I take this a bit further. Not only do I have pinned tabs, and other opened tabs that I don’t close until I’ve done with them (turns out normally between ½ and 2 dozen at a time), but I also use different browsers for different tasks.
DuckDuckGo for most browsing and YouTube; Firefox for various technical doc pages; Safari for banking pages and various fora;
I used to close tabs as soon as possible to keep the count and memory usage down, but now I don’t bother…I haven’t noticed major slowdowns.
I do have over 100 tabs open, in several tab groups in my personal Safari profile, plus I have a few Safari profiles with tabs open for the my personal Google account (when I need to connect with Google for something - I stay logged out in my personal profile) and for various other profiles (two for work, one for a charitable board I’m on).
One tab group, for example, is used for the research I’m doing on a new CarPlay receiver I plan to buy this summer from Crutchfield, one tab for each model I’m considering. Once I buy I’ll close the tabs and delete the tab group. I have another group of tabs open with gift ideas for my family as I see them. I suppose I could use a note but I just drag the tab into the group as I find it.
I’m pleased with Safari and I’ll use Firefox if Safari is acting up for some reason, but, unlike others, my tab groups sync well across devices so I can add to a tab group on one device and see it on the others. I really have no desire to try out other browsers.
Interesting Poll Mr. Engst!
I don’t even know what a pinned tab is!
As it’s zero, I couldn’t answer question 2.
Like some others, I personally try to keep as few tabs/windows open as possible, and use Firefox and Orion browsers. I don’t know what kind of ‘Tab Management’ these browsers offer!
My general approach is keeping TTalk in one window in Firefox. Reeder RSS app opens links to stuff I want to read later in that window; I read them when I have time and close them.
In Orion I try to have each window with related topic tabs, usually no more than a few of such windows. That is if I am researching a topic I have the search site in one tab and open links in additional tabs. If research drags on, I open the bookmarks sidebar and create a folder with the open tabs so I can close the window.
Possibly I have Open Browser Window Anxiety… the more open and undealt with tabs, the more guilty I feel.
Currently 28 windows open, an average of 6 or 7 tabs per window. Zero pinned tabs. Closed out 4 or 5 windows the other day or else the numbers would be higher. Lots of bookmarks too, 98% of which I’ve probably forgotten I even had. Queue the ADHD comments…
I rarely, if ever, have more than 6–7 tabs open at any one time, and most of the time it’s maybe 3 or four. I’ve tried pinned tabs, and decided they weren’t useful for me. Same with vertical tabs, tab groups/trees and other management systems. Instead, I have bookmarks in the browser (Vivaldi in my case) for the sites I use most often, a reading list (was Vivaldi but now I copy Markdown links to a file in Obsidian with some assistance from Keyboard Maestro ) for stuff I want to (re)read later, and a clippings folder in Obsidian that I put stuff into for reference using the official clipper extension.
I should add that my bookmarks and reading material have migrated several times between browsers, read-later services and apps. (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Evernote, Pocket, DEVONthink plus several more I’ve forgotten the names of.) And yes, I’ve declared bankruptcy a few times over the years, and gotten a lot better at not hoarding links.
This, except sometimes it takes a control-click and Open in a New Tab, because the web page has been written such that command-click does not open a new tab. Why and how?
That reminds me of students who put all files in their home directories—no subdirectory, ever.
Like @TBTdn and others, I don’t know what pinned tabs are. Does Firefox support them?
I used to be Level 2. Now I’m Level 1. Maybe my technical savvy has gone down or maybe bookmarks are too much work. I don’t care enough. I don’t bother to pin tabs either.
After reading other responses I think I will expand upon my answer. The number of tabs/pinned tabs mentioned before is still true.
I have a large collection of bookmarks that are organized into folders and subfolders. I also have ~20 Favorites on the top bar and some of these contain drop down menues with additional folders and subfolders.
Perhaps this system is not so different from tabs/pinned tabs except that none of them are open until I select them. And then they are closed at the end of the session when I quit Safari–which is usually several times/day.
would be interested in the technical guru comparison of:
-just leaving a favorite site open in a window (in view/minimized/own space)
-keeping it as ‘pinned tab’
-keeping it as a bookmark
are there advantages in terms of memory or battery usage or anything else?
In my case as a retiree, my ‘always open’ is Tidbits Talk. If I closed it each time, and reopened from a bookmark, maybe I’d have to re-login.
Hm, fascinating topic! I suppose this also gets to how people are using their browsers. I know a family member who keeps so many sites open in Chrome (independent worker managing several small business ventures), that only a partial site icon is visible even on a broswer full width on a 16" MBP. Some sites require logins with OTPs that go to colleagues’ phones in distant countries so I am always cautioned against closing any windows when handling the MBP as the family IT guy.
Similarly, I have about 8 folders in the favourites bar of older bookmarks (which rarely get used), but there’s around 50 sites in Safari’s Top Sites/Favourites page which is my primary way of getting to web sites. Open a page, do stuff, close a page. It’s extremely rare (every few months) I would use any tabs and typically only if I’m comparing like-for-like products when the site doesn’t have a compare option.
@ddmiller - please do a thread on your carplay receiver findings when you’ve worked them out - I’m in the market.
If you do this, the site remains loaded in memory and remains active. If it’s a plain page (like a hand-made page), this probably doesn’t matter, but if there are any scripts (including those that insert ads and the like), they will continue to run, potentially wasting CPU power and network bandwidth.
Also note that most modern browsers will spawn separate threads or processes for each tab. Which can be a big deal, if you have a lot of them and they all are running scripts of some kind.
Unfortunately I don’t know much about what this actually is. If it’s the same as a normal tab that auto-opens at startup, then see above.
I do know that Firefox has the concept of a tab that exists, but is not loaded. For instance, if you quit the app, restart it and then restore the previous session, it will create all the tabs from the previous session, but it will only load each tab’s content when you make it visible for the first time.
I don’t know if pinned tabs work this way when you restart the browser (it’s logical, but I don’t know for sure) or if they work like normal tabs, which start running as soon as they are created.
A bookmark uses no resources until you click on it. It’s just a URL with a name and maybe some other metadata. You can create thousands of bookmarks and they will use almost no system resources until you click on one (loading that URL into a tab).
This depends entirely on the site.
Most web sites will push a cookie to you, containing a token that represents your login session. So closing and restarting the browser will generally not require a re-login.
But some sites use cookies that expire quickly (maybe after only and hour or so) for extra security (so someone else sitting down won’t get access to your session), and if you configure your browser to block (or not save) cookies, that will also prevent automatic re-login.
I’ve found that most social/blogging sites (including Google, Facebook and TidBITS) use cookies that stick around for a long time, or until you explicitly log-out. But banking and corporate-access sites typically auto-expire a session after a few minutes of inactivity, which will easily expire if you close the tab and don’t quickly re-open its URL.
I remember Omniweb. It was, I believe, the first browser to use side tabs (either a list or thumbnails. I preferred the thumbnails, but when I got too many tabs, reverted to the list). It also had a wonderful feature, called Workspaces, where you could group tabs based on purpose. Eventually, it was abandoned, but Firefox gained an extension that allowed side tabs, called Tree-style Tabs, and I switched to that. Later, Edge came out with side tabs, and switched again. I believe I started pinning tabs in earnest then. I put my email and messaging sites in pinned tabs. I don’t like having multiple applications open, so prefer web apps, and pinning works.
When Arc came out, with its own version of Workspaces, I jumped on it. I have four workspaces there, with ones for each of my interests, plus work workspaces. That said, when they announced they were abandoning Arc, I jumped ship to Zen Browser, and that is where I currently am. I tried Firefox for a few days, but I like how Arc/Zen do pinned tabs, etc.
I try to keep the number of tabs to less than the height of my screen. That is the limit I’m willing to suffer with. But I can end up with dozens of tabs open on a busy day. Maybe it’s just my ADHD. I don’t know. ;-)
[Edited to remove my silly confusion with processes from the Arq backup application. ]
I thought I read somewhere that Arc’s pinned tabs were somehow “quieted”–that they didn’t consume as many resources as the one currently being viewed. I’m thinking that is not correct, based on what I’ve read here, and the lack of any corroborating evidence I could find on the Arc help pages (or elsewhere).
So that made me curious about how many resources my six workspaces and 70+ pinned tabs (total) were consuming on my MBP M1 with 16GB of memory. According to Activity Monitor, the main Arc process is currently consuming 784MB of RAM, has 64 threads, and has opened 1,439 ports.
I’m glad to read here that I’m not the only person for whom tabs don’t really serve much of a useful purpose. I feel as though tabs are just another to-do list of which I already have too many. “Pinned tabs” sound like a nightmare in two words.
) for stuff I want to (re)read later, and a clippings folder in Obsidian that I put stuff into for reference using the official clipper extension.
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