I have tons of tabs open at all times. In addition I have lots of windows open, in lots of virtual desktops, each window with a number of open tabs. That is, among other reasons, because I usually go back to office after hours and walk through my non-work-related forums and the like. I have long since given up keeping interesting stuff in bookmarks, the number of bookmarks are just too vast. And I don't remember enough of the right keywords to find the interesting page again later.
There was, for example, a page about combining a Git version control setup with a particular way of managing a web site. Somebody on a mailing list provided a link to that page some ten months ago. I used it back then, but recently I wanted to re-visit the page to check something. I searched all combinations of keywords I could think of but could never find the right page via the Famous Web Search Engine. But then I found it in a tab in one of my Firefox windows in one of my 18 virtual desktops.. case solved!
I need all those desktops, windows and tabs bcause I use my main computer for everything. I work on some 30 different work packages, which means that for longer or shorter periods I must leave a work package behind for hours, days, weeks or months, and revisit later. As I have carefully opened windows and tabs with all the info I need (including local files opened in a browser, but anyway I use the same principle with XEmacs) I don't wish to shut all of that down because I'm about to work on something else. No, I keep it all in tabs. And windows. And desktops. The main problem I had for a while was that X-Windows would run out of file descriptors, apparently it can only hold 255 open windows at the time. Fortunately that count does not include tabs inside each window. or even some windows on the side - I don't understand that particular aspect that well - but I have occasionally ran into the annoying problem of not being able to open more windows (did I mention the scores of open xterm terminal windows.. maybe I didn't).
So, when I switch work packages (or, after hours, visit some interesting forum or hobby project of mine) I have it all available, somewhere.
Well, Firefox eats memory. It seems to be much better in its 5.x incarnation than in 3.5, not to mention the last of the 2.x versions, but I still found it best to upgrade the computer to 16GB RAM. Occasionally Firefox will run out anyway, or xulrunner (mystical part of modern Firefox software) will go insane. Then it will either kill itself, or I have to kill it. And here's where a Firefox feature comes in handy: When I restart Firefox it'll open up all those windows and all those tabs, and I'm back where I was, minus the excessive memory footprint that caused it to crash, or to have to be killed.
As for this forum - when I read it I open a new window or tab for the "What's New" search, then I open a new tab for each thread I want to read. Then I read the threads and close them as I'm done with them, until only the 'search' tab/window remains. If that took some time then I'll click "What's new" again and read any updates, if not, I'll click "mark forums read" and I'm done (and those throw-away tabs gone as well). That works nicely.
Chromium (a variant of Chrome) is in many ways much better than Firefox, particularly in that as you open windows you're actually starting new processes. So a bad-behaving flash window, for example, can't destroy or stop everything else. But on the other hand Chromium doesn't recover all tabs and windows if it's forced down (it doesn't kill itself regularly the way Firefox does though). So in practice I use both Firefox, Chromium, Konquerer, and sometimes Opera and another one at the same time. And I even run Firefox on different accounts at the same time (it's easy to combine users in the same windows when on Linux), due to Firefox' annoying habit of insisting to use only a single instance - you can't start another instance as the same user, and sometimes I wish to keep things separate. E.g. just being able to do searches in the FWSE in an instance where I'm _not_ logged in to gmail. They don't need to record my searches.
So, how many tabs do I currently have open in total? No idea, I simply can't count them. :mrgreen:
-Tor
