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 easily hit 500+ tabs, usually against 1000 or so, and usually spread around over 40 windows on 4 different desktops, so it’s fairly wellp organized as all tabs in a window are about the same subject.
Most auto close after about 15 mins to spare resources because websites these days just are insanely heavy. I used to do 2000 sites with maybe 32GB mem, now I need a tab auto closer to be able to manage half of that.
The question was “why?” Not "can you demonstrate the world’s most extreme case of this thing that baffles me?’
When I’m doing youtube research, I search for something, and open 10-20 tabs from the search results (ctrl+click). They don’t really fully open in the background, but when I switch to those tabs, that’s when they really starts loading. If I quickly flip through all 20 tabs, it’s going to max out my ancient CPU for a minute or two. Somehow 24 GB is still fine but the CPU seems to be the biggest bottle neck with my computer.
BTW I recall seeing something about tabs going to sleep automatically. If your browser does that, then the RAM shouldn’t be a problem. You could easily open a thousand pages, and only a fraction of them would actually be in RAM.
Anyway, 40 windows seems pretty intense. I don’t think I would enjoy doing that. Occasionally, when I have a lot of active topics, I just copy those URLs to a txt file to keep things organized. If I did that more frequently, I might try bookmarks too. Anyway, the point of doing that is to keep the window count down to something that I can easily manage.