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?
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.