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?
but once I’m done, I close them all
Same. But I also have a continuous stream of new projects that never get finished.
on desktop, hell no. On mobile, I just wanted to see what would happen if I stopped closing them once in a while. it lags my phone so bad every time I scroll through them. It look about 1 minute to get through the entire list lol
my estimate is about 800, but I am not gonna spend time counting themBecause they hadn’t heard of this feature called bookmarks
Bookmarks is where all my open tabs go to die and never be remembered again.
For me, it more boils down to keeping my place within a web page or ever-updating feed.
For instance… If I’m going down a rabbit hole, I could have 4 root tabs open. Those tabs may have lengthy articles and would reference secondary sites throughout the page. Rather then having a good chance of the browser losing my place down the page by clicking on a link normally, I open it in a new tab. This allows me to switch to it, skim down to where it was referenced to understand that part of it, then switch back to the root tab while leaving the secondary tab open to fully read through when I finish with the root one. As the rabbit hole deepens, those secondary tabs may eventually become root tabs which may also reference their own secondary sites or even each other. The number of tabs just keeps growing until I either run out of those secondary tabs or I am just satisfied with the amount of info I gained. This can also happen over several days or weeks and have other rabbit holes open at the same time.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense too. That sort of forking is very common, especially when reading Wikipedia articles. Occasionally I have several wikipedia tabs open, but once I’ve drilled down deep enough, I lose interest, and close all of those tabs.
When researching any topic, it’s really common to have lots of tabs open, but I always close them as soon as they have served their purpose. I guess that’s the key difference here. Actually that difference is interesting. Why do I lose interest so quickly or why do you keep yours open for several days or even weeks?
… because I can’t find the tab I opened 2 days ago, so it’s faster open it again… which just creates a negative feedback loop of having too many tabs and not able to find anything.
Case and point: I’m in IT and we use github. Some code requires reviews (which needs “more time” to complete), then often I’m looking at other 3rd party repos’ for documentation/examples/etc. Some might be useful, some are related to my current problem. Oh, I get a ping - I need to finish that PR review: “which tab is it? They ALL say github!” … and I’m too impatient to hover over them. So, it’s faster to just type the URL in and go.
I loved browser plugin, Vimperator. It was fantastic, I could (at anytime) type “:b <pattern>” and it would search through my open tabs. But I’ve tried a bunch of the “successor”, but universally they seem to get “stuck” when it comes to inputting text - either into text fields (like on a normal email form) or as input into the browser extension.
Recently, I found an extension that would group tabs based on your rules (so, I could separate the company github tabs from the OSS). It’s far from perfect… but it’s endurable.
… but what I really wish for is a Firefox plugin that’ll allow me to type parts of the tabs domain or title and it’ll filter the results.
Vivaldi (chromium) lets me set tab rules. Tabs will jump to the correct workspace automatically.
That’s quite the vicious circle. More tabs means more problems, and you solve them by adding more tabs. LOL
Anyway, when doing work related stuff, it’s common to need a whole bunch of tabs open at times. However, not closing them is the detail that sets you apart from some other people. I think that opening lots of new tabs is a pretty universal experience, but closing them isn’t.
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.
Most of my projects require like 2-4 web apps so i constantly have two browser windows open side by side, with a bunch tabs on each
That’s a familiar feeling. However, some people have an absurd number of tabs open all the time. Makes me wonder if they actually use them for something.
I used to use bookmarks (at home). Now I just keep tabs open.
Any ideas why though? Is it just because it’s easier, it’s a visible reminder or something like that?
I think for me, personally, I bookmark sites I need to access regularly. As in, daily. At home, I don’t really visit the same sites. Or at least, it’s more infrequent, and fewer ones. So I just leave open a tab for Lemmy, Metacritic, HotLocalDwarfMilfs, Wikipedia, Spotify, etc. Even if my computer is restarted, Firefox saves them!
At work? Every shit is a browser app now. Hard to organize.
LOL. Can confirm. I have three tabs open every day just to have some basic stuff always open. I’m basically using Edge just for those three things and Firefox for everything else.
Turns out the Excel that was integrated into Teams can’t handle PowerQuery. I guess that’s just basically a website version of Excel and hence lacks 50% of the features of the real application. Isn’t it great now that everything is a website…
ADHD.
Overly the last year or so I’ve become entirely convinced I have developed ADHD. Is it possible to concuss yourself into ADHD?
It is possible to develop ADHD like symptoms from a TBI of some kind. It’s not ADHD from a technical definition standpoint, but from lived experience of symptoms, it can line up with 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
You can also use ^ to search your history instead, and do away with the tabs!
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.
All my life I never saved tabs and everytime I closed the browser I would open it again with just the home oage. Then about a year ago I downloaded Zen Browser and I really liked the tab management that came with it. I created some profiles and folders to organize the tabs in so now I have maybe 20-30 tabs always open, but they are almost always used regularly. I might have 5 for my school. 5 for torrenting/hosting. A few for music related things, gaming, etc. It’s very organized and basically replaces the need for a custom html homepage.
That sounds pretty cool. Are those tab management tricks something that could be replicated in Firefox with a few extensions?
Possibly. I never messed around with tab management extensions before. Everything in Zen is built in
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.
The good thing about tabs on mobile is the fact that the system manages RAM very efficiently. You never actually need to close anything, because the system takes care of kicking things out of RAM all the time. That’s both good and bad, but in your case it’s totally worth it.
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.
People have all sorts of preferences, and that’s ok. The way I do things obviously doesn’t work for everyone, but I’m really curious to find out why people do things the way they do.
Like, what makes the browser history unusable? Maybe there’s a better way to use a browser, but that way just never occurred to me.
