Too many tabs?

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Do you reckon I may have too many tabs open?

Too many tabs.png (446.56 KiB) Viewed 5333 times

Firefox has already peaked over 2000 MB, but not enough to cause a memory allocation failure and crash yet. (Possibly if it were to hit 2048 MB.)

Much of it is wiki work that's spiralling out of control again — I don't have the time to cover the amount of topics that I'm ending up involved with. (Sometimes I just close all the tabs and pretend I never saw them.)

Thankfully when I restart it, wiki pages in the middle of being edited seem to all come back OK — not sure I can be bothered to find where those might be in that mess.

[scottc]

If you're worried about a browser using up 2GB of RAM, you've obviously never used Chrome...

[webwit]

What I'm worried about is that although Firefox was getting quite stable, my recent Firefox updates have crashes again. On the bright side it is getting quite good at restoring forms, even when closing a tab and undoing that.

[002]

Lol I thought I had trouble letting go of tabs. You're out of control man. You could be on a digital version of the show Hoarders

[7bit]

If I where you, I'd buy a larger monitor, or better a 2nd one.


One for the tabs and one for the browser window you are working in.


ps: What is "Teenage Girls Tears Up ..."?

[matt3o]

If I where you, I'd buy a larger monitor, or better a 2nd one.


One for the tabs and one for the browser window you are working in.

this.

and of course install linux.

[Muirium]

The Workspaces feature in OmniWeb is good for this kind of thing. Hit a function key and you're in a whole other environment, separately saved. But alas that app is getting a bit old as Omni directs its resources to things that actually make money, like OmniFocus.

[kint]

...ps: What is "Teenage Girls Tears Up ..."?

Don't bother, you'ld get blacked out anyway.

[Game Theory]

...ps: What is "Teenage Girls Tears Up ..."?

Don't bother, you'ld get blacked out anyway.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLEn5G65LOQ

[webwit]

I'd just have one tab open myself, and then hire a secretary to handle all those other tabs, and when I need one, open it for me.

[mr_a500]

I always wanted a secretary. It's a shame that secretaries became obsolete before I had a chance to get one.

[mr_a500]

This is what webwit's secretary would look like in modern times:


(from Wikipedia)

I think I prefer the old days.

[nathanscribe]

[webwit]

I like vintage IBM fake (model) secretaries. Even better though are the fake vintage computer operators, or whatever the hell it is they are supposed to be doing. You have to appreciate the charming combination of at one hand the attempt to communicate IBM stance on an emancipated workplace (fictional or not in this context), and at the other hand the blatant sexism by using hot models in tight outfits. Them legs.


DT's operating center. Webwit shows the DT main operator the latest update of the forum spy, while Mrinterface is handling the backups.

[Daniel]

You should use tabgroups! [ctrl]+[shift]+[e] Makes it much easier to handle a large amount of tabs!

[Spharx]

Try the firefox TabGroups Manager addon. Its neat, it basically gives you a second tabbar for tab groups.

[7bit]

I'd go with webwit's secretary method and follow matt3o advise to have the money to pay her.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Lol I thought I had trouble letting go of tabs. You're out of control man. You could be on a digital version of the show Hoarders :)

I'm not hoarding them. I'm finding new things to work on the wiki faster than I can finish the previous one — most of those tabs are edits and research I was in the middle of when I got sidetracked onto something else. I close them as I complete the work, but they just stack up and up as I don't have enough time to do anything with them. A load of them relate to me having commented out most of [wiki]Matias Tactile Pro[/wiki], but I've not yet got around to adding all the new pages and all the research required. I hope to get that sorted out at the weekend.

If I where you, I'd buy a larger monitor, or better a 2nd one.

I'm sad because 1600×1200 is nearly dead. I bought a couple of used S-IPS 1600×1200 screens for work (same 20.1" S-IPS LG panel as mine at home, but HP screens instead of LG) and it really is my absolutely idea size. Good height without the excess width. Same as how my laptop is something like 1400×1050 in 15" — nothing like that is sold any more. The lunatics have taken over the monitor factory asylums.

At home, a single 1600×1200 is fine — it's a 5-year-old LG L2000CP that no-one ever cared about or wanted, yet it's every bit as good as the highly rated and hugely popular HP 2065LP (same panel), except for being DVI+VGA instead of dual DVI-I. I have another screen (17" TN) but the VGA input has died, so I can't connect it to both the PC at Mac at the same time, and I don't care enough to want to bother with it.

I don't really fancy the only alternative, which is 24" 1920×1200, but I could live with it.

ps: What is "Teenage Girls Tears Up ..."?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLEn5G65LOQ

[mr_a500]

I'm sad because 1600×1200 is nearly dead. I bought a couple of used S-IPS 1600×1200 screens for work (same 20.1" S-IPS LG panel as mine at home, but HP screens instead of LG) and it really is my absolutely idea size. Good height without the excess width. Same as how my laptop is something like 1400×1050 in 15" — nothing like that is sold any more. The lunatics have taken over the monitor factory asylums.

At home, a single 1600×1200 is fine — it's a 5-year-old LG L2000CP that no-one ever cared about or wanted, yet it's every bit as good as the highly rated and hugely popular HP 2065LP (same panel), except for being DVI+VGA instead of dual DVI-I. I have another screen (17" TN) but the VGA input has died, so I can't connect it to both the PC at Mac at the same time, and I don't care enough to want to bother with it.

I don't really fancy the only alternative, which is 24" 1920×1200, but I could live with it.

I've been playing around with native 2880x1800 on my 15" MacBook Pro. It's a hell of a lot of space, but using it for too long makes my eyeballs ache. 1920x1200 is more reasonable on 15".

[InSanCen]

Yeah, I thought I was bad with 40 or so tabs.

With regard to the screens, I use Dell 2001FP's, which sound like they use the same panel as your LG/HP monitors. 1600x1200 is indeed a very nice resolution. VGA, DVI, Composite (PiP), and S-Video inputs, and a 4 port powered hub. It may give you another option when looking for screens.

[Half-Saint]

I usually work with 30-40 tabs.. and I thought it to be a lot

[Dubsgalore]

My desktop usually has about 15-30 open

My laptop usually has about 5-15 open

Daniel i'd say you might have a few too many open..

[kint]

20-30 on desktop, 10-20 on Laptop. If it tops that, another window. When bored, shut everything.
As for the resolution: X * 1200 in anything >24" is nice because it shows a normal site in Word processing progs in full. I like that. 2 website windows in workable size abreast, as in >= 1920 resolution is nice too. No fancy panel here though.

[webwit]

I've got 2560x1440 at 27 inch, which gives me mixed feelings. Great resolution, but the software... Too small to browse without scaling. If I scale everything 1.25 or 1.50 times, fonts are great, but unscaled graphics always look better. So you might as well get a lower resolution monitor without this problem. It's ridiculous, desktop computers should be twice the resolution or more compared to mobile devices. But a f*cking phone now has a better screen than your average desktop or laptop, and scales better. Like time stood still for over a decade on the desktop.

[mr_a500]

Exactly. I complained about low resolutions back in 2004! That's why I waited over a decade before upgrading - because the computer specs were so damn pathetic. I expected SSD and high-density OLED as standard back in 2007. It's unbelievable that the specs that I expected in 2007 are barely available in 2013 - and at double the price. What the hell happened?

[Compgeke]

I still find it depressing how little progress we've achieved in the last 10 years, being as I still have a couple Dell Inspirons that weren't even high end with 1920x1200 15" displays, yet a modern 15" laptop seems to be coming with a 1366x768 display which is what I would expect in 2006, not 2013.

On the other hand I'm noticing less and less insanely underpowered systems being sold. I remember people shipped a lot of consumer XP laptops with 128 or 256 megs of ram which was far too little to do anything with, even in 2002. There were even Vista laptops with 512 megs ram (Toshiba: I'm looking at you) which were worse than the XP laptops. I'm finding it hard to find systems with less than 2 gigs today, which is enough to run 7 or 8(.1) without issues. I guess that's what they consider progress.

[7bit]

I can't complain about my 4:3, 1024x768 pixel monitor. I wish I could buy new monitors in that better looking format instead of that wide-screen stupidness!


Even when I look at photos in 3:2-format I get black sides on my monitor in the office.

edit: 0 tabs, but a lot of windows at window manager level, but usually not more than 1 1/2 rows of icons on the top of the screen (~20-30 at most).

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Dell 2001FP is the infamous "Dell lottery" display — they were originally the same LG.display S-IPS panel as mine, but most were (IIRC) S-PVA. Some HP LP2065 displays had A-MVA I think.

The problem with using high-resolution panels in Windows is how badly the Windows world copes. While RISC OS had fractional-pixel fonts by 1992, and Mac OS X in 2001, ClearType is still pixel-locked, so increasing the DPI to 125% or 150% gives you really spindly text, as stroke widths can only increase from 1 (100% DPI) to 2 (200% DPI) pixels. Then you have Microsoft's refusal to let go of nearest neighbour scaling, and programs with bitmapped controls that scale up horribly (mostly checkboxes — there's a lot of bitmapped ones out there). A lot of programs are locked into 100% DPI, so you're going to risk eyestrain trying to use them. F-Secure Client Security's scan dialog is a random mixture of 100% DPI and correctly scaled DPI, and Adobe have similar problems. LogMeIn Rescue is still 100% DPI with no scaling — and they have no interest in fixing bugs (their support staff are among the most clueless I've ever met).

Apple's advantage is that they never gave DPI any consideration at all, nor did the Mac ever have to deal with rectangular pixels (unlike rival systems such as RISC OS and Windows) — that's why Windows has separate x and y axis scaling. When Apple introduced high DPI, it was (so far as I imagine) as simple as a program saying "I do high DPI" in info.plist (or whatever Apple use now), and everything else is scaled by the GUI. Windows makes it horrifyingly complicated because there are pre-high-DPI concepts such as changing the system font size and changing the pixel scaling, and unless programs deny all knowledge of these, Windows seems to assume they're DPI aware and won't scale them, leaving them with unscaled window content. I never did quite follow this mess, but Windows DPI goes back to XP or earlier, long before high DPI panels, and Microsoft chose not to find a sane option such as a second opt-in DPI system for real DPI, and lie to non-opt-in programs that the DPI is 100%.

And screen manufacturers aren't going to go back to sane options like 15" 1400×1050 or 1440×1080 (I can never remember what my laptop is, probably the former — both those two work out to 4:3), which gives you all the space in the world without having to choose between eyestrain and random-ass font sizes all over the screen.

[kint]

just for the wide screen stupidness:
I used to complain about that too, now I find comfort in having two windows side by side open - that 's really neat. If on windows 7, one can also just snap the title bars out of the screen at each side of the display and they'll maximize from there to the screens middle axis. That's actually the only of the new fancy features I grew to like on a windows system.

As for the "underpowered Laptops back then" thing - Most people still don't do much more on their boxes than they used to do 5 years ago, whilst the power of the chips increases steadily. AMD/Intels biggest problem is rather what functions they'll integrate into the die next, now that IGP RAM was added too. There's not much sense in pushing the shrinking of the process with the past efforts any more. With everything on die there's less cost for other components.

[Muirium]

Progress on the laptop screen front isn't going to get any better now that the whole traditional computer industry (Macs included) is sliding down the sales curve to terminal obsolescence. I love my Retina MacBook Pro, but the market is heading elsewhere. Windows' issues with scaling don't exactly help matters, but the bigger problem is that people are migrating from general purpose computers, taking mainstream dollars elsewhere.

7bit might appreciate that my previous laptop did indeed have 1024x768 resolution. (12" PowerBook.) Cosy!