Back in 2000 web browsers didn't have tabs. There were two popular browsers I knew of - Netscape and Internet Explorer. The latter was by far the better one in those days. What is important is that both allowed one to browse one site at a time. Yes, you could open up multiple copies of the browser but that was ugly and not always good for your machine's performance. Internet connections used to be slow and you would be waiting in front of the browser for a long time. The appearance of tabs in browsers like Opera and Maxthon (this is the only name I remember from the many IE-based browsers at that time) was a big advantage. You could open up two or three tabs and since not all pages load with equal speed you could read one page while the others were loading. This meant less time staring at a blank screen and a productivity improvement in those times.
Today every browser is multi-tabbed and internet is fast. So typically I used to keep many tabs open - more than I could read. Some months ago I tried reducing the number of tabs I use, and I think it helps me be less defocussed. What I do nowadays is open 4-5 tabs at the maximum, and after some time, if I am not going to read some of them I close them. Its like setting a sort of mental expiry time on every tab.
Why does this work (if it does)? My hypothesis is that the human brain also has its version of Amdahl's law.
No comments:
Post a Comment