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Comment by blantonl | Hacker News Reader

should remain quick and responsive even under heavy load with hundreds of tabs.

What is the use case where someone would require hundreds of tabs to be open?

Actually, I'd like to revert the question: why would I close tabs? I generally have a few hundreds of them opened, because it works.

Once in a while, I realize that I'm not going to read all of these things and I remove most of them. But I'm glad my Firefox scales up to these use cases.

> why would I close tabs

Anxiety at the "I must read this" a bunch of open tabs can create. Frustration at being unable to find the tab I actually wanted to pull up out of the hundreds available to me. Forgetting something I actually wanted to do because it's buried in an avalanche of windows.

It's kinda funny to watch a colleague who follows that mantra try and find the right tab, sometimes cycling through the 4-5 copies of the same website to find the one with the proper state.

Then I see them do the same thing with terminal tabs/windows and cringe because they can never remember where they are or where their windows are connected to. Given that they have prod access and are connected out there while also developing locally, I'm sure nothing will ever go wrong...

That anxiety does not exist for everyone. I do a thing I call "immutable browsing" with tree-style tabs. I open EVERY link in a new child tab (and I might try to make my browser [0](shameless plug) support new-tab form submission). When I no longer need the parent, I just close it and other tabs move up.

Navigating a tree of your actions or your current context is actually way easier than re-navigating a website. This is especially true with things like API docs where you might open a bunch of things and constantly re-reference them. Saving off trees and supporting a kind of quick-tab-find approach both help here too. This also helps when navigating things like source repositories on GitHub.

We don't tell people to retrieve files externally because their filesystem makes it hard to find things. And we don't really chide people for too many editor tabs open either because we have a navigation panel. Why is a browser any different here?

0 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/

> And we don't really chide people for too many editor tabs open either because we have a navigation panel

> Why is a browser any different here?

"navigation panel" In which case the tabs are effectively duplicated, and not of much use.

> Navigating a tree of your actions or your current context is actually way easier than re-navigating a website.

It really depends on the size of the tree, and the speed of page loads. For example, I keep a local copy of the Python, Go, and Boto documentation. This makes navigation fast and simple, even in the slowest of browsers. Click on a link, loaded (virtually) instantly. Hit the back button on my mouse, loaded instantly. One tab, fast as I could ever ask for.

Ultimately, OP was asking why, I answered. No chiding intended, and only a little judgement - but disorder is incredibly ineffective.

It's not very unlikely for me to have thousands of tabs open in Firefox. It makes the browsing, especially researching, worry free, and with good UI (scrolling tabs, searching in Awesomebar and possible extensions like Tab Center Redux or Tree Style Tabs) it's still easy enough (if not easier) to navigate. I can't stand using Chromium, since after a few hours of browsing you can't navigate the tabs at all, since they are all reduced almost to single pixels.

Tabs are the only data representation of a tree of threads of research on a topic that I’ve found that works for me on the web. Not just spatially (I use Tree Style Tabs), but also over page history and context. Bookmarks are a snapshot in time of the arrangement of tabs, but then I lose the page history when I close the tabs. Once my thread of research solidifies to a point I’m satisfied with, I transcribe to notes I keep in Emacs Org mode. But until my thoughts coalesce adequately, the tabs let me conveniently re-acquire my mind state at the time I left off.

I should probably disclose that my lines of questioning cover very broad and unrelated areas. So a lot of what I research is along the lines of the direct question itself, then zillions of offshoots as I read to learn how to interpret the results as I’m frequently delving into subjects I am not deeply familiar with.

Mind mapping software is starting to get close to what I really want, but there are some rough edges to work out.

I've been wondering this for years. I'm glad Firefox can handle it but I can't help but feel that whatever use case people have shouldn't be the concern of a browser and could be better solved by a tool designed specifically for whatever it is they need.

Firefox w/tree style tabs is a research tool for many of us.

For me, whenever I find myself with 100 tabs, I realize that the problem is the bookmark/tab dichotomy, which can probably be solved with better UI - e.g. a bookmark is a frozen tab with a copy of the last content it showed, and be refreshed automatically or on demand.

This. I use onetab[0] for chrome as an intermediary between bookmarks and tabs. It lets me send all the tabs on the right, left, just the current tab etc to a temporary bookmarks page that I can scroll through and restore from with ease.

[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

I never use bookmarks, at all. Tabs in Firefox work that way just great.

They sort-of-do, but on my machine (an i3 with 8GB memory running Ubuntu), there's threshold that - when crossed - causes it to slow down considerably, and e.g. take about 5 minutes to become interactive after quitting and restarting.

Also, they are way too easy to close accidentally; bookmarks stay, but if you accidentally closed one of your thousand tabs 3 months ago, good luck finding it in history.

I had that issue (slow restart) with earlier versions, but it has been fixed with FF56.

I regularly have >50 tabs open, so I find not difficult to believe somebody could have hundreds of tabs.

They still haven't found the location bar or noticed that it has auto completion.

Porn.

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