Can anyone explain to me the psychology of having 30 tabs open? Why not just bookmark the URLs to an ephemeral folder or something? Having more than 10 tabs open is beyond stressful for me, and honestly I can’t see how having more open would make anyone more productive. Really curious to learn about other workflows and excessive tab use is one I’m morbidly curious about.
How can you do research without going beyond 10 tabs? I typically go horizontal. If i'm trying to solve problem, will middle click on top 5 results etc and go through them until problem solved. Then there is research on various topics that require deep dives into papers, those papers then have citations that require other papers or open up other queries. Then going through email generate various links that I need to see, via google alerts, groups etc, and that doesn't even get started with links generated out of hn/reddit etc. How do you get away with less than 10 tabs? I also use multiple tab managing plugins not just for memory, but for searching between open tabs, and then to manage and collapse entire windows etc...
> I really don’t find any value in having tabs open that aren’t immediately relevant to what I’m doing. 10 seems like the upper limit of focus for me.
It's clear that you do understand the value of preserving tabs that aren't immediately relevant to what you're doing. What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?
I'd understand if there weren't tree-style tabs - you can organize things better in your notes. There are tree-style tabs, though, so you can organize your tabs as you need them, and dropping into a root node is just like dropping into an old thought process.
I'm not the OP, but I almost never have a lot of tabs open, because to me "keep multiple windows each with dozens of tabs open" isn't organization any more than "keep dozens of icons on your desktop" is organization. Some people love that, but I can't find anything that way. And every implementation of tree-style tabs I've seen is -- again, to me, personal preference, YMMV, fill in your favorite disclaimer -- a hot mess. More to the point, it's still "keep multiple windows each with dozens of tabs open wait don't close the window reflexively OH NO YOU CLOSED IT FLAIL FLAIL UNDO HIT THE HISTORY UN-ERASER BUTTON WHEW IT'S BACK". Jesus. No. OMG stop.
Seriously, though, it's just a different way of working. If I want to save a link because I'm genuinely going to need it later, I save the link. More often than not, it just goes in the drafts or annotations for the article that I'm working on at that moment. If not, I save it in GoodLinks, where I get a title and a summary and tagging and syncing across my laptop and desktop and iPad.
I get that I'm an anomaly these days, and that "if you have less than 50 tabs open across three windows you're an amateur" is the norm among technonerds. (That is an actual quote from a friend.) But I am pretty sure the Venn diagram of the all-the-tabs-all-the-time folks I know and the "which tab is it? nope, nope, nope, I'm sure it's here somewhere" folks I know is essentially a perfect circle.
> What's the difference in value between writing tabs in your notes and simply not closing them?
Well, one is indexed, searchable, tagged, and available whenever and wherever I want.
The other is ephemeral and maybe, hopefully I can find it and maybe hopefully I didn’t close it out, and maybe hopefully I remember the name so I can find it in my search history.
Managing tabs with useful info instead of writing them down sounds like a living nightmare.
I drag excess tabs into their own windows to group them by subtopic. Too many tabs makes it too hard to track what all the tabs are. When there are more than 2 windows of 10 tabs I’ll move over to collecting and grouping annotated links in notes.
Bookmarks are like a bin things get thrown into and completely forgotten about. I open a bookmark maybe once a week, and then it's usually for something like accessing the wifi router, or a bookmarklet for adapting a web site.
Tabs are like a TODO list. If something needs to have attention paid to it, and then dismissed, I open a tab for it.
(Of course, I use Firefox & Tree Style Tabs. I find Chrome almost unusable due to its tabbing idiom.)
I’d never be able to use Tabs as todos because I personally use tabs very ephemerally. Closing out of chrome with 3 profiles and 10 tabs each open is nothing to me because I don’t care what tabs are open. If they’re important links then I’ve already written them down in Roam and/or bookmarked them.
question - how do you find anything? Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never used tree tabs, but finding the link you used last week or last month to complete a task sounds like a nightmare without bookmarking it. Contrast this with my workflow, which doesn’t rely on tabs, and I can easily find it in my notes in less than 10 seconds.
Tabs are like temporary bookmarks. I use 1 window per task and usually open links in new tabs. I don't need to do anything to pause a task: simply minimize the window and the tab unloader extension does the work of automatically keeping my RAM from overflowing.
When returning to the task, I just focus the window and instantly have a picture of my previous progression. In case of a computer crash or restart, it's been years since the Firefox session restore function ever failed me. That step in booting up the computer is quite painful though, the browser can take a good 60 seconds to restore the previous session.
When I'm done with a task for good, I just close the window. Workspaces help in keeping my Taskbar and Alt+Tab workflow clean as well. I often have 1000+ tabs "open".
Personally on my phone and work computer I keep legion number of tabs open. On my phone, it’s because using bookmarks is slower than opening the tab menu. Plus the OS will swap out tabs that haven’t been used in a while
With a work perspective in mind I have one window set up per task, I use tree style tabs on Firefox, and at a glance I can see the complete context of a task I’m researching, just from the decision tree the tab branches show. Every potentially interesting link that’ll help me with my task gets opened on a branch below the parent, then reviewed and filtered. This is tremendously useful when it comes to writing up documentation or updating tickets and the like.
