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?
Just checked and I’ve got 24 tabs open right now. Basically in my case I have a list of things I’d want to do at any given moment (chat on Whatsapp, watch anime, learn Chinese, etc), so each one gets its own tab group with things I’d usually want for the thing in question easily accessible. For example in my anime tab group I have My Anime List, two tabs with different anime and Reddit discussion threads. Also in my defense I’m looking for an oven right now so that’s inflating my tab numbers a little.
I will come back to it eventually, when the time is right.
It’s not important enough to bookmark, it’s not urgent enough to get to right now, but it’s too interesting to ignore entirely. When the time is right for a tab, I will return to it. Sometimes I scroll through them to jog my memory. Sometimes I’ll decide it wasn’t as interesting as I thought and delete it.
That’s sort of like the “watch later” feature in YouTube. Hey, wasn’t Firefox Pocket meant to be like that?
The problem with Pocket is that it’s out of sight. That’s like writing yourself a reminder note and putting it in a box under your bed. It also doesn’t maintain tab groups, so a collection of tabs will get scattered and messy.
That visibility seems to be a reoccurring theme in this thread. Some other people have brought that up as well.
On one hand I totally get it that if you see 10 tabs open all the time, they remind you of the 10 things you were planning to get back to at some point. On the other hand, I’m a bit skeptical about how functional that really is. I guess there is a way to make it work, otherwise nobody would do it that way.
What about 50 tabs? Does it still work that way? If you have a 100 tabs, you can’t even read the names any more, so it’s just one pile at that point, isn’t it. Although, some people treat that as a timeline of sorts, so I guess there can be some order too.
Anyway, recently I bumped into Raindrop, which seems to be like Pocket, but better. Still testing it, so I can’t tell you much yet. So far, it seems to be pretty good at organizing the stuff you throw in there.
Can you not read the labels? I know Chrome will shrink tabs to just the icon, but you mention Pocket, so I assume you know about firefox, where there’s always at least 6 or so characters shown.
I have no issue navigating 150+ tabs (except that it takes a moment to scroll over them). It’s like a kitchen; half of the cupboads just have baking supplies in them, but I know exactly where anything is, or at least where to look. Baking soda is in the first cupboard right of the fridge, next to the vanilla, behind the salt. The paper on planetary radius vs mass I’m using for worldbuilding in my TTRPG is just to the right of the chunkbase map, and a bit left of the second youtube island, next to the other 12 worldbuilding research tabs.
This was before tab groups too. Now I can collapse those 12 tabs into one item, and do that for each of ~10 topics, which makes navigating tabs much faster.
Firefox mobile is a different beast though, because I can’t organize the tabs, and they’ll get reorganized by time (I think?) after 2 weeks when they get moved to Inactive Tabs. That’s more of a big pile that I sort through when I’m bored.
I see those shrunk tabs on Chrome, as it’s a popular browser among my colleagues. I still prefer to use Firefox on my devices. So, in a way, I was making references to both browsers.
Some other people have also mentioned that they can find the tab they’re looking for even though there may be hundreds. Thanks for the kitchen analogy; it’s beginning to make sense.
Those inactive tabs are probably just a RAM-saving measure. Mobile devices tend to be pretty strict with that. Probably a bit annoying when you use tabs that way.
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.
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…
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
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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
I have 2 or 3 open at once at most. If I can’t remember what it’s for, it gets closed. And if I need to find it again, searching my history is easier than searching my open tabs
I just can’t handle tab frenzy
“i wonder what that article said about the thing i was thinking of. what was the article about again? …what site was it?”
anyway, ask me about my 400 open tabs
Do you ever close any of them?
sure, when i’m done with them
Ok that makes sense. It’s not an infinitely growing mess then.
weeeeeeeeell
Sounds like “when I’m done with them” comes with a caveat, right?
You’ll close them eventually, but let’s not worry about it this week. Next month could be too early, but within the next 6 months should be doable.
i had to recreate my profile a few years ago because some settings and tabs were coming up on 20 years old and started affecting the performance of the browser.
I mean, you can scan the page titles in your history just as easily as you can scan the titles of 400 tabs. So it’s kind of same same if you can’t remember any pertinent details
yeah but i can remember that they exist if i can see them
Tab History shows every instance of a tab, not just 1 for the 300 times you visited it.
Some browsers will not keep your history indefinitely (or even more than a month) any more
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
I use them as a sort of bookmark cache. Stuff I’m unlikely to want to keep for long but also not stuff I want to discard immediately. I use the tree style tabs plugin in ff, works beautifully
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.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
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.
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.
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.
ADHD. Lack of education with computers growing up are the one I commonly see. Basically America society failing them.
I was programming long before PC’s existed.
Your paradigm of the world isn’t everyone’s.
That’s their truth
Because the whole world is America, right?
I live in America and I don’t live in other countries I’m hoping that’s not the same in other countries though, but that is what my experience is living in America. As always your milage may very depending on your location.
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?
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.
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.
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.
It’s a to do list
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
I usually just bookmark after a few weeks. Might come back to it in a few years
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.
Rookie numbers
I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks
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
I have those too…
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
Not all disabilities are visible.
So much this. My one monitor is basically nothing but tabs open to remind me to do things like pay my bills.
And tabs with internet searches so I know what I was thinking of doing.
This may or may not be a joke, but yes, this is very often talked about among ADHDers!
I’m AuDHD and thankfully this is one area where my ordered, autistic side wins out – i.e. I have meticulously organised bookmarks and “Raindrop” tags for everything instead. 😄 I couldn’t stand having tons of tabs open.
AuDHD
Intrusive thought when I first read that, “Gold tier ADHD!”
I’ll grant you that, but are you implying that a large fraction, maybe close to half, of my coworkers are disabled? Surely there are other reasons.
Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
I wonder the same about people with hundreds of unread emails. Almost as if they don’t know that you can unsubscribe from newsletters.
I go through and unsub to stuff, but some keep coming back. Then I make a filter to delete them when they come.
When your inbox is a mess, email stops working for you. It’s impossible to find anything worth reading, so you end up reading nothing.
Same with notifications. If you allow all of them, it’s functionally the same as disabling the whole notification system.
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! 😁
Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
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.
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.
