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
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
Rookie numbers
CGP grey once spoke about those links on Cortex.
Instead of reading everything that seems important and interesting today, he just saves those links and gets back to them later. A few weeks later, he just ends up deleting most of that stuff anyway, because it wasn’t actually all that important.
I usually just bookmark after a few weeks. Might come back to it in a few years
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
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
Not all disabilities are visible.
This may or may not be a joke, but yes, this is very often talked about among ADHDers!
I’m AuDHD and thankfully this is one area where my ordered, autistic side wins out – i.e. I have meticulously organised bookmarks and “Raindrop” tags for everything instead. 😄 I couldn’t stand having tons of tabs open.
AuDHD
Intrusive thought when I first read that, “Gold tier ADHD!”
So much this. My one monitor is basically nothing but tabs open to remind me to do things like pay my bills.
And tabs with internet searches so I know what I was thinking of doing.
I’ll grant you that, but are you implying that a large fraction, maybe close to half, of my coworkers are disabled? Surely there are other reasons.
Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 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
Just tried that extension, and it’s pretty cool. Might actually keep it.
Also tried OneTab which condenses open tabs into a single list of links. Could be ideal for people who always need more RAM.
For people who are overwhelmed by tidying up (or can’t find anything afterwards xD) or managing bookmarks. So they simply use a chaotic system.
Interesting. I get it that making bookmarks takes some effort, so it’s easier to just ignore that system and use tabs instead. If you have hundreds of tabs open, how can you find anything? I just use the history of Firefox to find old stuff. The search feature actually works. Just sort by date and you can find that news article you almost read two months go.
Firefox actually searches tabs first when you enter something into the adress bar and switches to the tab automatically when you press enter.
Oh that feature. I bump into it all the time when I want to open the same site 4 times and then fork them into 4 different things. Could be handy for other people, but I tend to find that feature more annoying than useful. Fortunately ctrl+l, ctrl+c, ctrl+t, ctrl+v works too. I do that so often that I should probably set up a macro that does that ctrl+LCTV combo in one click.
Anyway, that means tabs can be searched conveniently. Even if you have a hundred tabs open, you can actually find what you need.
My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
Same here, but the but my history is sorted by last visited. Usually I’m looking for something that’s relatively recent, so it should be among the first 10 results. However, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of having more tabs.
I split the tabs into multiple windows by category, personally (tho firefox’s tab grouping is pretty great too). And it’s more about it being present - bookmarks are fine, but if I am not actively reminded of something I likely will just forget about it entirely. Bookmarks aren’t visible all the time, so they just get forgotten.
Well, that is a good point. Tabs are always more or less visible, so you may remember to check something that looked interesting last week.
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.
you get it.
i tried using bookmark tags for a while but it’s just a lot of extra work.
that’s one thing firefox could actually improve with their insistence on pushing ai into everything: tag my bookmarks for me and allow searching through them by topic rather than title.
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.
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.
Firefox’s “search in tabs” is an invaluable feature to reduce duplication.
Prefix with ‘%’ in the search bar
You can also use ^ to search your history instead, and do away with the tabs!
Thanks! I’ll save that for later.
Thanks
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.
Have you seen the price of RAM lately? You gotta do something to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Extensions like Tree Style Tabs that display tabs as a vertical list are really good for that, especially if they also let you group the tabs in collapsible sublists. Some browsers have vertical tab bars built in, but it’s considerably less useful if you can’t collapse part of the list.
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.
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
Uhhh because I need them all
All 500 of them?
Maybe not now but I will need them eventually
That’s understandable. But why keep them in tabs though? Other people here have recommended a variety of different approaches.
More than a few people have also mentioned Raindrop. Completely new to me. Haven’t tried that one yet, but I’m planning to take a closer look.
I used to use OneTab, then I stopped for some reason. I think it was acting more like Firefox Containers though. Maybe I’ll check raindrop out.
Just installed it and started dumping some of my transient tabs in it.
For example, I have some ideas for the next vacation, so I made a folder for that purpose and dropped a bunch of relevant links in there. I’ll get back to those sooner or later. No need to keep 10 tabs open for a few months, when I can keep my tab bar clean and dump all the unnecessary clutter to Raindrop. So far, I’m still using it in a very basic way, but let’s see what this develops into.
In my case, that clan tab bar may have something to do with my personal preference for tidyness and a sense of control. Other people obviously have different needs and preferences, and that’s ok. Maybe tab hoarders aren’t annoyed by a cluttered UI. Maybe they even see some value in it.
