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?
Out of sight, out of mind, which means it comes with pros and cons though. If you feel like 500 tabs is consuming too much of your mental bandwidth, then offloading some of them to bookmarks should help. The idea is that only active stuff would be in the tabs, while everything a bit less active would be in the bookmarks.
Some people just don’t roll that way, and this thread has some interesting comments about that style too. Turns out, people use their browsers in vastly different ways.
While I was writing my master’s thesis I tried to put things in the bookmarks folder and ended up re-researching a lot of topics. It ended up being much less work having 6 browser windows open across 2 monitors with a bunch of tabs relating to related subjects. For example window 1 might have only papers related to retrograde tracer studies in the medial entorhinal cortex, window 2 has anterograde tracer studies in the insular cortex etc that way if I needed info on any of those subjects I could flip through the tabs related to that topic before searching for a paper.
In other words, that’s the kind of stuff you need to reference frequently, so having those tabs constantly open is quite useful for the task at hand.
Other people seem to just neglect and abandon a bunch of tab. That’s a very different crowd though.
No I also tend to have about 12 irrelevant tabs open too. But it’s all down to executive dysfunction.