, but I recently went through a closed a bunch. I call it "Tab Hoarding".

*edit: I also have probably close to 1000 open on Chrome on my iPhone (they're hard to go through)

dsschnau• 13 years ago

sometimes it gets crazy. I try to keep it at 4-5 though.

IvyMike• 13 years ago

In chrome, the "Tab Count" extension gives you a quick way to find the answer.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-count/cfokcacd...

In my case, 82. When the favicons start to disappear I open another window.

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

right now I have 326 open across 6 windows.

I started using Readability to add things that I wanted to read later.

Chrome is currently using 6.3GB of RAM

EDIT: I use CMD + OPT + Left/Right Arrow to navigate through the tabs

EDIT 2: Chrome handles this. I have never been able to accomplish this in Safari and/or Firefox. Even Chrome has issues with this type of abuse.

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's I follow, SO, etc.

julianpye3• 13 years ago

You're the winner so far. Recently I had Chrome crash on me several times with 80 tabs. Rebuilding them is slow.... How is a crash with 300+?

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

When I crash and restore from previous session it take about 8 minutes...That is loading all the tabs, not waiting to load until it is clicked on...

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

oh and sometimes I get spikes of memory usage over 10gb. Then it goes back down.

eitland3• 13 years ago

EDIT 2: Chrome handles this. I have never been able to accomplish this in Safari and/or Firefox.

I heard this a few times. I don't know what I'm doing "wrong" but for me FF easily handles a couple of hundred tabs, no questions asked.

Is it because I often use flashblock and mostly consume boring (work-related) pages? As far as I remember that used to be the case on Mac as well.

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

Yeah, I dont play any Flash and I have an extension for Chrome that doesn't auto-play YouTube. (new, I had to find something as after a crash all the movies start to play after a relaunch.)

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

oh an idea. I am on OS X, I bet I could copy my Chrome data over to a Windows 7 partition and have it restore all of my tabs and see if Windows handles this easily as well!!

taude3• 13 years ago

We have a winner here!

jason_slack7• 13 years ago

You know why? I dont feel like bookmarks work well for me. Even with being able to type into the search bar. Also, It would take time to organize ALL of my bookmarks to where I could go just pick it from a list.

I even started to write a browser that puts focus on your daily patterns, frequent sites, frequent search terms, in order to somehow try and make tabs manageable and allow us to get back to the data we care about without hundreds of open tabs.

Pyrodogg2• 13 years ago

At work i force myself to shutdown Chrome daily to prevent tab bloat.

Home is another story. I've got two instances of chrome open, split screened on my 24" 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't seen favicons in weeks and frequently resort to Ctrl+Tab and Shift+Ctrl+Tab for navigating because the tabs are so small.

It'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't stand to close them though cause I might just find the interest and time again and then wonder where that page was.

Bookmarks are never looked at, i have a very strong out of sight out of mind mentality.

I cry on the occasions that Chrome crashes and for whatever reasons the session can't be restored. But I purposely don't have any extension to save tabs. It's my forest fire, a destructive but necessary part of the process.

julianpye3• 13 years ago

Pyrodogg, we need to talk about your tabs :)

I have tabs out of 100% the same reasons as you, however I try to save my sessions with Session Buddy, but I kind of like your forest fire attitude. Sounds cleansing.

eitland3• 13 years ago

Alternative solution is to use pinboard extension, save tabs from one window as a tab set, give it a meaningful name including todays date and feel good about closing it because you can always get the context back. In reality I guess you will never returning to it though ;-)

rlt3• 13 years ago

I used to use bookmarks when they were simple to use.

I'd find a page and click `add bookmark' 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.

If I click the `Bookmarks' menu, I don't see any bookmarks. I don't understand what happened, all I see are a bunch of folders of stuff I never added and don't care about.

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.

Zergy• 13 years ago

What browser are you using?

dBlisse• 13 years ago

Tabs are an extremely poor way of managing your space. In this case, your space is your screen.

The issue with tabs is that once you are past 10, you are significantly degrading the readability of your content. In order to reference 'x' material, you have to parse through all your tabs until you find the right one. This is a valuable waste of time and energy.

Over the last year I'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's already been solved. Workspaces.

If you've used a Macbook, you probably found out about 4 finger swiping, which switches between different 'workspaces', different, full-sized screens.

Similarly, on Linux distros, workspaces are usually enabled by default, and accessed via CTRL+ALT+ARROW_KEY.

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/Mac.

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.

I will then have several workspaces of pure reference material. C++ documentation, other specific documentation, random .pdf files, stackoverflow on Chrome and similar things.

And finally I'll have another workspace that's more of a play/irrelevant to activity theme. This way, tabs don'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'm working on Macros.

However, for casual business, I'll usually have 20+ tabs open. :p

PencilAndPaper• 13 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/close the tab now rather than filter through it later. Anything I think I might need later gets tagged into Delicious.

davidyoung604• 13 years ago

This is a shameless self-plug, but it'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/suggestions if you can think of a case it doesn't cover.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-flow/pfhnncnie...

saosebastiao• 13 years ago

I typically peak out at 30 or so, but never keep more than 10 or so open for long periods of time.

My wife, on the other hand, regularly consumes 2-3 gigs of memory with her Chrome usage. Sometimes, when I'm doing some heavy lifting in R, I have to log into her account and close her browser windows, just so I don't hit swap.

danielfernandez• 13 years ago

We are working on a solution for that, feel free to register if interested http://listboard.it/

codequickly• 13 years ago

I use Great Suspender extension for Chrome, which allows me to unload the tab, so it doesn't tax the memory. Then I can selectively open the tab when I'm ready to read. Otherwise, my 100+ tabs will create havoc, and slow down the Chrome to a crawl.

ivan_ah• 13 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:

   /1/ Tab groups -- I have a tab group for my work,
       another for general comms, and yet another 
       which serves as a "to read" buffer.
       https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tabs
       The default shortcut is command+shift+E 
     
   /2/ 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.

Thanks to /2/, 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 "max out" at 20-30 tabs, but with Firefox I can go to 50+ tabs, especially if they are in a tab group that hasn't been unloaded from RAM.

I still use Chrome for web dev though. The developer console, and tools are superior.

update: I HIGHLY recommend y'all try out this tab group thing. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like: http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/firefox-tab-group...

sys_argv• 13 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 'must-read' one day. http://imgur.com/1K4s6MP (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.

iSloth• 13 years ago

Normally around 10, hardly ever over 20, never over 30.

Drives me crazy having loads open, I kind of treat them like a to-do list...

chewxy• 13 years ago

I used to do 30 - 50 tabs. Now I'm better: http://i.imgur.com/xhLmt2A.png - almost all are work related (except those with that orange Y favicon)

I discovered that 30-50 tabs wasn't conducive to working environment.

If there can be a solution - it's this: if a tab has been open for more than say 3 hours and it's been untouched (focus has not gone to it), it needs to be closed. I currently do this manually

sker• 13 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.

true_religion• 13 years ago

Something like 60 or so, but Chrome handles it all without missing a beat. It's only if I have 40+ tabs running flash that there's a problem, and even then its only that flash might crash.

mcv• 13 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.

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'm pretty good at bringing any machine to its knees.

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't really miss them. I suspect it means there's something on the Internet that I haven't read.

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

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