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?

  • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
    1·
    1 hour ago

    That’s interesting. Sounds like you don’t view tabs as a temporary thing. I guess they were initially designed to be very temporary, but apparently many people have started to use them in a very different way. Any ideas why?

    • ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world
      1·
      24 minutes ago

      ADHD overhead to further organisation?

      I have folders of folders of bookmarks, save all tabs as a new dated bookmark folder at intervals (some bookmarks are therefore duplicated as many times as they continue to exist), just in case I hit the dreaded close all button.

      I do try to get rid of them as much as I can, but it’s like in my mind when I’m deleting them the question is “is this process still running?” and (due to ADHD?) I guess 300 tabs is the answer?

      Some things are not reproducible as bookmarks, for example pages with post content will be reposted on reload (or thawing)… which while perhaps is not great web design (and you would hope they would have error catching for safety), is a benefit of tab vs bookmark? Also I would say thumbnails as a visual reference, and they have actually saved me if a website has disappeared and all urls now get redirected, I have caught the title from the cached thumbnail.

      I have found “history”, even if you select “keep forever” is always being deleted, and bookmarks do not get surfaced on search, presumably due to inefficient search/index/storage, however, tabs are very reliably right there.

      If I could have a system, it would be no number of tabs, and they silently slip off into cold storage and lose their metadata over time, perhaps just a list of titles at the very top/bottom/oldest.

      This is insane, I understand that :-)