@munin I wish I could tell you how many tabs there are. But ... there's no fucking way of knowing. At least, not within reason.

The best approximation I've come up with, I shit thee not, as I am not a shitting-thee kind of Space Alien Cat, was to open a new tab, at the far right of the tabset, and drag it to the far left.

And time how long it took.

Seven. Motherfucking. Minutes.

I. Shit. Thee. Not.

In landscape mode, I can see a total of six, well, 5 1/3, tabs.

@munin I have, on occasion, raised my concerns with the good people of Google.

They appear not to share my concerns.

I am, it appears, "not the target user".

I have offered them in all sincerity to paint a target on my chest. Hell, I'll tattoo it there if it helps any.

I am told that "most users don't follow this usage pattern". I have, quietly and calmly (note: I may in fact be shitting thee at this point) noted a widely documented phenomenon, "survivorship bias".

@munin One of the early examples of this comes from WWII, where, faced with massive aircraft (and crew, if you're counting) loss rates in missions over the European front, Abraham Wald suggested examination of returning craft for bulletholes /and putting additional armouring where the holes weren't/. Because the planes hit there didn't make it back.

(Wald, and his wife, died in a plane crash over India, though it's not thought he was shot from the skies.)

@munin On a similar basis, if the members of the Wednesday Night Club, which meets on Thursdays, rather than Tuesdays as previously, is asked whether or not they'd prefer to move meetings to Monday ... you might, /just possibly/ have to contend with the fact that those present and voting have already indicated a certain preference and bias.

By a similar argument, an application design which makes it ... maternally emotionally fixedly impossible ... to address a task ...

@munin ... might in fact /not be selected for use by those attempting to accomplish said task, should they have any ... maternally emotively fixated ... choice in the matter.

Which of course means that those users, and by this I mean myself, who actually attempt to do such a thing, are clearly mad as clams.

That's the survivorship-bias argument.

I've also proposed an alternative theory: that of the tyranny of the minimum viable user.

https://redd.it/69wk8y

@munin The upshot of which is that in pretty much any product-market, /if/ that product was /initially/ aimed at a selective and discerning class of customer, then /as that market expands/, and by definition the customer base becomes larger, and less discerning, the quality and suitability of the product for discerning uses will /inevitably/ decline.

An earlier formulation of this is "Moen's Law of Bicycles" -- Good customers make for good products.

#GreshamsLaw

@munin "Quality thrives only when people can tell the difference. When they haven't a clue about products and how they work, schlock merchandise prevails. One can see this process at work in retail computing...: People who know least about computing always insist most on achieving bottom dollar... Gradually, this effect tends to drive good merchandise out of the market entirely, leaving a generous selection of cheap crud."

http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/lexicon.html

@munin The problem becomes ... acute ... when the customer base is very large, the skill range wide, and the minimum skill level exceptionally low.

Take, for example, Android.

For a time an online counter tracked the number of registered G+ profiles. It's most recent value was somewhere north of 3 billion accounts. To a rough approximation, this is the number of registered Android devices.

I posit this represents a large user base, approximating overall user skills.

@munin So, we might ask, how good are overall user skills?

An OECD survey finds they are /abysmally/ bad. Over half the population, and over 2/3 in most surveyed industrialised countries, have poor, "below poor", *** or no computer skills at all. ***

This is on a scale where only 5-8% of users have "advanced" skills. Such as ... using a wordprocessor's search-and-replace feature.

Programmers & sysadmins? 0.1%.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/computer-skill-levels/

@munin Mind: this /does/ indeed pose a legitimate challenge to Google, and I can somewhat feel for them. What I'm asking for ... hell, what I /need/ ... is not a widely-shared requirement. It's the sort of claim that's difficult to justify if your goal is not in fact addressing user needs but, say, just picking an incentive at random ....

Maximising advertising-eyeball exposure.

Which, unreliable sources inform me may in fact correspond to certain business models.

@munin Not, as it turns out, a newly-recognised problem. There's a delightful, short book published in 1909, "Commercialism and Journalism", by one Hamilton Holt, publisher of "The Independent" magazine, discussing the meteoric rise, and impact, of advertising on the publishing world. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

It is disarmingly frank. And terrifying.

https://archive.org/stream/commercialismjou00holtuoft#page/n7/mode/2up

@munin But back to your question: yes, when I'm researching something complex, I tend to open ... numerous tabs.

If I had my druthers about environments, I'd be on a desktop Linux system, with Firefox, Tree-Style Tabs, and Vimperator. And when I completed a specific short-term task, I'd collapse the tab subtree I was working on, and nuke the whole motherfucking thing, right there and then, with a not-inconsiderable level of satisfaction.

Takes a second or so.

@munin But seriously. I've got a post-it on my desk lamp, dated 15 April, reading "close tabs". That's my message to myself to try to whittle down the tab list on my Chrome/Android instance. Fat lot of good that.

/end/