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?
I have 2 or 3 open at once at most. If I can’t remember what it’s for, it gets closed. And if I need to find it again, searching my history is easier than searching my open tabs
I just can’t handle tab frenzy
“i wonder what that article said about the thing i was thinking of. what was the article about again? …what site was it?”
anyway, ask me about my 400 open tabs
I mean, you can scan the page titles in your history just as easily as you can scan the titles of 400 tabs. So it’s kind of same same if you can’t remember any pertinent details
yeah but i can remember that they exist if i can see them
Some browsers will not keep your history indefinitely (or even more than a month) any more
Tab History shows every instance of a tab, not just 1 for the 300 times you visited it.
Do you ever close any of them?
sure, when i’m done with them
Ok that makes sense. It’s not an infinitely growing mess then.
weeeeeeeeell
Sounds like “when I’m done with them” comes with a caveat, right?
You’ll close them eventually, but let’s not worry about it this week. Next month could be too early, but within the next 6 months should be doable.
i had to recreate my profile a few years ago because some settings and tabs were coming up on 20 years old and started affecting the performance of the browser.
Today I tried a few tab management extensions, and I found OneTab.
You might want to look into that one. It just saves all the tabs into a list that looks and feels a bit like a vertical tab bar. Since none of the tabs are actually loaded, they don’t really take any more RAM than a line of text. This way, you never have to close any tabs again. Just condense all of with OneTab and you’ll always be able to find them later. The only downside is that they aren’t quite as visible as normal tabs.
Same. I tend to tidy up my tabs regularly. If I have more than 10 tabs open, I usually don’t care about them any more, so it’s time for them to go. Also, I’m a huge fan of searching the history. It has saved the day more than a few times.
Apparently, some people operate differently. Makes me wonder why.