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By Robert Nagle

[poll=32]

Bonus Question: What does your answer indicate about your style of working and reading? (Leave answer in comment section)


firefox tab dialog

(By the way, I encounter this kind of firefox dialog at least once every single day). There was one time I had 170 tabs open in a single browser window. I had little clue (although I did notice that pressing the arrow key to switch tabs was taking an awful long time to get to the right one!) Often these tabs are links I opened with the intent to read, but never did. Or maybe I did read them with the intent to bookmark them with delicious, but never did. Or maybe a tab shows a dynamically loaded page in a certain state which I want to leave that way for reference (sometimes it will contain my comment –half-written, but never actually finished or submitted to the appropriate weblog). Sometimes I have a thread I wish to keep an eye on for the next hour or so, but don’t want to clutter my Bookmarks folder with it. In fact, there are dangers to keeping a large number of tabs open all at once: browser crash! Luckily firefox remembers tabs you had happen in such a case. Also, Ctl + Shift + D lets you create a new bookmark folder for all the tabs in the current browser window. Unfortunately I have a few dozen firefox favorite folders with descriptive names such as [Folder Name], [Folder Name], [Folder Name], [Folder Name], [Folder Name]2, [Folder Name] blog, [Folder Name], [Folder Name] movies.

Isn’t it strange how we’ve come to rely on having multiple tabs open to do our reading and research on the web? The problem comes when trying to remember which tab contained the relevant information (Lifehacker has tips on using keystroke shortcuts to switch between tabs). RSS readers partially alleviate the problem, but after a while even that can become heavy. My Netvibes RSS page contains 10 different subject tabs and about 10,000 posts –imagine how much RAM that sucks up! My bloglines account has too many feeds now to be of use to me any more except as reference. In fact, I have started the pernicious habit of keeping several tabs open for bloglines, and that doesn’t even include the multiple new tabs I open from bloglines about posts I wish to read on the actual website (to read comments, for example).

There is no comparison between the experience of having multiple tabs open in a browser and reading a book or ebook. Sure, once in a while, you’ll have several books sprawled out on your bed or desk –but then again, you rarely have to wait for a page on a book to “load.”

 
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