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?
No clue. The only time I have more than three open is when I’m researching some stupid question I have, and then I immediately close them after I get the answer. Even then, if I get too many, and am frustrated in my search, I’ll close them all in disgust and start over.
If it’s something I want to save for reference, I save it locally with the SingleFile extension, because contrary to popular belief, shit gets deleted off websites all the time.
I regularly filter out tabs on laptop, bookmarking things and closing stuff that isn’t on todo list for the next 24h.
Mobile though, clicling that through UI takes so much time I can’t be bothered. I just open new stuff on top, and maybe sometimes go through tabs like as if that’s browser history.
At work? Every shit is a browser app now. Hard to organize.
The only instances of this I have seen (on mobile) were not very tech-savvy people who click links in messages and apps, rarely open the browser, and/or don’t understand how to use the browser to begin with.
I suspect they lack whatever visceral reaction makes me start to panic if I have more tabs open than fit neatly across the top of the browser.
I have that sort of desire for order too. Seems to come with anxiety when seeing a pile of tabs spiraling out of control. So far, that set of traits have served me well, but some people are clearly built different. Maybe they’re immune to chaos.
Oh, I like chaos fine. With me it’s… fear of loss? I have to close all unnecessary tabs myself so I don’t lose track of and accidentally close the few important ones.
Because, shockingly, not everyone sees the world the way you do.
Why do people consider the way others do things as flawed, or pathologize the behaviours of others?
Also, browser history is awful.
ADHD.
Surprisingly many people have brought that up. Probably not a coincidence. Maybe that’s the thing I didn’t think of.
People with ADHD (I speak from experience) have shitty working memory, poor organisational skills, are easily distracted, and a tendancy to procrasate.
Therefore you start researching something for work/uni (4tabs) I’ll come back to that after a little YouTube break (+3tabs) I’ll watch those videos later I need to get back to work (+4 tabs that are duplicates of the first 4). Time for home, when do I need to catch the bus (+1) and the first 12 tabs will just stay open till the next day because you know you won’t remember what you were doing.
I am surprised by all the ADHD responses. I have ADHD and being able to see all the tabs I’m not using makes me anxious. I have to close them. If I really need them, I move them to a separate window and pretend it’s not there.
ADHD is a spectrum disorder much like the tism.
No idea. I close tabs as soon as I’m done. Also private tab by default
ADHD
I don’t really see anyone admitting the truth: digital hoarding. At a certain number of tabs it becomes nearly impossible to find anything so it’s hard for me to believe people really find the practice as useful as they claim. I probably have 50 tabs open but I use a tab group extension that keeps most hidden (and Firefox doesn’t load the content in inactive tabs after you restart it). Most are essentially bookmarks but I’d be lying if I said even 20% of them end up being useful to keep open.
Ok, so is it just the feeling of keeping something that might be useful? Isn’t that what hoarding really is? I guess it’s better to hoard tabs than photos, let alone physical papers.
Yes and yes, to a degree. I think most people are hoarders on some small scale but at a certain point it’s harmful. But yeah digital hoarding is probably the least harmful type.
Yup, that’s also the reason I have them a lot.
Other times it’s just me being too lazy to close them, cause I feel lost in all the tabs and don’t know anymore which to close. There should be a toggleable option to default close tabs when they’ve not been opened for 30 days or more. Perhaps with a question “this tab is about to be closed, do you want it closed or bookmarked?”
Just tried a cool extension called OneTab. It condenses all of your tabs into a neat list of links. That way, each site doesn’t take any more RAM than line of text. The tab is technically closed, but you can easily access it from the OneTab menu. Looks and feels more like a vertical tab bar really. Might want to try it out. That way, you never have to let go any tabs ever again.
Neat. Does it somehow save session info along with the link?
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.
Do none of these people know about the bookmarks bar? And that you can literally put folders on it if you want?
What do you mean they’re not visible, of course they are
I’m never actually going to look in the bookmarks folder so why would I put anything there?
Bookmarks bar. It’s literally a toolbar under your URL bar that you can have displaying always.
You can put folders on that bar (with no name if you want so it takes up almost no space) if you want.
Hahahaha, right.
I guess these people just can’t be bothered to organize stuff. I find a bit puzzling that they prefer to live with chaos like that. I would feel very anxious and frustrated if I had to deal with a hundred tabs in a single window all the time.
I don’t even really have mine organized. I tried at one point, but meh…
It’s still all there at the top of my browser, right under the URL bar, except they are all open tabs, because that’s not what tabs are for.
Shockingly, some people function differently to you.
Maybe they have a superpower for staying calm even though everything around them is a total mess. I know I don’t have that power.
The whole entire world is a giant fucked up mess run by mentally handicapped billionaires. Shits fucking terrifying and we’re all cooked. Having a neat browser window isn’t going to fix that.
The point is that it may look like a mess to you but that doesn’t mean it is objectively a mess. Hundreds of open tabs can still have logic and organisation even if that is not obvious to you.
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
