Two tabs, one account

Two tabs open on the same service are not two independent copies. They share whatever the browser holds for that service, which means they share the signed in state, and anything that changes it in one affects the other immediately and silently.

The tabs do not know this about each other. Each shows whatever was true when it last loaded, so the display can be out of date in one tab while the other is current, and there is nothing on screen to indicate which is which.

• An action that works in one tab and fails in the other, with no obvious difference between them.
• Being signed out in one tab while the other still shows a signed in page.
• Something you did in one tab not appearing in the other until you reload it.
• A page that seems to have gone backwards, because you are looking at an older snapshot.

Every one of those symptoms looks like something malfunctioning, and none of them is. They are the ordinary consequence of a display that was drawn at one moment and state that moved afterwards.

The cost of misreading them is real. People conclude something is wrong, start retrying, and generate exactly the situation that causes the most trouble: several attempts at the same action in slightly different states, with no clear picture of which of them took effect.

One tab. Do one thing at a time in it, let each thing complete, and close it when you are finished.

This is not a technique and there is no clever version. It removes an entire category of confusion at the cost of a small amount of convenience, and the convenience it costs is the ability to keep something open while you look at something else, which is the habit that produced the problem.

Anywhere an action cannot be taken back. Multiple tabs plus an irreversible action is the combination behind most of the accounts of things going wrong that are actually about tabs rather than about services.

The panel on finalising and the panel on the irreversible steps both come back to this. If you are about to do something you cannot undo, being certain about what state you are looking at is not a small detail.

This panel word count, its share of the whole board, the links leaving it, and how many pages sit at each depth in the site tree. All four are countable from the pages in front of you.

There is nothing about tabs to measure. This site has no access to a browser, no telemetry of any kind, and no way to observe anybody doing anything. So it measures itself and says so, which is the rule everywhere on this board.

The version of this that actually happens to people is not two tabs opened deliberately. It is one tab opened days ago, buried behind a dozen others, and a second one opened because the first was forgotten.

That is worse than the deliberate case in one specific way: you do not know the old tab exists, so when the symptoms appear there is no candidate explanation. Something behaves oddly, nothing in your current window accounts for it, and the cause is a tab you cannot see.

The remedy is the same dull one. Close things when you finish with them, on purpose, rather than letting them accumulate. It is a tidiness habit rather than a technical one, which is why it gets ignored, and why the symptoms it produces get blamed on services.

Do two windows behave differently from two tabs?

Generally not in the way that matters. They share the same state for the same service unless you have gone out of your way to separate them.

Is reloading both tabs a fix?

It makes both current at that moment. It does not stop them diverging again as soon as you act in one of them.