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?
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.
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.
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.
Can confirm. Nowadays the URL doesn’t really say much. Even if you bookmark something, what you see there isn’t really saved anywhere. The link will lead you to something that’s somewhere in the approximate neighborhood, but not exactly what you wanted to save.
One of these first world problems again…
It takes literally no time. You click the star in the URL bar and save it to your bookmarks bar
And what about when I don’t need it any more? Just leave them all in there, eventually cluttering up my bookmarks even worse than the tab situation?
Yep, it’s simply open and close. Bookmarks is open, bookmark, close, open again sometime later from bookmarks, close, then go back in and delete bookmark.
Bookmarks for me are super long term saves, not normal daily use.
And if you use a good extension or something, open tabs are fine. Im using simple tab groups in Firefox and it’s fantastic.
You can right click it and click “delete” if it bothers you that much.
Tabs are temporary and were never meant to be kept from session to session. The only reason they do now is because people like yourself kept eating up all your RAM with them and then complaining when everything got slow.
Show me where I was complaining thusly.
I think it’s closely related to people with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox,
Nope.
I have a half dozen email address, about 20 aliases.
My inbox rarely has even 5 unopened emails.
I have 100+ tabs on desktop, over 100 on phone.
Do you ever close those tabs?
i use hundreds of tabs, have disabled desktop icons, and run inbox zero. i refuse to fit in your boxes!
Okay, I was curious what Inbox Zero is, and I went ‘ew’ at the ‘ai’ angle, but then I fucking lost it when I got to the prices. They want $18 a month (per user) on the annual plan, to:
- basically tags your email, which you can set up yourself using folders, and probably near identical through gmail or something
- get ai replies written up for you… which I think gmail also does now
- ‘blocks cold emails’ which is just the spam filter with a fresh coat of paint
- ‘bulk unsubscibed / archive’… you can do that in most modern email clients? I guess not in bulk but how many shitty newsletters and promos do you subscribe to, really?
- and an ‘analysis’ of your email…?
I do everything except the ai replies through cpanel and my email client, for free. Fucking hell, that’s almost 3x what I pay for my web/email hosting. And I don’t have to prepay for a year of service, and I get way more granular control over incoming messages. That service is highway robbery, and they have 15k users?! What the actual fuck. $18 a year, kinda high, but a fucking month…
Inbox zero means handling your emails in such a way that you keep your inbox empty. Sounds like someone named a shitty SAAS product after the concept.
See my other comment :p
okay i’ve never heard of that. inbox zero just means having nothing in your inbox.
Yeah, lol, I figured it wasn’t a real thing but search turned up this immediately: https://www.getinboxzero.com/
oh ew
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
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.
“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
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.
yeah but i can remember that they exist if i can see them
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.
ADHD
That’s a very popular explanation here.
It’s also most likely not an explanation. I’m ADHD too, and I hate having browser tabs open. I keep them as few as possible, closing them as soon as I don’t know what they are or why they’re open.
I am reading a text and there’s a link in it, that I want to follow up. But first I want to finish the text, so I open the link in the background.
Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.
Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.
Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).
I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.
For me, it more boils down to keeping my place within a web page or ever-updating feed.
For instance… If I’m going down a rabbit hole, I could have 4 root tabs open. Those tabs may have lengthy articles and would reference secondary sites throughout the page. Rather then having a good chance of the browser losing my place down the page by clicking on a link normally, I open it in a new tab. This allows me to switch to it, skim down to where it was referenced to understand that part of it, then switch back to the root tab while leaving the secondary tab open to fully read through when I finish with the root one. As the rabbit hole deepens, those secondary tabs may eventually become root tabs which may also reference their own secondary sites or even each other. The number of tabs just keeps growing until I either run out of those secondary tabs or I am just satisfied with the amount of info I gained. This can also happen over several days or weeks and have other rabbit holes open at the same time.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense too. That sort of forking is very common, especially when reading Wikipedia articles. Occasionally I have several wikipedia tabs open, but once I’ve drilled down deep enough, I lose interest, and close all of those tabs.
When researching any topic, it’s really common to have lots of tabs open, but I always close them as soon as they have served their purpose. I guess that’s the key difference here. Actually that difference is interesting. Why do I lose interest so quickly or why do you keep yours open for several days or even weeks?
Not OP, but many topics last longer than a week.
I’m not going to finish Factorio in a week, and my collection of tabs on factorioLab, sheets, drawio, and the wiki are both interrelated and mark the several projects I have going. That’s also a topic that would be very annoying to reopen every week, and also would lead to bookmark clutter as most of those tabs will get closed when the projects are finished.
There’s also research tabs for things that will come up later. I have 6 open right now for configuring a smart home system that won’t get opened until I can actually see the system in person, but I don’t know when that will happen.
And there’s also long running series, like text stories, podcasts, or youtube series. That would be a nightmare to update bookmarks for, but those tabs will track progress just fine.
I suppose I keep tabs exactly because I want to keep interest for weeks, but I know I’ll forget all the details between sessions.
Those long projects are a proper use case I don’t really have much experience with. I would probably just end up bookmarking them and opening the sites when I need them.
However, tracking progress is a whole different thing. That’s a very valid use case IMO. Bokmarks just weren’t built for that sort of thing, whereas an open tab works perfectly. Actually, some other people have also pointed out that an open tab will store the place where you were. For example, if it’s a long article, it knows exactly how far you’ve scrolled and it will allow you to easily pick up where you left off last time. That is something I rarely do, but now I can definitely see the value in keeping those tabs open.
Keeping the interest active is also a pretty good point. If the tab is open, it will remind you of its existence. If you bookmark a site, it will be very easy to forget it ever existed. You would have to actively seek it out to be reminded of it. As some other people have already said: bookmarks is the place where tabs go to die.
I have close to 200. Every task I start has a new set of tabs. In theory I’ll complete them and work my way back through the stack
Imagine you start researching something else before you’ve had the opportunity to finish your last. I have 10-20 tabs open for each of several in progress projects on my tablet
Yeah, that does happen from time to time. In that case, I tend to use separate browser windows for each topic. There could be 5-20 tabs in each, and maybe about 30 tabs in total. It’s pretty rare to go over that.
However, some people seem to have 100+ tabs in a single window with no other windows or even tab groups. They just dump everything into something that looks like a huge mountain of pure chaos.
So you admit to doing the same thing.
Only for an hour or two when the situation calls for it. When I’m done researching that topic, I close the tabs and windows. During normal days, I have 3-10 tabs and only one window. Usually, all of those tabs can be closed and forgotten.
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.
It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.
I hear what you’re saying, but not once have I ever seen somebody with lots of tabs be able to find what they’re looking for in those tabs. They almost always click through several, then open a new tab and navigate to the content they need.
Sucks to be them I guess?
Good for you.
I simply scroll down my tab bar to what I’m looking for.
I’m down to 130 tabs from 170
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because I’m working on multiple tasks at once, and some of those tasks require comparing things like data sheets or products or reading multiple documents
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because I don’t want to dig up the thing I was looking at yesterday with a 10-tab group, but I also ran out of time yesterday to complete the task
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because I can and it’s convenient
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because I keep something open until I have dealt with it, so it functions as a task list
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In many cases are issues to keep dealing with later after the current urgency is solved, is faster and more effective than trying to register the progress somewhere and save it for later… eventually some fell out forever and just accumulate, also start cleaning/clossing often reveal sooner than later something pending and the maintenance stops abruptly there
Only 30?
Depends on the taks I’m working on. If it’s a simple tech problem, 10 would be a lot. If it involves comparing various products, specs and prices, hitting 50 is quite normal. The key here is that I always close the tabs as soon as I’m done with that topic.
If it’s something I need to get back to later, it requires a more permanent place than browser tabs.
Because I’m going to need those! Not this second / day / week / month, but I’m going to need those and I have way too many bookmarks!
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.
Ok, so you have a lot of stuff going on, which is fine. You’re also keeping it under control, so the numbers never get totally crazy.
That’s not at all what I see some other people doing. They have like hundreds of tabs open all the time, and I have no idea if there’s any method to that madness.
More madness and less method the more tabs are open is my guess.
