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?
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.
The decline of good search engines and the AI slopocalypse has made it difficult to find good resources. Let alone, to find it a second time. So a lot of us close the tab only after the related task is completed. Bookmarks are too permanent for one-off tasks (plus, we probably have way too many bookmarks already).
Yeah that would make sense except the overuse of tabs is at least a decade old phenomenon.
Eh… depends on the interpretation of overuse. One person’s excess is another person’s minimal. Different subjects - like ones that require researching - are expected to need more tabs open. It loosely parallels having multiple books splayed open for quick referencing.
Though, I do feel the number of tabs lately has drastically increased for myself and colleges.
Overuse means you have trouble finding tabs because you have so many open. I don’t think your analogy works very well here. No one would defend having 2000 books open as helpful to a researcher.
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.
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?
Haven’t used it enough to know. In any case, the link list stays with the browser even if I restart. Is that good enough, or were you looking for something more granular?
Eh just curious about the session info (what all that entails I’m not 100% on). I just know in Firefox tabs retain session info which keeps you logged in typically for sites where that’s a thing
Oh that sort of login session stuff. Nah, I don’t think it saves any of that. As far as I can tell, it’s just a link. Nothing more. If you’re logged in somewhere, the cookies should allow you to continue where you left off, but they will expire at some point.
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.