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Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.



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