Tabs! Tabs! Everywhere!

[paraka]

I kind of stopped reading my LJ about halfway through the month of December. I've gone back as far as my flist will let me and am making my way forward. So if you get a comment from me for a post from 2 weeks ago, that's why.

Since I'm catching up, I only just saw this post by seperis on how many tabs people generally have open at a time. I was kind of surprised to see "Why In the Name of God: 51 - 99" and "Screenshots or It Didn't Happen: 100+ " because for me, 51-99 means "Yay! I've gotten rid of a ton of tabs!" My average amount of tabs is somewhere around 120-180 tabs open (generally between 2, sometimes 3 windows). It always takes me like 2 minutes to scroll through all the tabs I have open.

...Is that not normal? Because I totally thought it was. Hell, even at work, where I try my best to not have very many tabs open, I have 35 open. So, I'd like to do my own poll to see how my flist does:

[Poll #1322798]

It's funny, when I first got into fandom (when I was still using IE) I never used to have more than, oh, say 5 windows open (although, I think it was more like 2). I used to make fun of raxhel for having 20 windows open all the time. Then when we moved to China, we were sharing an internet connection between the two of us, so I'd go on stints and open a ton of windows so I'd always have fic available. I was still using IE at the time, and would get like 50 window open. I *hated* Windows automatic updates, because they'd shut my computer down while I was sleeping (I turn my computer off maybe a dozen times a year the rest of the time it just goes into hibernation) and I'd lose all my windows. Then I found Firefox.

I think before too, I wasn't getting as much fic off of LJ, I'd just go searching for fic off archives, rec lists or yes, sometimes LJ whenever I wanted to read. I'd only ever pull up one fic at a time. Now though, there's so much fic on my flist that I am constantly opening new tabs. There's more fic than I could ever possibly read out there. In fact, I started a spreadsheet with links to all the fics I found interesting enough to read. And that's not even mentioning all the meta and rec lists and vidding links I pull up as well. I can't imagine going back to just having a few windows open at a time.

Of course, all this does explain why Firefox alone uses around 400MBs of my memory on a good day.

Comments

[aurora]

Oh man, I get twitchy when I have more than 10 tabs for longer than a few hours. (And that's WITH Firefox' Faviconize add-on.) When I read my flist, I do tend to open up 50+ because I scroll down/up my friends page and open every entry I want to read/comment on in a separate tab.

I do often open a new window when I'm reading my message center, because I open every relevant message in a new tab too.

As for fic: I really haven't read all that much these last few months, and save all the things I want to read on a 'to do' textfile on my desktop.

Oh, and about reading your flist when you've been gone for a while: don't know if you saw this, but LJ introduced the View Friends Page by Date feature. It's pretty handy.

[paraka]

Oh man, for some reason, I thought you were one of the people on my flist that had 20+ tabs open at a time. I think I must have been in some sort of denial land to think having 100+ tabs open was normal :P

As for fic: I really haven't read all that much these last few months, and save all the things I want to read on a 'to do' textfile on my desktop.
Out of curiosity, when you add things to your to do list, do you just add the link? Or do you add a description of why you wanted to read it?
I think I could avoid a lot of my tabs if I was willing to save things without an explanation of why I want to go back to it but if I do that, I'll never go back and read the links.
Hell, I hardly ever manage to get through anything on my To-Read list, and there are descriptions there.

[aurora]

I thought you were one of the people on my flist that had 20+ tabs open at a time. I
I used to do that last year or so, but then it got on my nerves. Now I'm trying to pace myself a bit.

Out of curiosity, when you add things to your to do list, do you just add the link? Or do you add a description of why you wanted to read it?
Just the link and the wordcount. Most of the time, it's already been recced by a few people whose judgment I trust. And if I don't like it (when I finally get around to reading it), I just close the tab.

[paraka]

I used to do that last year or so, but then it got on my nerves. Now I'm trying to pace myself a bit.
Oh good, I'd hate to think I had made that up. I think you had done a screen cap of your tabs once, that's where I got the idea...

Most of the time, it's already been recced by a few people whose judgment I trust. And if I don't like it (when I finally get around to reading it), I just close the tab.
See, I think my problem is that I'm a moody reader. It could be a totally awesome amazing fic, but if I'm just not in the mood for it that day, then I'm not going to enjoy it properly and vice versa (it could be a bad fic, but if I'm in the mood for it, I'll like it anyways).

[paraka]

Oh! And thank you for the by date thing. I remember the announcement, but I never really looked into it. Have you used it before? Can you still filter? Because I'm currently at skip 300 on my super-ultra-nothing-but-people filter, if I have to actually go through all the comms as well, I'll be at about skip 5000 :S

[aurora]

Have you used it before?
I haven't taken any huge breaks from my flist since they introduced it, but I did test it and it seems to work. \o/

I think you could filter yeah...let me look, it was somewhere in the comments of the announcement post: here.

[paraka]

I've gone through some of my flist using these links and OMG is it ever awesome! I'm totally going to have to do it this way from now on. Thanks so much for the suggestion!