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?

  • AA5B@lemmy.world
    9·
    1 day ago

    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

    • BussyCat@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 day ago

      Why not just close them and open them back up later? Like you can bookmark the pages so you don’t lose your spot but I find it annoying to find the tab I am looking for at around 10 I would imagine it’s much worse at 200

      • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        17 hours ago

        Why not just close them and open them back up later?

        Because that’s extra steps for no actual improvement.

        I close the tabs that I’m done with and add new ones when I want to not forget to look at something a bit later.

        That doesn’t need the “permanence” of a bookmark. (And, obviously I know editing bookmarks is a thing, but that is also extra steps for something I’ll only want once in about 15 min from now)

        • BussyCat@lemmy.world
          2·
          15 hours ago

          Isn’t there a vast improvement by having a clean set of tabs that you can read the names of compared to 100 little tabs that you have to click through?

          • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
            2·
            8 hours ago

            I didn’t claim I had a hundred of them going at any give time.

            And, regardless, I also don’t keep them open forever. I just close the one I’m finished with, check out the next one, then repeat until I’m through with them.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
        4·
        20 hours ago

        I don’t generally find any tab. I work with the set related to my task then close them. The tabs for the previous task are right there, so I can just continue that task until completed, then close those tabs.

        It partly works, but I don’t always close tabs for interruptions and aren’t always able to work my way back to uncompleted tasks, so it builds up.

        I want to start using workspaces or tab groups to improve my discipline but haven’t yet

        Edit: and yes there are times when I don’t remember I started a task or can’t find my set of tabs so open a new set.

        And no, multiple windows was a horrible idea. Instead of making it easier to organized tab sets, it made it easier to open many more tabs

      • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
        6·
        1 day ago

        You can search specifically for open tabs in Firefox and probably most other browsers (enter % [keyword] in Firefox’ address bar). If you tend to have related tabs near it, it’s less work than opening all those tabs back up through bookmarks or history.