I wasn't using it to asses the value of the feature in general. I was just curious how often that user ran into the problem that makes it a problem they have been trying to find a fix for since the beginning of tabbed browsing. A tiny annoyance that happens 10 times a day, everyday? A huge annoyance that has happened only twice... but just got him fired from his job? This person made it sound pretty serious to them so I was trying to get a better understanding of what they thought was serious. The issue is so not serious to me that it is not even an issue. Not wanting to sit with just a sample of 1, I thought I'd try to get additional info.

But since you asked... there have been many times when I used my wipers thousands of times each day for several days on end. But we're experiencing a bit of a drought right now so I've not used them in a couple months.

Some people on HN open very many tabs. Like, over one hundred open tabs. So I guess those people find it hard to find the noisy tab.

Also, some things are kind of frustrating, but not frustrating enough to bother spending ages fixing it.

Quite often something will happen and I'll think "there must be a fix. I just don't know the OS enough yet" - and sometimes there is a really easy fix and sometimes there is an ugly 3rd party kludge. While the problem is kind of annoying having a fix just fixes the problem, while searching for a fix teaches me more. (Am I making any sense? Its about the journey not the destination).

> Some people on HN open very many tabs. Like, over one hundred open tabs.

I can't even imagine how that is useful. I guess it is to them or they wouldn't do it.

I have 25 tabs open at the moment (and I've only had this browser open for 3 hours).

I tend to "open in new tab" and queue things for reading.

Because I tend to open lots of new tabs within a short period, it makes identifying the one that is playing sounds very hard. The worst is the "delayed video player" scenario, especially if it is below the fold. It's incredibly annoying and embarrassing to be desperately trying to find where the noise is coming from if it happens in a boring meeting.

I can get to 50 tabs pretty quickly when researching a problem. Sometimes I'll then trim them and save them as sets to open later. Is really useful for cross referencing and noun hunting.

What do you use to save them?

The browser.

On firefox is just Bookmarks > Bookmark All Tabs

My wife can literally have 30 tabs open at once. It doesn't make sense to me...

I've probably got about 60 open across two sessions right now, and this is typical or lower. It's as simple as having a queue of things to get to, plus groups of tabs represented in-progress research on some topic. It's especially useful given tab-sync across devices. It's not a workflow for everyone, but if the benefit of having easy access outweighs the intangible mental cost of a zillion tabs, it can work very well.