Study reveals that some coping strategies only make the problem worse:
Five billion people spend almost half of their waking hours online. According to a new study from Aalto University, browser clutter is a serious problem for one in four of them. The results will be presented on April 27 at CHI 2023, the leading conference for human-computer interaction research.
'We began exploring which challenges make users feel overwhelmed when browsing the internet. We also mapped the behaviors that cause the clutter and how users react to the stress,' says Associate Professor and Head of Department Janne Lindqvist.
Browsing habits play a major role in cluttering up a browser. Using interviews and an online survey, the researchers found that clutter-related stress goes up when users keep a large number of tabs and browser windows open, as well as because of interactive elements like ads and pop-up windows.
Multitasking adds to the problem, and it gets worse if users are hesitant to close tabs or are dealing with complex tasks. Clutter also accumulates when users have tabs open related to different online activities – for example, if they're managing a travel reservation in one tab and chatting with friends or colleagues in another.
[...] The study found that many users react to stress by trying to change either their behavior or their attitude towards the clutter. Only the former, problem-focused solutions, proved helpful in solving the issue. An example solution would be to consciously minimize clutter by deciding on an upper limit to the number of tabs you have open.
[...] The researchers pointed out that 'organizing' techniques, such as using tools to manage tabs, might just lead to more clutter. 'These approaches are similar to someone not actually cleaning but just rearranging things in the same space – the problem doesn't go away,' says Lindqvist.
[...] 'We use computers every day, and it's definitely not always ideal. Many things would actually be much better handled only on paper,' he says. 'I look at this from the point of view of how we can live a meaningful and good life despite computers.'
How many tabs do you have open right now?
Journal Reference:
Rongjun Ma, Henrik Lassila, Leysan Nurgalieva, Janne Lindqvist, When Browsing Gets Cluttered: Exploring and Modeling Interactions of Browsing Clutter, Browsing Habits, and Coping [open], CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580690
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday May 16, @03:30PM (23 children)
Remember back in the late 1990s / early 2000s when browsers did not have tabs? Yes, really. And it was uphill both ways! And cell phones were this brand new revolution.
People didn't have to deal with the problem of browser tabs. They had to deal with having dozens of separate browser windows open. And the tendency of their browser to crash.
I started with Linux in June 1999 and was surprised how stable the browser was even with many browser windows open.
Didn't people figure out by the mid 2000s how to manage bookmarks and not keep so many windows/tabs open?
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aafcac on Tuesday May 16, @03:53PM (11 children)
A lot of this is because we have "experts" obsessed with UX that can't be bothered to pay attention to what users are doing and how they're doing it. So much has been done to make the interface look neat, without considering how that impacts the user. If anything, computers have gotten significantly harder to operate now than when things were primarily either DOS or MacOS.
(Score: 4, Funny) by DannyB on Tuesday May 16, @07:25PM (2 children)
One big innovation in UX experience in browsers at about 1999 or 2000 ish was that if you closed a browser window, about four more windows with ads would pop up.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Wednesday May 17, @12:24AM (1 child)
Yeah, I modded you insightful. Cuz the modern day UI folks who think hiding scroll bars, low contrast UIs, and 6 level menus to change these defaults are the same assholes who think popups are A Good Thing (tm).
I just passed a drug test. My dealer has some explaining to do.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday May 17, @12:44PM
The sad thing is that pop ups were invented to be less of an issue for people browsing the site, then as is often the case, advertisers got their grubby hands on them and made it a nightmare for the rest of us. Especially those pop under ads with media.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday May 16, @07:50PM
I've observed a bit of a competition with web page designers. Maybe include all UX. They like to use every freaking gizmo and trickery they can find. I'm not quite sure who they're trying to impress- co-workers? bosses? Resume / HR? Friends? Dopey customers who think it's kewl?
All I know is I hate a lot of webpage designs. I realize many are catering to cellphone screen UX. Sigh. Some sites used to detect, or give you the option of the desktop or mobile page, but I haven't seen that anymore.
I started using Opera (still use Old Opera) maybe 1998. IIRC they invented tabs, but they also invented per-site settings, including turning OFF javascript, images, image animation, cookies, css, and a long list.
Whether Windows, MacOS, Android, IOS, or Linux, I do everything I can do cut out garbage, unneeded / unwanted processes, clutter, etc. What used to be fun- new OS / browser install, is now huge drudgery to go through and clean it all up.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday May 16, @08:27PM (2 children)
And none of them check what to do on"Websites that suck" or they would know that you DO NOT HIDE THE NAVIGATION - EVER!!!"
On top of that Icons only work if there are eight or less. Beyond that, no one who does not use the thing as a full time job knows what
they mean. (Assuming the icons mean anything at all, which most probably don't).
I understand that if you write the UI in English, only English speakers will understand. What I don't understand is how using Icons that
no one can understand is an improvement. You might need to Google "Locale" otherwise perhaps you should not be involved
in the software industry at all.
If you need to use pictures instead of words for some bizarre reason, you can use Kanji - it still works well for millions of people, even
after 4,000 years. Google cant keep an Icon alive for 4 months. I hope they never get near Tamagochis.
And why do the mouse-overs always prevent you from seeing the thing you want to click on? Do you not know what a punch in the face feels like?
.
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @10:22PM (1 child)
Looks like Dr Spin has spun out...
Thanks for the rant!
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Thursday May 18, @09:08PM
It is amazing what can be achieved after the fourth brandy.
(Just don't let me near the php).
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Tuesday May 16, @11:58PM (1 child)
Yea, back around the late 1990s / early 2000s you had window management that ACTUALLY WORKED. You didn't need browser tabs because your task bar was ALREADY a tray full of tabs. In-application tabs were totally redundant.
But browser makers pushed tabs because the window management on MacOS X and Linux was shit... and then Microsoft brought the shit MacOS X was doing to Windows and then everyone needed browser tabs to stay afloat.
Hell the other day a cow-worker was insisting that he use that clunky-ass Google web based presentation thing to edit Power Point files rather than his local copy of Microsoft Power Point. Why? Because he wanted it "in a browser tab"!!!!!! That was the only reason!
Yes, just that. The Windows 11 task bar is just TOO FUCKED UP. (I was going to tell hem about this nice OS UI that had tabs at the bottom of the screen... and then eventually mention it was Windows 95)
(Score: 3, Informative) by helel on Wednesday May 17, @01:31AM
In windows thees days M$ offers a program called United Sets that lets you open multiple application windows as tabs in a single window. I don't know if you want to raise this with your cow-orker but it seems like it might be the feature they're looking for?
Republican Patriotism [youtube.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 17, @06:35AM (1 child)
No kidding. And unlike back then, you can't even provide easy step by step instructions for the people you're trying to give them to.
Back with CLIs, you'd list a couple commands and be done. A complicated workflow took less than a page in a manual.
Today, you need GUI screenshots to tell people where to click and how to click on it (left, right or some supersecret handshake because left and right clicking have already been occupied by some other function), and of course in what order and when, so even the simplest of things someone might want to do takes multiple pages of multicolor pictures just to get the basics in.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Wednesday May 17, @12:50PM
The non-techies I point this out to think I've lost the plot, but IMHO, the best programs are CLI ones with a GUI that runs over the top of that if you need it. That way, you can more easily script the program if you want to automate it without having to go to extremes like Power Automate Desktop and if you need to explain to somebody how to do something, it's mostly a matter of giving them the command line arguments and indicating what each argument does. So long as you're not needing to do something like mixing audio or making judgments about image corrections, chances are that that's enough.
I also regularly use sed, awk, grep and xargs with command line utilities to quickly process a large number of files in one go. Doing the same with windows apps is a pain and usually requires power automate.
Commandlines are also helpful because there are utilities that allow you to record the entire session along with any messages without having to resort to videos. If something goes wrong or I forget what I did at a certain point, I can do a quick text search rather than watching the video.
(Score: 2) by GloomMower on Tuesday May 16, @04:28PM (3 children)
I got co-workers, when they share their screen, they got over 50 taps open. Not sure how they function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @04:38PM (1 child)
I created my own bookmarks system from scratch over the last few years.
I cut down on the tabs but I sometimes get to 50 over multiple windows without any trouble.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Tuesday May 16, @05:45PM
I use a hierarchy of multiple virtual desktops, one for each project or category of activity. Within them I have one or more applications and those can include more than one browser (or none) depending on needs. When I do have a browser open inside a virtual desktop, I have multiple tabs unless splitting off a second window makes sense to add to the mix. When a virtual desktop gets too cluttered or confusing or the task is complete, I close all the windows in that virtual desktop and start anew. Browsers are a PITA and although they are unavoidable nowadays, I still try to avoid using one when another program will do.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 20, @03:24PM
I do this. I open browser windows and lots of tabs as a way of keeping track of what I am doing
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Tuesday May 16, @08:30PM
I never liked tabs from the moment they were forced on me, so I use an extension called "Tab-less", which opens every new tab in a new window instead. That's because out of habit, when I'm done with a window I just close it. But when tabs became a fashion, all of my windows all of a sudden got closed that way. So I never could get used to tabs. I never keep many browser windows open simultaneously anyway, and I'm able to close them one by one, with the traditional top right close button.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 16, @09:41PM (2 children)
Heh: i started with Red Hat linux (5.2?) back in 1999. Bought from Staples, i think (couldn't download due to being on dial-up...until i found about wget -c).
I found linux BECAUSE of the windows browser crashing time after time.
Had to go edit the X config to get a gui, but loved learning something new.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @11:44PM
Are you sure you entered the refresh rate correctly? BECAUSE YOU CAN DESTROY YOUR MONITOR!!!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 17, @02:23PM
NOTE: mostly off topic of browsers, until the very end
Similar here. Classic Mac developer. I knew nothing about PCs or PC hardware. Fortunately I did know that all PC manufacturers hire people to sharpen the edges of all metal parts inside the PC to ensure you will cut your hands if you open up the PC and try to change anything. Macs were lacking this innovation. On a Mac you could open the case and swap out almost anything with no tools but your bare hands.
I started in June 1999. Found a place that would sell me a PC at a reasonably competitive price with Red Hat installed.
Turns out I just could not stomach FVWM95 nor the RPM hell. I couldn't even get video to play in those days. That's okay because I kept my PowerMac 7600 for a few more years but found myself using Linux more and more and the Mac less and less.
A friend suggested that I try SuSE. So I did. Never looked back. It was a lot easier for a newbie. A few years later I knew a lot more but I tried Ubuntu and really liked that. Until they stopped having a conventional desktop that everyone on the planet knows how to use. It's like making a new car with unconventional controls. A steering tiller. A button on the ceiling to slow down or stop the vehicle. Etc.
I was a huge KDE fan until KDE 4. Somehow after that, I just never found my way back to KDE again, although I've tried it a few times and liked it. Konqueror did give me an alternative browser to Netscape. (Remember the days before Firefox existed?)
The one thing consistent through it all was the amazing stability of Linux.
How often should I have my memory checked? I used to know but...
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday May 16, @10:27PM
It probably wasn't as efficient to have multiple instances of the browser running. I seem to recall. but could be wrong, that you could usually run multiple instances of the browser so you sort of had tabs just in different applications or instances of the same application and you could copy-n-paste things over etc. Also running multiple different browsers was an option, at times also a necessity since some browser engines decided to render html differently etc. But it had similar issues, if one of the browsers you had open crashed or consumed all the memory it brought the whole thing crashing down. Just like now, except with tabs and we now have gigabytes of ram instead of megabytes. The broswer is in some regard a massive resource hog if I look at what apps use the most memory and cpu time.
What I'm sort of wondering here is if there is Browser (software) clutter or is the clutter part of the Web design? I don't think my browser have really become more cluttered over the years. The authors appear to disagree. If anything a lot of the annoying large buttons, bars, animations and stuff have gone away. Now everyone have embraced the minimalism UI. What is cluttered is usually the web design. It seems to go in waves and trends and some of them are really annoying -- there is a reason noscript to disable javascript and such was invented and it was not just for the ads. A lot of pages do appear to put style over substance and the UI is weird, they want to have things that move etc. I'm sure some UI specialists will tell us all about how it makes the pages come alive and it's there to engage with users yada-yada.
Sometimes I miss the Lynx-web. Here have some text. A lot of text.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @11:27PM
Yes, I do, and held off on using them for the longest time. Trouble is, the browsers got optimized for tabs. They probably don't even think much about multi-process any more, it's all multi-thread (or multi-process perhaps, but with one mother of all processes).
It was kind of braindead, but it's not the worst. I still don't get the people who leave huge numbers of tabs open and rely on the browser to keep state (other than persistent cookies, which stay around when the tabs are closed). I can't believe that performs well on an old machine like mine. I don't see the advantage of that use case.
Maybe when I finally have to toss Windows 8.1, I'll get roped in to some kind of environment that encourages one to blithely leave tabs lingering for all eternity, or whatever. Like, I consider a dozen to be "a lot" and I trim it back to 4 or 5. Seriously, I don't get it.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @12:01AM
I read my email using mutt on my server over ssh -X from mu laptop.
Plain text works just fine.
HTML stuff used to work, but slowly. mutt invokes a browser.
Starting a month or so ago, my browser fails on most HTML messages.
On a few, though, it works. Those messages tend to be the ones that might just as well have been plain text.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gznork26 on Tuesday May 16, @04:38PM (1 child)
I don't keep lots of tabs open. I've got two of them pinned, one being Soylent, and only as many others as I need for what I'm doing at the moment. But that's probably because I don't like clutter. Still, lots of people do keep many tabs open, so UX designers offer ways to manage them. As with the clutter we've created with folders in our email programs, this is frequently accomplished with a search feature. I use it myself at times, even though I keep things organized. In the extreme, since there is a search function, people can abandon organizing their mess and rely entirely on search. This approach was adopted by UX designers for tablets and phones, where users often have no idea where things are stored, and don't care, since they can find them either with search or 'recent documents'.
I recently read that IT students whose primary exposure to tech is with phones and tablets increasingly have no understanding of file systems, folders or directory trees, or even what files are. That's an artifact of UX designs which hide the existence of such things. The built world's underbelly is largely hidden now; being able to use a thing is what's important, not understanding how it works. If it breaks, toss it and replace it.
I think this same pattern is at work here, when we discuss browser clutter and tabs. You don't have to know the first thing about how the content shown in your browser window gets there in order to use it. If you don't want to see ads, install a thing to hide them. If you obsessively multi-task, set up virtual desktops so you can segment them and keep your work clutter separate from your gaming clutter, your social network clutter and your hobby clutter.
This is nothing new. How many people know intimately how the engine in a car works, for instance? If it's running, drive it, otherwise have someone else deal with it.
The pattern plays out in other ways as well. But there is a price. If you know nothing about how things work, you have no basis for accepting explanations that mean nothing to you.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by RS3 on Tuesday May 16, @07:57PM
Vivaldi browser I'm using has a ton of customizations- most of which I don't use. One is "tab stacking". I'm not super clear on what it is or why I need it, but it seems like it would make things more complicated- keeping track of even more open tabs, but you can't really see them? At some point it's too much mental scatter for me, but it's cool that it's there for people who like and use such things.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @04:38PM (4 children)
I routinely deal with tasks that'd boggle the average internet user's mind, yet I rarely have more than 4 tabs open. When I'm done with something I close it and if by chance I need it again I can fish it out of history or just look it up again in case it's not there.
Then I hear about people that keep 1000+ tabs open for the absolutely most mundane tasks and that in turn boggles my mind. Why would you ever even want that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @05:21PM (1 child)
Sometimes it's faster to keep a bunch open and deal with them all at once.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @05:54PM
Instead of post-it notes stuck around my screen, I have a couple of Firefox windows open, total about 70 open tabs. One window (smaller) is for books I'm reading or referencing, most from Open Library which streams to a tab. The other windo has tabs that are for ongoing projects/problems--diagnostic links for a laptop that locked up, roofing materials for a leaky roof that needs to be repaired this summer, customer sites (up/down loads, invoicing), several news sources (some for niche sports news), several email accounts and several for references that take awhile to search for (and I use more often than the thousands of bookmarks I've saved over many years).
And of course SN and Pipedot's delightfully customizable Feed page, both came from buck feta.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 16, @07:58PM
I would keep hundreds or 1000+ tabs open if I had a reason to do so. Maybe if I was evaluating lots of images or some other drudgery, or keeping in the browser's memory content that could be deleted at any moment.
Some people have an unhealthy relationship with browser tabs, like having a house full of clutter. They made a TV show about that.
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday May 17, @12:43AM
Firefox has extensions that recreate closed tabs including their histories; also recreate closed windows.
(Score: 2, Informative) by dwilson98052 on Tuesday May 16, @04:40PM
If you have issues with tabs you probably also have issues not looking up with your mouth open and drowning every time it rains.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ShovelOperator1 on Tuesday May 16, @05:19PM (10 children)
Are we talking about tabs, or maybe about the clutter a few pixels below?
Modern webpages are a total mess when it comes to user interface cleanliness. Almost all of them got the same esthetics, as it went more profitable for ads and maximizes the numbers - mostly number of clicks which can accidentally land in some ad - without any improvement of the website. More - the usability suffers with it as the only items which can be highlighted must be ads! So text becomes gray, background becomes gray, photos become more and more cut out and transparent, a whole interface becomes flat and colorless - decades of research about colour importance in ergonomics have been minimized to one principle: "Ads must be in color, the rest in gray".
Simultaneously, the websites are meant to be used. News site - to look for and read articles. Internet shop for searching, comparing and buying the product. Someone's personal blog or website to read articles, opinions and project logs. This all got lost, and the initial content became only some kind of peculiar addon to the mountain of pop-ups, "subscribe" dialogs, chatbots (why the hell do I need a chatbot in the site with old newspaper archives?) and of course mountains of ads. So the main objective of the websites has been changed.
And it's time to change the way we think about websites too, and finally abandon this long-dead "personal website" myth. Currently making even the most simple website is the real pain in the bottom, hosting it drains cash and creating worthy content requires hiring lots of people who will write bad code for money because... these 1990s generators are bad as they write bad code for free.
And my special thanks to Mozilla who slowly removes the "customize toolbar" facility, button by button. Thank you for making me switch to some long unmaintained fork.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @12:16AM (7 children)
I just have a personal website on my home computer in my living room.
There's a directory on the network-connected computer behind my easy chair that's full of html.
That is my website.
When one of my browser tabs stays around more than a day or so, and I think it may be worth keeping,
I bookmark it. And I don't use the browser to do that.
I copy the link and a description into a markdown file. Every now and then I translate it to html and put the result into my website. It's just another file on my hard drive, after all.
And now and then I edit the bookmarks file, rearrange things, add section headers, and the like.
Simple, the way the web used to be.
Website: http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik [pooq.com]
bookmarks: http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/bookmarks.html [pooq.com]
Emjoy.
(Oh, of course there are bookmarks that shouldn't be public. I put them in a dfferent markdown file that doesn't get posted to the website.)
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday May 17, @03:11AM (2 children)
Your list of "bookmark" links is very long. I thought I was the only one to do this. For me, however, instead of one big file, my list is comprised of a bunch of html files nested into folders, broken down by various topics. I navigate it by keyboard with custom a written JavaScript menu. I hate JavaScript, but recently I decided that native html is now unusable via keyboard in modern GUIs. I'm happy enough with my monstrosity.
It's just nice to know that I'm not the only one who does this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @12:32PM (1 child)
Embrace JavaScript and CSS like I did and you are able to implement cool features like your own mini search engine, "fixed" and "sticky" positioned UI elements, open random links in a category, and dynamic links like (year % 2 ? year + 1 : year) + " United States elections". You can include encrypted links and text.
I put it all in one file to make it more portable. It's almost 9000 links with other features, and just over 1 megabyte.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @05:32PM
I navigate in the browser by using control-f and then typing in a word to search for. In emacs, when I edit the source file, I use control-s.
I've thought about using a more complex hierarchy of web pages, but there are too many links that would fit on multiple pages, and it would be hard to control-f find them.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @11:11AM (2 children)
We have very different colour vision. The white on black is too bold and for me the blue is almost unreadable. (my cheap screen I'm on at athe moment probably isn't helping)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @05:28PM (1 child)
I know. I plan to change the blue to another colour, but haven't got around to it yet.
The green links o stand out well, which is useful for frequently used bookmarks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @07:50PM
I use #F99 for links, #F55 for :visited links, a few other colors for emphasizing certain parts like parentheticals (you can put a <span> inside an <a> and give it a class), and a mix of green and white text.
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday May 17, @07:20PM
Congratulations that You could get the site running from home. I also have a similar set-up - when I found that my workflow does not require custom CMS, and the site is static, generated once with a bunch of Perl scripts, I decided to try it - did a highly optimized RPi setup.
The good thing is that even if I have a 128kB/s (kByte, not kbit) upload connection, I can still allocate about half of it to the upload and... the site made of HTML, simple CSS and, don't know, a single, 50-100kB photo per average page will happily load well even when a few users visit it. And I don't expect more than two search engine bots, maybe some spam mail seeker and two meatware users at once.
Then problems came - mostly with the visibility of the server. It is behind a CG-NAT. Sorry, behind at least 3 NATs. ISP has one, his provider another one, and while here their explanations end, I highly suspect that the datacenter they take the connection from has another one. It means that to make the site connectable to the domain, I may have to punch a hole thru 3 walls, paying 3 people significant amount of money. IPv6? We don't do that here!
And this is not an arsehole of the third world, this is the EU country. Yes, 128kB/s upload, Behind 3 CG-NATs, with extra paid IP (about 6 times the link itself), no knowledge that we have solved this problem for at least decade. And "voting with wallet" ends when I tell my address as there's "no infrastructure" there.
Finally, I settled with cramming the Tor with a hidden service running on this poor RPi. The good thing is that it is out there. The bad thing - the accessibility over clearnet still sucks, this is not an underground casino, this is a hobby website.
I decided to run the clearnet version too for some time. The thing is that I don't need much. This RPi acts as a network drive in my LAN too. There's a 16GB card and it is sufficient - usually ~4GB is free all time. A whole website, counting as really whole thing, weights less than 1GB including sources of my software (which I could finally tar.gz instead of zipping). What I found is that in my country to make a website, you have to be at least a web shopping platform developer, and have a lot of money needing hundreds of GBs for data - there are almost no small providers, and these who still are there are highly unreliable.
What I call "highly unreliable" means, in normal country "cheating so much that you could go to the court with them".
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Wednesday May 17, @12:49AM (1 child)
My bank won't accept browsers more that 3 versions old, and firefox increments the version every 4 weeks now. The newest firefox, 112, won't work on my system. Thanks for nothing, mozilla.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @12:15PM
That's awful. I don't even understand why that policy would help. The older, less secure browser connected to the bank website shouldn't be a security risk. I'm pretty sure insecure extensions are managed separately from browser updates.
Did you try using a user agent switcher to fool the bank into thinking you have the latest version?
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 16, @06:03PM (2 children)
On top of using a mix of .desktop files and a few markdown files for bookmarks, I also use tabs (often ~100 or more) as bookmarks with tree style tab [mozilla.org] while manually unloading the stuff I don't use with tab unloader [mozilla.org].
Mind, I'm not "lost" through it all. It's just that there's no good alternative to https://github.com/Erisa/save-all-tab-urls [github.com] when handling bookmarks so I could care less how it's called internally so long as it works.
Every once in a while I test out stuff like https://github.com/TCB13/LoFloccus [github.com] but I always go back to text files and a shit ton of open tabs for one reason or the next.
compiling...
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 16, @09:06PM (1 child)
I close my tabs when performance gets a bit laggy* on my PC, about once every 3 weeks to a month, so the number open is between about 500 to 1000. I save them all into the Bookmarks database before closing**; and very useful it has been too to go back to a tab I remember from a few years ago, The search capability within Firefox's 'Manage Bookmarks' has been very useful.
Scrolling back and forth though the tabs helps me remember the context of the tasks I am working on.
*Currently a dual core Celeron N3350*** with 4 GBytes RAM and quite a large SSD with a big swap partition. When the load average is over 30, it's definitely time to clear out the tabs. My workflow is different to many people's. I ad-block and terminate ads with extreme prejudice. My cpu cycles are for me, not advertisers.
**I'm tempted to write a script to save each web-page to disk when its tab is closed, because it gets irritating when web-sites close down or get revised. The Internet Archive has been very useful.
***No fan. I like having a quiet office.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 16, @10:23PM
Yeah I think that's the "normal" use case. I think I had the same workflow back in the day but since I never used the search option and had syncing issues between different browsers and devices I ended up moving more and more toward external files in a syncthing dir...
Anyhow, again, floccus should work but I'm just too lazy to bother migrating everything. Maybe one of these days...
compiling...
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Tuesday May 16, @09:45PM (1 child)
"One in Four Internet Users Are Overwhelmed by the Clutter in Their Browser"
Sheeit... Two in four are overwhelmed by computers!
Some can't print, or use tabs or 'find Facebook'.
Sheeit.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @12:54AM
I can print! All I have to do is turn off my printer and computer together, and then turn them on again! And then it works!
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday May 16, @11:52PM
Clutter sucks. Clutter is anything that I didn't ask for, or want on a page. Ads, reminders, warnings, alarms that content can't be shown due to ad blockers, etc ad nauseum. Seriously, that chick waving her teats in the javascript box doesn't even look appealing, she is clutter.
Eliminate all the clutter, and it doesn't matter how many tabs are open.
The relationship between clutter and the number of tabs open, is that each additional tab just adds to the clutter. Clear the clutter, and any number of tabs doesn't really change the experience. Well, aside from the potential to misplace a tab, then have to search for it.
Ublock Origin is my primary tool to block all the crap. Blocking ad servers on the router is my secondary tool. (that sounds kinda backward, don't it?)
If your browser is cluttered, why on earth would you want to multiply the clutter with additional tabs?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday May 17, @06:40AM
Or can handle?
I currently have about 50 tabs open. I have to multitask and it's easier to organize them that way for me. I do know what's where. I am aware that most people will probably not be able to handle memorizing what's in 50 tabs. They might want to either open multiple browser windows so they can group the tabs that belong together or they might want to close the tabs they don't need right now and rely on bookmarks to reopen them.
That would probably be a pretty nifty browser feature (plugin writers, in case you're listening...): Bookmark groups. Click on a bookmark group and it opens up the 5 or 10 tabs associated with it and put them in a new window. Or another feature where you can "close and group" tabs, you save the state of the tab you close for later use and when you click on "reopen group", the tabs you closed that belong to that group return.
There's much left to be done for browser tab organization.
(Score: 2) by Uncle_Al on Wednesday May 17, @12:59PM
"Next month, Google will force Chrome and all Chromium based browsers (Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera, etc) to Manifest V3, this will effectively cripple ad blocking
on these browsers and for the most part leave only Firefox and Safari as viable alternatives as just about every other browser is a derivative of Chrome.
If you rely on ad blocking, I suggest you prepare yourself to move to either Firefox or Safari. "
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