When I found my first tabbed browser. Netcaptor. It changed everything. Open in new tab. Open in new tab. Open in new tab.

Go back to the first tab which has finally finished loading. Consume.

It's funny to think back, as I've just recently installed a browser extension to do the opposite (i.e. to prevent "open in new tab" tabs from doing any work until I foreground them.)

Today, my computer's memory is far more constrained than its network bandwidth. I find it very easy to accidentally open tons of tabs very quickly (esp. from the HN front page!) until suddenly the browser is swapping and everything's slowing to a crawl trying to process all those new page DOMs.

And yet, even when it doesn't choke the computer, I find no real benefit to preloading pages in the background any more. At least on my connection, the page load time after I focus a tab is almost imperceptible.

How things have changed!