an odd sort of bankruptcy

[dsrtao]

I have never been tempted to declare, as has recently become fashionable, "email bankruptcy". That is the situation when one declares that there is simply too much unhandled email to deal with, and all history will be erased. I have tools to deal with that.

No, I just declared browser tab bankruptcy. With over 300 open tabs in two windows, I found that I had no way to cope. I need better tools.

I'm starting over. I just killed Firefox, started it again, and am now building on a clean slate. First move: opening the six sites that I really do hit over and over and over again as "pinned app tabs". If you have a sufficiently new FF or Chrome, try right-clicking on a tab such as LJ. The Pin as App Tab choice collapses the tab to the site's favored icon and slides it over to the left.

Comments

[seawasp]

300 tabs? How the hell do you even GET to that? I shut off Firefox routinely. I don't think I've ever had more than 10 tabs open at once. And that was because certain links were opening tabs without my noticing.

And *why*?

[dsrtao]

This desktop has been up for 170 days, has 6GB of RAM, and Firefox has Session Manager installed, so whatever tabs were open when I close FF are re-loaded when I open it again. I generally don't close FF -- it crashes or asks to update.

300 open tabs: because I was interested in them and not finished. For example, I had a half-dozen Home Depot pages open because I was looking at sheds to replace the two we lost in Snowpocalypse. The index page to the Washington Post's series on corruption. Many tabs concerning hacking Android devices. Pages on minor research topics that I was planning on revisiting...

[seawasp]

He's MAD, I tell you! MAD!

I shut down my desktop (at work) every day, except on Thursdays when I leave it on for backup. My laptop, I close any application or tab I don't expect to be using in the next, say, half hour.

[dsrtao]

My job requires a middle-of-the-night Internet connection that is up and usable by the time I've finished blinking my eyes enough to read (if not understand) whatever alert has come in.

Similarly, if I rush into the office, I expect my machine to be up and running in the time it takes me to type my password and then take off my coat.

[cellio]

I generally have 40-80. Most of them are short-lived; for example, the way I read LJ is to go down the reading page and launch a new tab for anything with a cut tag or comments that I want to read. Then when I'm done with that pass I'll go through the tabs. (Except that if I run out of time, particularly in the morning before leaving for work, I launch the tabs but don't even try to read them all until I come back later.)

But some of those pages I'll want to leave available for a while, perhaps because I anticipate interesting conversation in comments. (And I'll generally have my most recent couple of entries sitting around in tabs for easy comment-updating.) Then there's all the stuff that's near-permanent, e.g. my Netflix queue. And news articles I've launched recently but not yet finished with, the occasional Google results page, product pages for things I'm thinking about, etc etc.