I work for a Japanese company and if you've ever worked with them you know they go crazy with testing (often automated). I get bugreports like this constantly. And while you might argue if that's a use case or not (mostly it's not), a crash is still a crash! We do go the extra mile to analyze and fix those. It makes the software overall more robust and on occasion you really find a much severe underlying issue that would have exploded in your face also in other, more realistic workflows. Don't dismiss bugs without at least understanding what's happening! As others have stated, a lot of these weird issues are race conditions which might suggest a bigger problem in the design.
Yes! This sort of thing is always, always a real bug which can sometimes randomly show up in normal usage. Figuring out the root cause is really satisfying, so a good repro case (even if it’s just “spam this button a whole bunch and it usually crashes”) is valuable.
Or you can just shrug it off as a mysterious unknown glitch, and live with software that mostly works but occasionally crashes - like almost all software, sadly.
Tab hoarding is caused mostly by there being nothing less cumbersome/annoying to manage than bookmarks. The tabs that get kept around are often important enough to want to keep around, but not so important as to be worth dealing with cleaning up bookmarks later. This is especially true for task-associated “to do” tabs that will no longer be needed when the task is completed.
The other reason is because for a lot of people “out of sight, out of mind” is very true and so if they bookmark their tabs, the bookmarks will then gather cobwebs as they’re forgotten about shortly after bookmarking. Tabs don’t have this problem because they’re right there in your face all the time reminding you of their existence, meaning they actually get dealt with.
In my case (as described elsewhere) it helps me that they are visible and it might also help that they are in the same position where I left them (spatial consistency I guess, but English is not my first language).
The spatial element makes total sense. Placement of windows and elements within windows on a desktop computer is really not that different from stacks of papers arranged on a desk, and spatial memory makes keeping track of it all much more feasible in both situations. It turns your desktop into something resembling a physical space rather than an arbitrary hierarchy.
This is actually one of the reasons why I prefer to have a "mess" of freely floating windows of assorted sizes on a 27" or larger screen as opposed to having the same windows all maximized/tiled on a smaller screen. The former of the two setups gives persistent windows a unique place that they "live" on the screen, which makes picking each one out faster for me than if I were e.g. spamming alt-tab or scanning a taskbar to find the window I want.
I don't like the "you're holding it wrong" style of solving problems like this. I often find bugs or problems in software I maintain and even though I don't like to use the software in the way that exhibit the bug, I find myself being very understanding that other people do things in different ways and as long as it doesn't take a significant amount of work to support a usage modality compared to how many are using it, we should do it.
Some people are like me: a well functioning and extremely well liked engineer with a what seems like a significantly smaller short time memory. (This is part of a wider diagnosis.)
Having everything I work on
- easily, visibly available
- in a tree,
- sorted and grouped by where I found it from (a natural consequence of using tree style tabs and using ctrl-click to open every link when I am in research mode)
helps me a lot.
Sure, I can try to be like the cool kids, but why?
Surely you can exist as a real estate manager and absolutely do nothing, barely needing a tab, let alone 2048. But there won’t be rampant technological autocomplication that comes of it either.
You should then limit your cool browser to 5 or 6 tabs, if you allow max N tabs and it crashes with less then N then either change N or admit it is a bug and fix it, it will probably reveal some ugly issue that might also affect other uses in different way, if you have this easy way to reproduce it then as a dev you should attempt to reproduce it and if you can then that is great news, you can try and find the cause and fix it.
