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?
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.