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?

  • tty5@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    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

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOP
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      7 days ago

      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.

        • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOP
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          7 days ago

          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.