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?
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My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
Yes, exactly. But also when I have to force quit my browser and it asks me if I want to reopen the tabs, I immediately click no. It’s like I’ve been released from an evil wizard’s curse. Then I can start a fresh tab hoard.
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
Interesting. I get it that making bookmarks takes some effort, so it’s easier to just ignore that system and use tabs instead. If you have hundreds of tabs open, how can you find anything? I just use the history of Firefox to find old stuff. The search feature actually works. Just sort by date and you can find that news article you almost read two months go.
My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
Same here, but the but my history is sorted by last visited. Usually I’m looking for something that’s relatively recent, so it should be among the first 10 results. However, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of having more tabs.
Firefox actually searches tabs first when you enter something into the adress bar and switches to the tab automatically when you press enter.
Oh that feature. I bump into it all the time when I want to open the same site 4 times and then fork them into 4 different things. Could be handy for other people, but I tend to find that feature more annoying than useful. Fortunately ctrl+l, ctrl+c, ctrl+t, ctrl+v works too. I do that so often that I should probably set up a macro that does that ctrl+LCTV combo in one click.
Anyway, that means tabs can be searched conveniently. Even if you have a hundred tabs open, you can actually find what you need.
I split the tabs into multiple windows by category, personally (tho firefox’s tab grouping is pretty great too). And it’s more about it being present - bookmarks are fine, but if I am not actively reminded of something I likely will just forget about it entirely. Bookmarks aren’t visible all the time, so they just get forgotten.
Well, that is a good point. Tabs are always more or less visible, so you may remember to check something that looked interesting last week.
For people who are overwhelmed by tidying up (or can’t find anything afterwards xD) or managing bookmarks. So they simply use a chaotic system.
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Just tried that extension, and it’s pretty cool. Might actually keep it.
Also tried OneTab which condenses open tabs into a single list of links. Could be ideal for people who always need more RAM.
Bad parenting
I usually have 50-70 tabs open, spread across 6-8 windows.
Each window is for a particular client, usually with various pages from their website, plus the equivalent CMS editing page, their socials, etc. I’m regularly doing a small job for one client here, another there, and so on, so it’s easier to just leave them open.
I also usually have at least one or two windows with my own stuff - Lemmy, BlueSky, a football ⚽ forum I use, YouTube, BBC News, etc.
It’s messy, but it works on the whole. It’s a pain whenever I need to restart or run updates though, since I need to check every tab to make sure it’s safe to close! 😁
Totally understandable in a work context. At work, I can have like 50 tabs and several windows open when comparing products, prices or whatever. When there’s nothing urgent like that going on, there’s no need to keep them open. I’ll just close a bunch of tabs when they’ve served their purpose.
At home though, that’s a bit rare. When researching something, I can have 10-30 tabs easily, but they are also very temporary. When I’m done, I just close them.
Some people seem to hoard tabs instead. They just keep opening more and more without ever really closing the ones they no longer need. Or do they still need them like 3 weeks later? Seems doubtful to me.
There are also a few things I need regularly, so I’ll just bookmark those places for easy access. After an update, I’ll click those links and I’m ready to continue where I left off earlier.
Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
The weirdest thing to me is how some people brag about how many tabs they have open as if it’s a competition. Like, it shouldn’t be a point of pride, it just shows you don’t know how to use bookmarks.
I think it’s closely related to people with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox, and people who keep all their files on their desktop. Some people just live in chaos.
Didn’t Linus do some completely absurd tab setup a few years ago? They had like a crazy amount of ram, and started opening thousands of tabs to see if they can max out the ram or whatever. I’m pretty sure Linus has the bragging rights when it comes to tab count.
When you accumulate hundreds of tabs as a part of normal everyday life, that just looks messy and unorganized to me. Maybe this post will enlighten me. Maybe there is a valid use case other than stress testing hardware.
BTW that with 500 tabs also uses the desktop as a dumping for all their digital trash and treasures. It’s true, some people really do live in chaos.
Why spend all that time making and deleting bookmarks when I can just leave some tabs open? Also, too many sites are poorly designed and the desired data can’t be directly accessed from a URL.
Can confirm. Nowadays the URL doesn’t really say much. Even if you bookmark something, what you see there isn’t really saved anywhere. The link will lead you to something that’s somewhere in the approximate neighborhood, but not exactly what you wanted to save.
One of these first world problems again…
It takes literally no time. You click the star in the URL bar and save it to your bookmarks bar
And what about when I don’t need it any more? Just leave them all in there, eventually cluttering up my bookmarks even worse than the tab situation?
You can right click it and click “delete” if it bothers you that much.
Tabs are temporary and were never meant to be kept from session to session. The only reason they do now is because people like yourself kept eating up all your RAM with them and then complaining when everything got slow.
Show me where I was complaining thusly.
Yep, it’s simply open and close. Bookmarks is open, bookmark, close, open again sometime later from bookmarks, close, then go back in and delete bookmark.
Bookmarks for me are super long term saves, not normal daily use.
And if you use a good extension or something, open tabs are fine. Im using simple tab groups in Firefox and it’s fantastic.
I think it’s closely related to people with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox,
Nope.
I have a half dozen email address, about 20 aliases.
My inbox rarely has even 5 unopened emails.
I have 100+ tabs on desktop, over 100 on phone.
Do you ever close those tabs?
i use hundreds of tabs, have disabled desktop icons, and run inbox zero. i refuse to fit in your boxes!
Okay, I was curious what Inbox Zero is, and I went ‘ew’ at the ‘ai’ angle, but then I fucking lost it when I got to the prices. They want $18 a month (per user) on the annual plan, to:
- basically tags your email, which you can set up yourself using folders, and probably near identical through gmail or something
- get ai replies written up for you… which I think gmail also does now
- ‘blocks cold emails’ which is just the spam filter with a fresh coat of paint
- ‘bulk unsubscibed / archive’… you can do that in most modern email clients? I guess not in bulk but how many shitty newsletters and promos do you subscribe to, really?
- and an ‘analysis’ of your email…?
I do everything except the ai replies through cpanel and my email client, for free. Fucking hell, that’s almost 3x what I pay for my web/email hosting. And I don’t have to prepay for a year of service, and I get way more granular control over incoming messages. That service is highway robbery, and they have 15k users?! What the actual fuck. $18 a year, kinda high, but a fucking month…
Inbox zero means handling your emails in such a way that you keep your inbox empty. Sounds like someone named a shitty SAAS product after the concept.
See my other comment :p
okay i’ve never heard of that. inbox zero just means having nothing in your inbox.
Yeah, lol, I figured it wasn’t a real thing but search turned up this immediately: https://www.getinboxzero.com/
oh ew
Looking at what I have now, it’s a mix of tasks I don’t want to forget to do, a long article I was reading but felt i wasn’t absorbing, some fanfic I am probably going to read in the next couple days plus the rec list I got them from, a podcast I’m still midway through for when I’m driving, an article for a work thing I’ll need tomorrow, a couple dnd race pages open as I’m making a character for a new campaign, and two bsky people who post interesting articles on the daily so I read them daily. Some stuff is bookmarked, but if I’m using it in the next week, it stays in tabs.
They all get closed when I’m done with them, but new things get rotated in. I’m at my max now, but it’s rare I have under five open. It’s a to-do list, basically, and there are always new things to do, and read, and think about, and learn. Bookmarks are for when I want to save a link to look at much later. Like, webcomics I’ve caught up with, artists I like, utility pages, resources, etc.
I used to be “worse” because I had fun in the early 00s generating link lists for character fan pages. It involved opening every relevant link on an already vetted and tagged page, and then checking each one (and opening pages from their links if they turned out to be relevant). When I finished a character, I’d start on the next, so I’d have one or two hundred open most of the time. I lost interest, eventually. The impulse to link to relevant topics still exists in me, however, which is a big reason I’m on this website.
That sounds like all of them are actually more or less active. It’s not like vast majority of them are neglected and forgotten.
Maybe you’re some sort of a power user who just needs a lot of tabs to get stuff done. I don’t see any problem with that. Since you also use bookmarks, you’re effectively controlling the chaos. That doesn’t look anything like the chaotic mess I’ve seen with some other people.
“power user” is such a kind way to describe that, thank you!
😄 You’re welcome!
It’s a to do list
I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks
I have those too…
Firefox has that pocket thing. Could be worth a try.
RIP Pocket. I did use it for a time before it was killed, but I had moved to self-hosted solution (readeck) prior to it being killed.
Oh it died already? Haven’t been following the news on that. I just couldn’t figure out what it’s good for, so I simply ignored it.
It was around for a long time but pretty recently Mozilla decided to kill it
I used to love that shit in the iPod Touch web browsing days… But in the end it ended up being another tab hoarding container for me lol.
I push shit to read-it-later things all the time but even when I don’t read them I think it’s good. I don’t have the annoying tab clutter anymore and clearly it wasn’t that important if I haven’t ever gotten around to reading it
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
Rookie numbers
CGP grey once spoke about those links on Cortex.
Instead of reading everything that seems important and interesting today, he just saves those links and gets back to them later. A few weeks later, he just ends up deleting most of that stuff anyway, because it wasn’t actually all that important.
I usually just bookmark after a few weeks. Might come back to it in a few years
I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.
There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.
I am never close to 100. I don’t even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.
Ok, so you have a lot of stuff going on, which is fine. You’re also keeping it under control, so the numbers never get totally crazy.
That’s not at all what I see some other people doing. They have like hundreds of tabs open all the time, and I have no idea if there’s any method to that madness.
More madness and less method the more tabs are open is my guess.
Keeping them open keeps them more visible than if you only rely on bookmarks or browser history. Personally I use a browser extension for vertical tabs (Tree Style Tab) that allows you to make subgroups, which does a great job organizing the tabs - I could replicate something similar with bookmarks, but that would be additional work.
I also use an extension that automaticaly unloads tabs after a while (you can toggle it off on a per-tab basis, of course), which helps a lot with keeping down resource use.
I have to refer to between 25-40 tabs to do my job at work, plus then there’s the stuff “to do” for today, stuff I just know is going to come up again or I’m actively tracking or referring to, etc.
At home I have several tabs I refer to or visit often, and then there’s the stuff I mean to follow up on, and the stuff I’m actively doing/reading.
That is very interesting. I should probably try that automatic tab management thing. Any recommendations?
you get it.
i tried using bookmark tags for a while but it’s just a lot of extra work.
that’s one thing firefox could actually improve with their insistence on pushing ai into everything: tag my bookmarks for me and allow searching through them by topic rather than title.
Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec
I open a tab, read half of it.
“I’ll finish it later”
opens another tab
repeat forever…
Infinite tabs. The question of “how many” isn’t even relevant at that point. The real question is: countable or uncountable infinity?
I always mean to go back to them but never do. It’s usually something that is not quite important enough to bookmark. At some point they reach critical mass and I lose the whole session. Tab savers mitigate this, however. Funny thing is, I never used to be a tab guy - I always just opened new pages.
Do tabs use less memory or something? Are they more system resource efficient overall?
Some article may seem interesting, important and urgent today, but if you just save that link for later, it can feel very liberating. Usually, there’s no real urgency to actually read it today. If you get back to it a week later, you’ll probably realize it wasn’t that useful after all, and end up deleting the link immediately.
My friend has ADHD and 300 tabs. I’m pretty sure they are related.
I don’t save tabs between sessions because of my ADHD. Otherwise I’d drown in them. This way I’m forced to use bookmarks for things I really need and the useless clutter gets removed once I close my browser.
I can’t even have 5 tabs open even if I try. I always close a tab when I am done with it.
