Hacker News Reader

Comment by k3n | Hacker News Reader

There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open, and that is surely a smell for inefficiency. For any given task, 5 tabs is probably reaching the upper limit on what's actually _required_, with around 10 being the upper limit.

Granted, you could have multiple tasks ongoing in parallel, but are you really working in parallel at that point? If not, save the tabs and return to them later. I really doubt you are visiting all 100 tabs on a regular basis so as to merit they stay open at all times.

I've seen way too many people use their browser as a sort of todo app, by virtue of "I'll open a tab for this so I don't forget to do it later" -- hell, I do this too -- but that's not at all the intended usage of a browser, and so naturally, it sucks at it.

View on HN

What can I say? It worked for me. I was doing a lot of research and things I'd read would lead to more searches of tangential topics that I'd want to revisit in the coming hours. This method of working fit my mental model and I was flitting between tabs as necessary, not just opening them up with the hope that I'd read them sometime.

Also, if I need to click on a whole bunch of links that I know I'm immediately going to evaluate, it's faster and easier to click on 50 links in one go than to click, evaluate, close, find my old position, click, evaluate ...! I'm someone that likes to batch tasks because I find it more efficient.

Opening that many tabs isn't something I do every day. I've only got seven open right now, which is normal-ish, but sometimes I need it and I know I'll need it again soon.

(On a side note, I can't really figure out why but I hate the term smell but it triggers a visceral reaction and wish it'd die a horrible death!)

You don't open 100 apps on your computer and then complain about memory usage. Running 100 tabs at the same time, all of which may be running live JS processes, is about the same. It's a perfectly valid usage pattern but it's also going to eat a lot of memory. It's not like driving with your parking brake on, but it's like loading your car up with its maximum passenger capacity and then complaining that it's accelerating more slowly.

I've done it before with earlier versions of Firefox on a system with fewer resources that yielded a substantially lower memory footprint.

It is very possible to do a lot with less memory.

It's possible, but there are always competing goals - speed, security, reliability, features, memory usage. When capacity on one is growing quickly (and cheaply), it's not surprising it doesn't get the same priority as some of the others. In particular, I'm not sure how many extra users you'd get by reducing memory footprint versus adding features.

But this has been discussed ad nauseam, and it's unproductive to keep complaining about it. The fact should be obvious, at least by now, that sandboxing uses more resources. If you're fine with that, great! If not, do something to fix it or use a different browser.

This sounds like it was possibly some time ago. If so, don't discount the effect of having less resource-intensive sites too.

Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow.

I do understand at times you want to open many more than that for a limited time, but those situations (at least in my experience) are typically very short-lived and don't represent my ordinary common usage pattern.

[and yes, smell is supposed to invoke that reaction! a code "smell", or process "smell", etc. is something that stinks, and it should disgust you, and you should work to clean up the 'smell' ASAP! :)]

> Originally you explained the problem as if you always had 100+ tabs open, but now it sounds like an occasional occurrence. I was mainly speaking to if you always had 100+ open -- as if that was your normal workflow.

... because if you do it only occasionally it uses less memory? :-/

> [and yes, smell is supposed to invoke that reaction! a code "smell", or process "smell", etc. is something that stinks, and it should disgust you, and you should work to clean up the 'smell' ASAP! :)]

Yes, Mother.

Guess what? Your preferred workflow is just as smelly. Clean it up.

Tabs have replaced bookmarks as the means of saving stuff for later. Why is that? Because bookmarks require a lot more mental effort to organize and take more effort to delete when you're done with them. Bookmarks also take a lot longer to load than a tab (which is usually loaded already).

Very good point, and touches on a potential piece I'd like to write sometime. Used to, bookmarks were like a collection of good books -- easily filed away, organized, and still as good when you opened them a year later as when you last touched them.

But not anymore. They change. There's tons of them. And organization sucks, though FF isn't as bad as Chrome and IE, but the general paradigm of shortcuts needs to be re-evaluated. I don't like web-based services (for many reasons), and I've yet to find a fitting extension that works for me.

So yeah, I can see how this usage pattern has arisen, but I think the answer is ultimately up to innovation that has sadly yet to occur.

I agree. I regularly have hundreds of tabs open in Chrome, and while I do regularly save things to Chrome bookmarks, I treat it more as a place where I can put something that I won't look at again but there's a 1% chance I'll desperately need to find it at some point in the future and won't be able to find it by Googling.

Also interesting that Chrome never added an option to sync bookmarks to the Google Bookmarks web service.

If the majority of people are using a tool in a particular way, it becomes the tool's responsibility to meet that need effectively. Just because you didn't anticipate the ways that real people would use your technology doesn't mean you get assuage responsibility for its shortcomings because you didn't foresee them.

I'd argue that a majority of users aren't running with 100+ tabs open, though.

I regularly maintain over 250 tabs, and use multiple workspaces to manage a very specific and highly efficient workflow. It works incredibly well for me.

I agree it sounds a bit excessive (though I go up to 50 tabs myself often enough), but how is you telling him off about how his way of tab-usage is inefficient in itself in any way relevant to a discussion about browsers memory usage??

I hope you didn't really try to say "there's nothing wrong with browsers' memory usage, as long as you don't stress them too much" ? :) :)

I wish browsers would ditch tabs and switch to buffers. Emacs users know just how darn useful it is to keep 500 buffers open, each with fuzzy completion so you can switch to exactly what you want.

> There's no way you could effectively work with 100 tabs open

I'm sure there's no way you could effectively work that way, but imagining that what's true for you is true for everyone is a massive smell for ignorance of other workflow styles and cognitive abilities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com