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?
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.
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…
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. 😏
I’m a tab-o-holic. I probably have ADD. I don’t know but I’ll start researching something and if I don’t finish that research before moving on to something else or if the need for the research is postponed, I don’t want to lose what I was doing.
Also there are sites I go to everyday, email, calendar, YouTube, so I just leave them up all of the time.
Somebody help me!!
I have a few tabs open all the time as well, but I also have bookmarks for them so that I can easily reopen them after updating and restarting. However, I think Firefox can remember my tabs, so maybe I don’t necessarily need to do it that way. Should probably try that out at some point.
Other people here have suggested using bookmarks, tab groups,tree style tab, OneTab or even Raindrop for keeping things organized. Do you think some of those might serve your purposes?
Yeah, actually they might. I do use bookmarks too, but for more permanent things, like recipes and car sites (I’m a car guy). For projects I’m working on and will move along when I’m finished I didn’t want them polluting my bookmarks. I guess I could delete the bookmarks too. Look I never said it made any sense. Ugh.
Simple.
- I’m reading tab A
- Tab A links to tab B
- Open B in new tab, since I know I’m going back to tab A soon.
- Go to tab A
- Go to tab B again
- I’m finished reading tab B so I close it.
Notice how I didn’t close tab A. Because at that point, I was not in tab A, therefore I don’t think about that tab much so I don’t even think if I should close it or not. Tab A will probably stay open until I decide to clean my tabs when there are 50+ tabs on them.
Another common scenario:
- I’m reading tab C
- Something comes up that makes me either switch to another task or shut down the computer
From this point there are 2 paths: either I never resume the task I opened tab C for, so it stays there for a long time, or I resume the task when tab C is too far up (I use vertical tabs), so I open tab D that is the same webpage as tab C. When I finish I close tab D, but tab C remains for a long time.
It sounds like you do close tabs, but they also tend to accumulate over time anyway. It’s actually quite familiar to me that paths fork all the time, which can result in exponential growth of the tab count. Ok, so that should cover where all the tabs come from.
But why do you keep them as tabs as opposed to unloading them to any other “read it later” feature? People have proposed a variety of solutions in this thread, but some people still have their reasons to stick with tabs instead.
Bookmarks are even harder to clear than tabs, since they are more “long term”. furthermore, they require more effort. Opening and closing a tab is 1 click each. Bookmarks take 1 click to create at least, but 2 to delete at least.
The browser history requires a lot of effort to find what you want.
Basically I use tabs because they require less effort than any other method.
Fair enough. Smooth workflow matters too, and tabs certainly provide that.
For me it’s because I have ADHD and thrive among organized clutter.
I may have 100 tabs open, but they’re all categorized: One tab group for YouTube, one for porn, one for my website, and one for everything else. I keep stuff in there that’s good enough to hang onto for a while, but not good enough to bookmark.
Your way to manage you tabs is really close to managing bookmarks. It takes time and effort. And categorzing them goes against clutter ! What is your criteria to move a webpage to a bookmark ? I use bookmadks in the toolbar, so they are all accessible and well organized. They are not tab, just a list of pages in different folders (folder = tab group)
The criteria is whatever I feel like at the moment if/when I ultimately decide to bookmark. There is no hard set rule, because again, I have ADHD.
What do you use bookmarks for then? How important and permanent does it have to be to earn a dedicated bookmark?
I previously answered a similar question from another user. For your convenience, here is my response:
The criteria is whatever I feel like at the moment if/when I ultimately decide to bookmark. There is no hard set rule, because again, I have ADHD.
Yeah I don’t get it, some people have 100s, dude that is what bookmarks are for.
That’s what I thought, but many people here say otherwise.
I like bookmarks because I can categorize them into drop down menus that make sense to me.
Same. Having a logical subfolder structure and maybe even tags just makes it so much nicer IMO.
However, that’s not the only way to roll. Lots of people here prefer to use tabs instead.
I keep a huge pile of tabs open for things I need to keep an eye on but not necessarily interact with unless something changes. Bookmarks don’t have notifications, open tabs do.
In that use-case: Sounds like bookmarks need a feature upgrade
People that don’t know advanced ways to organise bookmarks.
Like folders and tags? Are there fancier ways too?
Because people are overworked or overwhelmed, in my experience.
I noticed that people who are laid back and or relaxed for whatever reason, will close them.
On the other hand, people I know that regularly overwork themselves have a billion tabs open all the time.
They could also be tech illiterate I guess.
Being overwhelmed sounds like a very plausible explanation for some cases. When you’re constantly bounced between tasks, there’s no time to tidy things up. Sounds like an early warning sign of burnout, and being tech illiterate will only aggravate it.
Next time I see a coworker with a hundred tabs, I better ask if they’re feeling ok.
Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.
Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.
Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).
I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.
Something really interesting is beginning to emerge from this discussion. People have varying requirements in terms of transience/permanence. Some features, like tabs are less permanent, but still permanent enough for many uses. Other features like bookmarks are far more permanent, maybe even too permanent.
All of this is beginning to look like the communication tool hierarchy (calling, email, teams etc). There’s clearly a similar hierarchy of permanence, and when a given topic does not cross the permanence threshold required for a bookmark, it stays in the tabs. That is something I hadn’t really considered before, although I was already applying this concept.
I regularly sit at anywhere from a thousand to several thousand tabs on my desktop browser. I have a tab-counter extension.
I use tree-style tabs. I use this to organize thoughts into groups, or families, hierarchically, with varying levels and numbers of tabs, depending on topic and my interest.
Most tabs are unloaded. I do close and reopen my browser regularly, and restart my pc. I just have the browser remember the tabs in it.
I do occasionally revisit and complete families of tabs. Sometimes I’ll queue up loads of things to read on a subject, so that nothing ever has to load or reload.
Tabs are like a working space to me, kind of like working memory in your brain.
Sometimes I’ll load in several searches at once.
I have ADHD.
I am also a very passionate and try to be a very thorough person.
I generally do things top-down when researching, but also casually search.
I have waves of purging, myself, but also will randomly close tabs or trees if they are complete or exhausted.
Like once a year or so, the browser has a stroke and decides to flush everything away and I’m sad for a couple weeks.
I have lost amazing things and nearly exhaustive subjects, that alone have been hundreds of tabs.
An example of which was a (near) 100% collection of a web archive that had a complete list and archive of a lost website and organization that personally means a lot to me. I had separated its history into eras, and had found and organized nearly all of a thing that had ever been made by the organization. It’s extremely nitpicky and claims almost no storage in my mind or pc. Think of it like data hoarding or zombifying something I deem important and culturally significant. Nearly impossible to do automatedly, and I wouldn’t want nor trust a bot to do it, so I did it myself, by hand, in line with a hobby.
This is incredible what you do ! I also saves some webpage thata are important to me, but still have the URL saved in my booksmarks, as duplicate entry if you like.
Because they are important, I have an organised collection of bookmarks which can be saved and archived outside the browser. A bookmark list is just a structured html page that any browser can export, import and share, unlike tabs. I have lot of themed bookmarks folder, for the future.
With so much work to organise your tabs, why make you not use bookmarks instead ? Do you have a lot of RAM and SSD on your computer to save all your tabs ? Your browser needs to keep a copy in RAM for you. The more tabs, the slower your browser runs.
That was a really interesting chapter. I don’t mind a wall of text like this.
Since you’re using tree-style tabs, you can actually keep things organized. This thread has turned out to be very educational to me. I didn’t really know ADHD could be involved in this, let alone that it could produce such a variety of different results when it comes to tab usage.
Anyway, tabs have a tendency to disappear sooner or later, and that’s a real problem. In this thread, I’ve found some interesting tools like Raindrop. I get the feeling you might appreciate it. I’m still testing it myself, but so far it seems like solution for that problem. I’ve also quickly tested OneTab, but I don’t really know how permanent that storage option is in the long run.
This really resonates with me. At least in the sense I operate like this without the tree structure but would vastly benefit from it. If you don’t mind my asking, what browser and extensions do you use?
Firefox and https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en That’s the creators page, but it’s also on the Mozilla site.
I use a bunch of other stuff too, that synergizes and whatnot, but that’s the tree style tabs that I’ve been using since like 2011. I’ve also been telling people that this is the future the entire time, and nobody ever believes me. But that’s fine, it’s going to be an inevitable option. But maybe at this rate, the internet will die before people adopt tree tabs hahaha.
If you do use that extension, I suggest going through the options, as it’s pretty well fleshed out. An option that makes a big difference to me is the the theme or whatever, to clearly see the boxes around each tab, and therefore the indentation. Another meaningful option is the tree behavior that auto-collapses the tree is you open a new one - I don’t like that, and prefer the trees stay option and me in control. But to each their own. After all, this is all just tools for you to optimize and explore.
I can multitask.
I know this is foreign to a lot of people but I actually have multiple applications and windows open in my os as well. Even multiple desktops.
Yeah, I have lots of stuff open on several desktops too. On my work computer, there are usually a few desktops for different topics. I don’t really call that multitasking, as I’m only focussing on one thing at a time, and usually at least 30 minutes each. I think of it more in the terms of keeping things organized. Back in the old days when Windows didn’t natively support virtual desktops, people had like 20 windows open in a single desktop, and that looked incredibly cluttered to me. Actually, some people still do that since they haven’t discovered virtual desktops yet.
So I don’t lose that one porn video I found 3 years ago.
And other ways don’t work because….
Clearly you have never found that one video. That one video that was just perfect. And ever since, you have spent years looking for it. Yeah, there are many. But, there will always be that one that got away.
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
Rookie numbers
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks
I have those too…
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
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.
Hoarding
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
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
