Tab soup

September 13, 2007 on 1:09 am | In personal |

I’m an inveterate RSS consumer, and I use the NetNewsWire+Firefox work-flow. I am also one of those people who can’t stand to have a message (in a news reader, an e-mail client, etc) marked as unread, so I tend to pop open a new tab for every new article, assuming I don’t have time to read it immediately. I almost never have time to read things immediately.

The net result tends to be a cyclical model where the number of open tabs builds over the span of the work week, starting of a low around 10 or 20 and ending somewhere around 100. Anything beyond 100 tends to put me into a danger area where Firefox will slow to a crawl, explode, etc. Over the weekend I go through a purge process, using some of that downtime (and the much lower velocity of incoming news articles) to read my way through most of my backlog.

Right now, I have 154 tabs open. That is a personal record and well outside of tolerances. Firefox may blow at any second. I have no time to get this down to a reasonable level between now and Friday, so I think I have no choice but to ride this thing out.

3 Comments »

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  1. Very interesting workflow. How do you persist and reactivate these tabs across browser restarts?

    Comment by Edwin Khodabakchian — September 13, 2007 #

  2. Good question. The workflow is based on an assumption that I will never restart the browser. All of my browsing happens on my MacBook Pro, so I always have the machine with my Firefox session with me wherever I go.

    Of course, restarts happen (either due to a crash or because I want to activate a new version of an Add On), so I use Tab Mix Plus to persist my session state in those cases. Tab Mix Plus provides a more robust session manager than the browser built-in, including resuming tabs to their last scroll position.

    It also adds the ability to customize the visual presentation of tabs to assist my heavy consumption. With those tweaks, I can see around 55 tabs in the tab bar before they scroll off the screen, much more than the 32 I get with the default minimum horizontal width of a tab.

    There have been rare occasions where Tab Mix Plus failed to save my session state, so when I get a really huge number of tabs open, I will periodically save them all to a bookmark folder.

    Comment by Ryan Breen — September 13, 2007 #

  3. You could bookmark them all as one then come back to them later. of course, inevitably, you would do this many times then have a bunch of folder bookmarks of stuff to come back to that you never would. Not much different than them being marked unread in the first place :)

    Comment by Brian — October 2, 2007 #

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