

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

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?
======
Pyrodogg
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.

~~~
eitland
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 ;-)

------
jason_slack
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.

~~~
eitland
> 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_slack
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.)

------
davidyoung604
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...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
flow/pfhnncnieignceheeojlnpfhkblicdjd?hl=en)

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

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
count/cfokcacd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
count/cfokcacdaonnckdmopmcgeanhkebeaio)

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

------
taude
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.)

------
dBlisse
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

------
ivan_ah
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...](http://gigaom2.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/firefox-tab-groups.png)

------
julianpye
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
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.

------
PencilAndPaper
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.

------
rlt3
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
What browser are you using?

------
mcv
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.

------
josephpmay
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)

------
sys_argv
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](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.

------
chewxy
I used to do 30 - 50 tabs. Now I'm better:
[http://i.imgur.com/xhLmt2A.png](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

------
saosebastiao
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.

------
eitland
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.

------
codequickly
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.

------
true_religion
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.

------
legacy2013
I can have fifty tabs open at any given time. Don't worry about it

------
danielfernandez
We are working on a solution for that, feel free to register if interested
[http://listboard.it/](http://listboard.it/)

------
VierScar
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+

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iSloth
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...

------
sker
I used to have over 200 in Chrome until I discovered OneTab. Now I have 289
tabs in OneTab plus 20 regular tabs.

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

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

