Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajpatel | Hacker News Reader

People that do this are NUTS. Ever heard of Evernote, Read It Later, or the plethora of websites that exist for this very reason? Man up and shell out a few bucks...there is NO reason you should have more than 10-12 tabs open on a regular, consistent basis...

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There are a lot of different ways to use different tools, because there are a lot of different people who think and organize differently. Yours is not the only way that people manage information in their head, but I'm sure it works great for you.

A couple scenarios for how I get a lot of tabs open:

- <ahem> Hacker News. Scan down the page, and for each interesting article, middle click the article and the comments link. Work your way through the tabs (maybe going back and forth between "work" and HN).

- Search. Middle click the most promising results. Work your way through the tabs, possibly bookmarking something that you know you'll want again.

ReadItLater or any other temporary archive seems like procedural overkill for something you intend to come back to in a few minutes to half an hour.

Bookmarking the same sort of material seems inappropriate since most of what's in those tabs isn't yet determined to be bookmarkworthy.

I didn't dream this up, it's just how I naturally organize my short term browser use. I think "short term" is the important phrase there.

Finally, there's a middle ground between lots of tabs and ReadItLater. Chrome has a nice extension called Session Buddy, that records the tabs in your current session. Hit the button and another tab (ironically) opens, showing your current and recent sessions. Now close as many tabs as you like, get back on task, and gradually work your way through the sites listed on the session buddy tab.

Lots of ways to do everything. I really don't think I'm nuts for doing it this way.

Yup. I tend to do this with Google News. I scan through it, clear everything down to zero, and open any interesting stories in tabs, and then work through them.

I also have tabs open for multiple build servers, internal wiki pages for the work I'm doing, and some reference pages for the actual coding I'm doing.

A few minutes or half an hour are different...this guy has upwards of 500 tabs - you can't come back to that in a few minutes or half an hour...

I said 10-12 tabs consistently - and by that I mean app tabs that remain open. The rest should be opened for research as needed AND THEN CLOSED WHEN FINISHED. For everything else that you need to consistently check updates on, you need to find a way to turn it into an RSS feed or Twitter feed or whatever that feeds into an existing tab for an app you already have open (e.g. Google Reader or your social media aggregator of choice).

This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once. You would be overwhelmed by 500 tabs of information...that's why most of us have 1 site where all our information aggregates and 1 email address where the rest forward and 1 cell phone rather than 5-6, etc. I'm saying that people that do this type of EXTREME tab browsing are inherently disorganized and lack focus and attention to anything they do.

Yeah, downvote it to hell, I really don't mind. If you do this on a regular basis though, I'd love to hear from you and how you feel about whether you are an organized individual and one who adequately focuses on the things that are important to you.

I tend to have about 100 tabs open in my web browser. Of those, 10-15 are for pages that I always have open, ~50 are for pages that are relatively temporary (as in a few weeks), and another ~25 for more temporary (days), and then up to 50 for very temporary (like when I'm browsing through hacker news and so on).

I would say that I am relatively organized, but apparently in another way than you are. As an example of how I organize my tabs, I have 8 tabs open with minecraftwiki/forum, 5 imdb tabs with bad '50s horror flicks for a movie night I'm planning, 4 tabs with articles about an emacs customization that I'm planning, 10 tabs with doxygen generated documentation for a C++ project I'm doing, 6 tabs have arduino documentation for a hardware project I'm halfway through, a few appdb.winehq pages for games I have problems running, some wiki-pages with books I'm thinking about buying, and a few with articles I'm thinking about sharing with my friends. This is in 3 windows on 2 virtual desktops (on my main machine, I have another 20 tabs open on my laptop).

I don't get "[1]00 tabs of information", I get perhaps 10 different topics that I can choose between, and when I have done that I can just scroll over the group of tabs that make up a topic to get a quick overview. After this, I'm usually synced up with what I was thinking the last time I was working with the project.

Btw, I use 2 rss readers (google reader and akregator), the akregator one for things I shouldn't read while working. I have 2 cell phones. I also have 3 email endpoints, one for studies, one for personal mail and one for work.

There is nothing inherently disorganized about this (IMO), since it gives me a very clear distinction between my different tasks.

I prob dont get up to 100 tabs. but I do like to open different browser instances, one for mail, fb, twitter, etc. one with a bunch of news articles (and of course, for evert hn article, the comments) one for whatever prog language im currently in. which is usually thw biggest, that contains multiple how-tos, searches for commands, at least 10 tabs from the 'official' site, and its this one that needs to stay open for days/weeks as im working on a project and constantly refrencing info i previously knew id need. also, each browaer instance is usuaaly in a doff workspace, to keep work and play seperate.

"This is not "my" way - this is the way of the human brain. You can't do that many things at once and you can't focus on that many things at once."

Exactly. So he offloads that memory into tabs. If the browser will handle it, it's as good as file cabinets, in/out trays, ReadItLater, or tall yellow stacks of National Geographic.

+1 for sixtofour's tip on Session Buddy,[1] which looks nice.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/edacconmaakjimmfgn...

I go offline for days at a time. First, open every webpage and document I think I'll need to finish The Big Project. Then disconnect and work. Stay offline* until the project is done. If projects are overlapping, hitting 300 tabs is easy.

I also have several gigs of saved PDF and HTML files, but one-off information goes in a tab.

What good do your "online utilities" do for someone with inconsistent internet?

* Maybe every three hours I'll connect for a few seconds to check for voice/email.

Right. And who in his right mind would use an ancient emacs setup if you just need to pay a few bugs and get a _really nice IDE_, eh?

Or - why would anyone have a problem storing a huge collection of records/cds if you just need to throw a couple of bucks at Apple to get it on your iOS device?

People are sick. Let's call them out.

(Careful, this post might be mocking and contain a good amount of sarcasm)

As long as there isn't a moral or ethical issue at hand (and here there clearly isn't), software should adapt to the user, not the other way round.

I agree, anyone who claims they need so many tabs open is flat out lying, you can't possibly be using them all. Bookmarks exist for a reason, and you can do a lot with them. In Firefox there are keywords you can set up as well as Awesomebar modifiers that allow you to do a lot of powerful things with the bookmarks system all without having to have tons of tabs in memory. http://kb.mozillazine.org/Location_Bar_search#Location_Bar_s...

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