Today I was browsing recipes on Epicurious, opening recipes in tabs as I found them. Once I decided to save a recipe to my recipe box, I had to login to the site, at which point I was able to save…from within that tab. To save each of the other recipes I had opened in other tabs, I had to reload each tab, one by one, so that when it reloaded, it knew I was already logged in.

This is a common problem for a tab abuser like me: I often have multiple open tabs that have to be reloaded so that my site login can disseminate across all my open tabs. The smart thing to do would be to just remember to login before opening all those tabs, but apparently I’m not that smart.

I do understand the underlying technical obstacle that prevents an already-loaded tab from recognizing a login that occurs after loading. But I do wonder whether some clever coder out there could come up with a workaround. Maybe a browser plugin that notices when you are logging into a site, and automatically refreshes any open tabs that are pointed to the same site? (So that by the time you switch over to those tabs, they are already refreshed and logged in.) Better yet, is there conceivably some server-side solution — some Ajax-y magic that could periodically poll the mother ship for logged in status? (Hard for me to imagine how that would work, but I’m way beyond my actual tech skill level here.)

If we tab abusers are a small crowd, this is not a problem worth solving. But my hunch is that I’m not alone in experiencing this recurring source of irritation. Does it bug you, too?