getting in ยท post 06 of 7 in this channel
One tab, one window, and why that matters on WTN market
The instinct is to open all three addresses at once and use whichever answers first. It is a reasonable instinct and it works badly here.
the three wethenorth market addresses
hn2paw7zfvndw3dovycegeqmvvnf4pl67b3g2p7pohjlzavloosh73id.onionhn2paw7zrgujyhnt6mgxlt2q6uhgbke4itpqitxhyfbumq3wtnckbuyd.onionhn2paw7zadwkcra3qzv5e4q547i7e5lvxm62cfxqftuqdu7moiu2ceyd.onionprinted the way they were handed over. no labels, no numbering, nothing here says which one to try first. this feed never opens them, so it has no status light, no percentage and no date of checking to give you.
why the instinct is understandable
On the normal web, parallel tabs are free. Loading three copies of something costs you nothing except a little bandwidth, and the fastest one wins.
Here the same move loads three sets of Tor circuits at once, and it makes every one of them slower. You have not created a race, you have created congestion.
and then there is the session
If you sign in on one tab and then start poking at another, you now have a session that two tabs both think they own. Sites do not always handle that gracefully.
The usual symptom is being logged out unexpectedly, or an action that seems to succeed and then does not appear. Neither of those looks like a tab problem when it happens, which is why people chase the wrong cause.
The post on sessions and logging out covers the other half of this.
the tidier habit
One address, one tab. If it does not answer after a genuinely long wait, close that tab and try the next address in a fresh one.
Closing rather than leaving it spinning matters. A stalled tab keeps working in the background and keeps taking a share of your connection.
This is slower in wall clock terms and faster in practice, which is a pattern that repeats everywhere on this site.
the other windows
Keeping unrelated browsing in the same Tor Browser window is its own small mistake. Circuits are shared by site, but your attention is not, and the tab you paste something into is the tab you were not looking at.
Keeping ordinary browsing in your ordinary browser and this in Tor Browser is a cleaner arrangement, and it costs nothing.
It also gives you a crude but effective rule you can apply without thinking: if it is in the Tor Browser window, it is this. If it is anywhere else, it is not. Rules that simple survive being tired, and more elaborate ones do not.
while you wait
Do something else. Genuinely. The urge to fiddle with a loading page produces reloads, extra tabs and eventually a search for a faster address, which is the failure mode.
Patience is not a virtue being recommended here for its own sake. It is the cheapest defence available against the specific thing that goes wrong.
There is also a smaller benefit that people underrate. With one tab open, you always know what is on your screen. With five, you are relying on memory, and memory is exactly the faculty that fails while you are impatient and mildly annoyed.
A single tab is not a security measure. It is a way of keeping your own attention honest, which turns out to matter more often.
replies
a reader askedCan I stay signed in on two mirrors at once?
the answerYou can attempt it and it tends to go badly, with sessions interfering rather than coexisting. There is no benefit to set against the mess.
a reader askedIs opening several tabs actually dangerous or just annoying?
the answerMostly annoying, with one real edge: confusion about which tab is which is how things get pasted into the wrong place. That is a real risk with a boring cause.
a reader askedWhat if I need to compare two pages?
the answerOpen one, read it, close it, open the other. Slower, and it removes the entire class of mistake where you act on the wrong tab.
what this post is not Not a claim that the market forbids multiple tabs. It is about what tends to go wrong, not about a rule anyone published.