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 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 friend has ADHD and 300 tabs. I’m pretty sure they are related.
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
They can’t organise bookmarks
For me it is not about being unable to organise them but once it is bookmarked it is basically gone from my sight and memory.
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.
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.
That is very interesting. I should probably try that automatic tab management thing. Any recommendations?
because i forget to close useless ones.
They use to be new window (not like a pop up, but a new window). Today every new page or “new window” becomes a new tab.
And before you know it, you have dozens of tabs open. But no way you use to have 30 different windows open, since that would drive you crazy with alt+tab.
So the bar is low and it’s easy to keep them open as well. So people will.
That being said. Do we want to go back to 30 windows? I don’t think so.
Floorp has additional features that keep you managed. Like Workspaces. And also you can group tabs. Or even use colored tabs.
I can almost never find things in my browser history. I keep windows with relevant tabs open on separate workspaces.
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
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.
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.
My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
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.
Well, that is a good point. Tabs are always more or less visible, so you may remember to check something that looked interesting last week.
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.
CGP grey once spoke about those links on Cortex.
Instead of reading everything that seems important and interesting today, he just saves those links and gets back to them later. A few weeks later, he just ends up deleting most of that stuff anyway, because it wasn’t actually all that important.
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! 😁
Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
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.
Bad parenting
Just checked and I’ve got 24 tabs open right now. Basically in my case I have a list of things I’d want to do at any given moment (chat on Whatsapp, watch anime, learn Chinese, etc), so each one gets its own tab group with things I’d usually want for the thing in question easily accessible. For example in my anime tab group I have My Anime List, two tabs with different anime and Reddit discussion threads. Also in my defense I’m looking for an oven right now so that’s inflating my tab numbers a little.
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?
