The one about tabs
My oldest has a ridiculous ton of tabs open in Edge, even though he uses Chrome as his primary browser. It's at the "I didn't even know favicons could shrink that small" level. When asked about it, it's because that's where Discord links open up. When asked why he doesn't close them, he said sometimes he wants to go back to them.
We're past the generation that doesn't know where files are stored; it's possible the latest batch doesn't understand the delete my browser history meme.
(And doesn't linking to a Google Images search result feel like another generation of disconnect? Forget links turning into 404 pages; will the context evolve over time?)
Related to favicons: Running Pong in 240 Browser Tabs (via Kottke.) As one who almost got Pong running on an oscilloscope for a bonus mark in a school assignment (sadly, I ran out of time and regret it more than many dubious choices from that era) I'm in favour of "can it run Pong" over "can it run Doom" but I've no doubt that a Doom port to tabs is mere days away now that the door has been opened.
Related to tabs in general: Tabs Give Me Superpowers. The oldest and I got to see Cory Doctorow speak last night, and the boy's big question at the end of the night was "how does he know all this stuff?" I knew a bit about it (including the aforementioned link, via Cory Doctorow's Blogging Style,) but what surprised me/brought it all together was his answer after (with some prodding) the boy asked him. His response was basically a paraphrasing of this post:
Blogging has always been a part of this project. For nearly 20 years, I posted nearly every day on Boing Boing – 53,906 posts in all! – taking note of everything that seemed important. Keeping a "writer's notebook" in public imposes an unbeatable rigor, since you can't slack off and leave notes so brief and cryptic that they neither lodge in your subconscious nor form a record clear enough to refer to in future. By contrast, keeping public notes produces both a subconscious, supersaturated solution of fragmentary ideas that rattle around, periodically cohering into nucleii that crystallize into full-blown ideas for stories, novels, essays, speeches and nonfiction books. What's more, those ripened ideas are supported by a searchable database of everything I've thought about the subject, often annotated by readers and other writers who've commented on the posts.
I, like most people, usually have a series of tabs open that I'm not quite ready to close, usually because they're related to a project that I'm not quite done with. A browser crash this weekend wiped them all out. There was a sense of relief, like the one that comes from declaring email bankruptcy and deleting/archiving everything in the inbox, but what would have happened if I'd taken (not a lot of) time to stitch the tabs together into a series of WIP project notes and shared them, even if they weren't quite "ready" or "perfect" for publication?
(Photo: Tab Cola by Fiona Henderson from Earlville, Australia, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
