I just saw a coworker with something like 30 tabs open in Chrome. I also know someone who regularly hits the 500-tab limit on their phone, though I suspect that’s more about being messy than anything else.
When I’m researching something, I might have 10-50 tabs open for a while, but once I’m done, I close them all. If I need them again, browser history is there.
Why do people keep so many tabs open? Is there a workflow or habit I’m missing? Do they just never clean up, or is there a real benefit to tab hoarding? I’m genuinely curious. Why do people do that?
Keeping them open keeps them more visible than if you only rely on bookmarks or browser history. Personally I use a browser extension for vertical tabs (Tree Style Tab) that allows you to make subgroups, which does a great job organizing the tabs - I could replicate something similar with bookmarks, but that would be additional work.
I also use an extension that automaticaly unloads tabs after a while (you can toggle it off on a per-tab basis, of course), which helps a lot with keeping down resource use.
you get it.
i tried using bookmark tags for a while but it’s just a lot of extra work.
that’s one thing firefox could actually improve with their insistence on pushing ai into everything: tag my bookmarks for me and allow searching through them by topic rather than title.
I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.
There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.
I am never close to 100. I don’t even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
I use them as a sort of bookmark cache. Stuff I’m unlikely to want to keep for long but also not stuff I want to discard immediately. I use the tree style tabs plugin in ff, works beautifully
Interesting. I get it that making bookmarks takes some effort, so it’s easier to just ignore that system and use tabs instead. If you have hundreds of tabs open, how can you find anything? I just use the history of Firefox to find old stuff. The search feature actually works. Just sort by date and you can find that news article you almost read two months go.
I split the tabs into multiple windows by category, personally (tho firefox’s tab grouping is pretty great too). And it’s more about it being present - bookmarks are fine, but if I am not actively reminded of something I likely will just forget about it entirely. Bookmarks aren’t visible all the time, so they just get forgotten.
For people who are overwhelmed by tidying up (or can’t find anything afterwards xD) or managing bookmarks. So they simply use a chaotic system.
Bad parenting
Not all disabilities are visible.
This may or may not be a joke, but yes, this is very often talked about among ADHDers!
I’m AuDHD and thankfully this is one area where my ordered, autistic side wins out – i.e. I have meticulously organised bookmarks and “Raindrop” tags for everything instead. 😄 I couldn’t stand having tons of tabs open.
It’s a to do list
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
Rookie numbers
I usually have 50-70 tabs open, spread across 6-8 windows.
Each window is for a particular client, usually with various pages from their website, plus the equivalent CMS editing page, their socials, etc. I’m regularly doing a small job for one client here, another there, and so on, so it’s easier to just leave them open.
I also usually have at least one or two windows with my own stuff - Lemmy, BlueSky, a football ⚽ forum I use, YouTube, BBC News, etc.
It’s messy, but it works on the whole. It’s a pain whenever I need to restart or run updates though, since I need to check every tab to make sure it’s safe to close! 😁
Totally understandable in a work context. At work, I can have like 50 tabs and several windows open when comparing products, prices or whatever. When there’s nothing urgent like that going on, there’s no need to keep them open. I’ll just close a bunch of tabs when they’ve served their purpose.
At home though, that’s a bit rare. When researching something, I can have 10-30 tabs easily, but they are also very temporary. When I’m done, I just close them.
Some people seem to hoard tabs instead. They just keep opening more and more without ever really closing the ones they no longer need. Or do they still need them like 3 weeks later? Seems doubtful to me.
There are also a few things I need regularly, so I’ll just bookmark those places for easy access. After an update, I’ll click those links and I’m ready to continue where I left off earlier.
I can almost never find things in my browser history. I keep windows with relevant tabs open on separate workspaces.
I wonder the same about people with hundreds of unread emails. Almost as if they don’t know that you can unsubscribe from newsletters.
I go through and unsub to stuff, but some keep coming back. Then I make a filter to delete them when they come.
Looking at what I have now, it’s a mix of tasks I don’t want to forget to do, a long article I was reading but felt i wasn’t absorbing, some fanfic I am probably going to read in the next couple days plus the rec list I got them from, a podcast I’m still midway through for when I’m driving, an article for a work thing I’ll need tomorrow, a couple dnd race pages open as I’m making a character for a new campaign, and two bsky people who post interesting articles on the daily so I read them daily. Some stuff is bookmarked, but if I’m using it in the next week, it stays in tabs.
They all get closed when I’m done with them, but new things get rotated in. I’m at my max now, but it’s rare I have under five open. It’s a to-do list, basically, and there are always new things to do, and read, and think about, and learn. Bookmarks are for when I want to save a link to look at much later. Like, webcomics I’ve caught up with, artists I like, utility pages, resources, etc.
I used to be “worse” because I had fun in the early 00s generating link lists for character fan pages. It involved opening every relevant link on an already vetted and tagged page, and then checking each one (and opening pages from their links if they turned out to be relevant). When I finished a character, I’d start on the next, so I’d have one or two hundred open most of the time. I lost interest, eventually. The impulse to link to relevant topics still exists in me, however, which is a big reason I’m on this website.
The weirdest thing to me is how some people brag about how many tabs they have open as if it’s a competition. Like, it shouldn’t be a point of pride, it just shows you don’t know how to use bookmarks.
I think it’s closely related to people with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox, and people who keep all their files on their desktop. Some people just live in chaos.
Why spend all that time making and deleting bookmarks when I can just leave some tabs open? Also, too many sites are poorly designed and the desired data can’t be directly accessed from a URL.
Didn’t Linus do some completely absurd tab setup a few years ago? They had like a crazy amount of ram, and started opening thousands of tabs to see if they can max out the ram or whatever. I’m pretty sure Linus has the bragging rights when it comes to tab count.
When you accumulate hundreds of tabs as a part of normal everyday life, that just looks messy and unorganized to me. Maybe this post will enlighten me. Maybe there is a valid use case other than stress testing hardware.
BTW that with 500 tabs also uses the desktop as a dumping for all their digital trash and treasures. It’s true, some people really do live in chaos.
i use hundreds of tabs, have disabled desktop icons, and run inbox zero. i refuse to fit in your boxes!
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
I always mean to go back to them but never do. It’s usually something that is not quite important enough to bookmark. At some point they reach critical mass and I lose the whole session. Tab savers mitigate this, however. Funny thing is, I never used to be a tab guy - I always just opened new pages.
Do tabs use less memory or something? Are they more system resource efficient overall?
Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec
I open a tab, read half of it.
“I’ll finish it later”
opens another tab
repeat forever…
Infinite tabs. The question of “how many” isn’t even relevant at that point. The real question is: countable or uncountable infinity?
