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?
It’s a to do list
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
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?
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 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.
ADHD.
Overly the last year or so I’ve become entirely convinced I have developed ADHD. Is it possible to concuss yourself into ADHD?
No, but life style changes may reveal you had ADHD all along and had just been lucky enough to be unaffected by it.
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.
Oh, so that’s how the numbers go up. Keep on doing that for a week or two, and having only 100 tabs open is an achievement.
Yeah, I was thinking the 30 from your original post is rookie numbers.
Well, a coworker of mine has so many tabs that it was difficult to tell exactly how many there were. The top bar was completely full, so I guess that’s way more than 20. Probably not a hundred yet.
Firefox’s “search in tabs” is an invaluable feature to reduce duplication.
Prefix with ‘%’ in the search bar
Thanks
Have you seen the price of RAM lately? You gotta do something to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth.
LMAO, as a light “desktop/laptop” user I agree, if it wasn’t for tab hoarding I’d never hit 90% or more of the RAM usage of my 16 GB of RAM MacBook Pro that I have been maining since 2014 😂
Saw a Loops video about it a few days ago. Other than that, I have no idea.
No need to worry about RAM prices since you can always just download more RAM.
but once I’m done, I close them all
Same. But I also have a continuous stream of new projects that never get finished.
When I have a lot of unfinished things going on, they begin to bother me. I need to close things and start from a clean slate. Doesn’t that bother you at all?
Oh, so much. I’m still trying to figure out how to actually complete things.
I typically have 100-200. It’s usually a “let me come back to this in a day or three”, which may or may not happen. Or a thread of “doing research on a topic” and then getting pulled to something else, but not having time to summarize/organize for later. Plus, as others have mentioned, sometimes you need the tab session history.
I really appreciate y’all saying what a monster or computer illiterate I am, though. Don’t tell my boss, she’ll wonder what I do all day.
Hmm… The “lemmy get back to that” feeling is familiar, especially the second part where you never actually do.
Back when I had a hundred neatly organized bookmarks, there were several links like that. Some site seemed like a neat tool or an interesting article, but I never actually ended up revisiting that site. Fast forward 10 years, and I start going through all of those bookmarks to see which ones are actually worth keeping. That’s when I find out that more than half of those sites don’t even exist any more.
Nowadays, I’m better at letting go of digital things and discarding useless junk. My current bookmark list consists of sites I actually use frequently enough to appreciate the shortcut.
You know when you make a sandwich or some buttered toast and you set the knife carefully on the edge of the sink. Well because you might decided to make another sandwich latter or your SO goes that looks good can I get one too. And bam your the hero because you now have one less knife to clean in the dishwasher.
That is why I have so many tabs open. I know I probably won’t need most of them and it’s safe to close them. But oh dang do I feel like a hero when I get that itch for a video I want to watch and I don’t have to look through my history for next 20 minutes because, bam, its right their in that tab.
Especially at work when you might need a combination of those 3 tabs from last month.
Shhh. I was mainly talking about porn… But yes that works too. 😏
That’s a pretty good analogy.
There are some YT playlists I visit every now and then. Maybe I should just keep them open all the time…
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
Even those 500 tabs in mobile Safari?
Anyone that uses Safari isn’t serious about browsing. ;p
There’s this guy who uses his phone for browsing stuff all the time. The way I see it, he is very serious about making his life harder.
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
Yeah, that seems like a good way to use tabs.
However, eventually they have a tendency to accumulate and fill the entire tab bar to such an extent that you can no longer even see the names. Some people like to roll that way, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going with that.
Some people don’t let them accumulate much, but others do. The key difference seems to be how often do you close the tabs. If you close them rarely enough that you still have 100+ tabs open all the time, that’s the kind of situation I have questions about.
when i have had tons and tons of tabs open, it has been due to laziness and just not bothering to sort which tabs are useless to have around and which are not.
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
ADHD.
Care to elaborate? Some people with ADHD hate seeing tabs, and they close all tabs as soon as possible.
And sometimes we will totally come back to that later, maybe, one day. And so it stays forever.
That is the other extreme, and both groups say they have ADHD. Seems like a pretty complex term to me.
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
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
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.HO HO HO BOY you should not have told me that. My tab hoarding is about to become infinitely worse 😈
Join the dark side 😈
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
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)
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?
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.
Ah I thought you were the person with 200 tabs
