14 votes

Close your open tabs - Sometimes, information overload has its limits

18 comments

  1. [3]
    Micycle_the_Bichael
    Link
    Finally!!! Someone on my side. My partner and my coworkers all have multiple windows with like 20 tabs each on them open and claim they need them all. If I have more than like, 5 tabs open that...

    Finally!!! Someone on my side. My partner and my coworkers all have multiple windows with like 20 tabs each on them open and claim they need them all. If I have more than like, 5 tabs open that aren’t in use I feel overwhelmed. Like if I’m doing a task that requires a lot of research or tabs I can deal with that, but as soon as they’re not useful anymore they need to be culled or I will lose my fucking mind. Idk why it gives me so much anxiety.m, but I just will feel immediately overwhelmed and either close out of all but 2 tabs or shut down.

    12 votes
    1. [2]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. Death
        Link Parent
        My number of tabs grows into the tens or twenties as I dig further and further into my code until, at some point I literally have the same tabs or searches open multiple times. And it actually...

        My number of tabs grows into the tens or twenties as I dig further and further into my code until, at some point I literally have the same tabs or searches open multiple times. And it actually kind of upsets me whenever I notice and start having to close a bunch of them, so I've decided to try out Tab Wrangler, from the article, and am hoping it'll improve my worklfow a little bit.

    2. Parliament
      (edited )
      Link Parent
      Amen to this. I rarely get above 10 and always start over each day on my work computer. For the laptop at home that runs 24/7, I never leave open more than 5 tabs. My mom is the exact opposite....

      Amen to this. I rarely get above 10 and always start over each day on my work computer. For the laptop at home that runs 24/7, I never leave open more than 5 tabs.

      My mom is the exact opposite. She'll have so many tabs up that you can't even view the icon indicating what website it represents - you have to click the tab to see what it is. I'm pretty sure this is why she gets suckered into how she justifies buying a new laptop from Apple every year or so because she complains about the old one getting too slow. I have 3 MBPs from 2009-2012, and they've all continued working fine (albeit with hardware upgrades) while she's gone through a half dozen or more new purchases.

      And now that I'm ranting about her, this is the woman who used to accuse me of crippling our family desktop computer by installing games (namely Age of Empires). My siblings and I know the real truth though - she is and always has been a digital hoarder.

      5 votes
  2. [4]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. [2]
      pvik
      Link Parent
      I agree with you mostly. However, the problem is a lot of times when I am reading/processing through a single tab, it would lead me to open up multiple tabs, which I would like to process shortly...

      I agree with you mostly.
      However, the problem is a lot of times when I am reading/processing through a single tab, it would lead me to open up multiple tabs, which I would like to process shortly after processing the current tab.
      I would also like to keep the parent tab open, while processing through the children tab, because I may have to go back to it to refer something.
      And this is where the analogy to a stack falls flat.

      I see the open tabs more as a tree and as /u/PetitPrince mentioned above, I really like TreeStyleTabs to maintain the structure of the tabs, reduces a little more of mental overhead as you're processing through the tabs.

      However, the article is directed more towards people who have a few hundred tabs open at any given time!

      1 vote
      1. [2]
        Comment deleted by author
        Link Parent
        1. pvik
          Link Parent
          Sorry If my post came off as trying to contradict how your brain works. My reply was more of how my own mental model deviates from yours. A more correct statement would've been:

          Sorry If my post came off as trying to contradict how your brain works.
          My reply was more of how my own mental model deviates from yours.

          A more correct statement would've been:

          And this is where the analogy to a stack falls flat for me.

          1 vote
    2. unknown user
      Link Parent
      The amount of times I muttered "goddammit" to myself because I clicked back on the wrong tab due to a similar approach to in-the-moment tab-keeping is in the hundreds. Many of those came seconds...

      The amount of times I muttered "goddammit" to myself because I clicked back on the wrong tab due to a similar approach to in-the-moment tab-keeping is in the hundreds. Many of those came seconds apart.

      As a sidenote, I'm sure people reading these comments would appreciate any sort of illumination of the subject better than being called out for defaults they didn't choose. "Make the old model obsolete" and all that.

  3. [4]
    PetitPrince
    (edited )
    Link
    Have you heard of our Lord and Savior Tree Style Tabs?

    The tabs bleed into one other, their icons shrinking in width and slowly becoming unclickable.

    Have you heard of our Lord and Savior Tree Style Tabs?

    8 votes
    1. [3]
      pvik
      Link Parent
      Tree Style Tabs make managing a bunch of tabs so much easier! It's one of the first things I install if I am setting up firefox. It's also great that it auto-collapses tabs if you have a lot of...

      Tree Style Tabs make managing a bunch of tabs so much easier! It's one of the first things I install if I am setting up firefox.
      It's also great that it auto-collapses tabs if you have a lot of them open.
      (Also, being able to close the parent tba and have all the children tabs close along with it is great)

      For anyone wondering this is what my browser looks like with TST.

      2 votes
      1. [2]
        Soptik
        Link Parent
        Would you mind sharing your userchrome? It looks really good :)

        Would you mind sharing your userchrome? It looks really good :)

        1 vote
        1. pvik
          Link Parent
          Sure, I had posted this to /r/unixporn a while back. That post still has all the details here.

          Sure, I had posted this to /r/unixporn a while back.
          That post still has all the details here.

          2 votes
  4. unknown user
    Link
    I've been getting into that sorta mental territory for the last few years. My laptop has limited RAM that I can't afford to upgrade any further at the moment. It's not a little, but under the...

    I've been getting into that sorta mental territory for the last few years.

    My laptop has limited RAM that I can't afford to upgrade any further at the moment. It's not a little, but under the stress of a couple of dozens of active tabs (or about a hundred passive, text-mostly ones) there is a noticable strain in performance.

    Ever since I started noticing how many tabs I have open, I started piling them down to a bookmark folder called "sort out". It currently has 200+ pages of wildly-varied content that I haven't gotten to decluttering yet. That, compounded with the previous inbox folder called "Reading" (300+), shows that sometimes, you can be excessive with things that aren't readily tangible.

    And I still have a separate passive window with 7 tabs on stand-by.

    2 votes
  5. MimicSquid
    Link
    I have a small set of pinned tabs in my work browser: email, online file manager, calendar, project/task manager, bookkeeping website. Everything else is only open until I'm done reading the page...

    I have a small set of pinned tabs in my work browser: email, online file manager, calendar, project/task manager, bookkeeping website. Everything else is only open until I'm done reading the page or while I need to refer to the document. What do you need so many tabs for? You can only read one at a time.

    1 vote
  6. mrbig
    Link
    I use Tab Wrangler on Chrome to automatically archive my unused tabs (you can restore than if needed. But I never do). There are many similar extensions/addons. To be honest, this is not such a...

    I use Tab Wrangler on Chrome to automatically archive my unused tabs (you can restore than if needed. But I never do). There are many similar extensions/addons. To be honest, this is not such a hard problem to solve.

  7. [5]
    ThiccPad
    Link
    Say whatever you want but i am not letting go of my 100+ nsfw tabs

    Say whatever you want but i am not letting go of my 100+ nsfw tabs

    1 vote
    1. [3]
      Whom
      Link Parent
      Save your nsfw material locally! The extra options for viewing as well as the assurance that it won't be taken down makes it much better. Plus if you're a nerd, you can organize it and it's fun.

      Save your nsfw material locally!

      The extra options for viewing as well as the assurance that it won't be taken down makes it much better. Plus if you're a nerd, you can organize it and it's fun.

      5 votes
      1. [3]
        Comment deleted by author
        Link Parent
        1. [2]
          unknown user
          Link Parent
          ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) ...apparently, Lenny Face don't work on them Tildes. On my screen, It looks more like a teenager getting access to an archive of erotica for the first time.

          ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

          ...apparently, Lenny Face don't work on them Tildes. On my screen, It looks more like a teenager getting access to an archive of erotica for the first time.

          1. Kuromantis
            Link Parent
            In my (mobile) screen it looks perfectly fine, maybe with slightly clipped eyebrows.

            In my (mobile) screen it looks perfectly fine, maybe with slightly clipped eyebrows.

            1 vote
    2. unknown user
      Link Parent
      You can bookmark them all into a separate folder and either open them all at once or one by one whenever you find yourself in need.

      You can bookmark them all into a separate folder and either open them all at once or one by one whenever you find yourself in need.

      4 votes