Why do some people have so many tabs open on their browser?

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip⁩ to ⁨nostupidquestions@lemmy.world⁩

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?

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prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Do none of these people know about the bookmarks bar? And that you can literally put folders on it if you want?

What do you mean they’re not visible, of course they are

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- Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I’m never actually going to look in the bookmarks folder so why would I put anything there?
  
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  - TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Out of sight, out of mind, which means it comes with pros and cons though. If you feel like 500 tabs is consuming too much of your mental bandwidth, then offloading some of them to bookmarks should help. The idea is that only active stuff would be in the tabs, while everything a bit less active would be in the bookmarks.
    
    Some people just don’t roll that way, and this thread has some interesting comments about that style too.
    
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Bookmarks bar. It’s literally a toolbar under your URL bar that you can have displaying always.
    
    You can put folders on that bar (with no name if you want so it takes up almost no space) if you want.
    
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I guess these people just can’t be bothered to organize stuff. I find a bit puzzling that they prefer to live with chaos like that. I would feel very anxious and frustrated if I had to deal with a hundred tabs in a single window all the time.
  
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I don’t even really have mine organized. I tried at one point, but meh…
    
    It’s still all there at the top of my browser, right under the URL bar, except they are all open tabs, because that’s not what tabs are for.
    
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  - Unquote0270@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Shockingly, some people function differently to you.
    
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DrBob@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ADHD.

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- datavoid@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Overly the last year or so I’ve become entirely convinced I have developed ADHD. Is it possible to concuss yourself into ADHD?
  
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  - ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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
    
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  - Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    No, but life style changes may reveal you had ADHD all along and had just been lucky enough to be unaffected by it.
    
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Surprisingly many people have brought that up. Probably not a coincidence. Maybe that’s the thing I didn’t think of.
  
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  - Berengaria_of_Navarre@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    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.
    
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phoenixz@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I easily hit 500+ tabs, usually against 1000 or so, and usually spread around over 40 windows on 4 different desktops, so it’s fairly wellp organized as all tabs in a window are about the same subject.

Most auto close after about 15 mins to spare resources because websites these days just are insanely heavy. I used to do 2000 sites with maybe 32GB mem, now I need a tab auto closer to be able to manage half of that.

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- TrickDacy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The question was “why?” Not "can you demonstrate the world’s most extreme case of this thing that baffles me?’
  
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  When I’m doing youtube research, I search for something, and open 10-20 tabs from the search results (ctrl+click). They don’t really fully open in the background, but when I switch to those tabs, that’s when they really starts loading. If I quickly flip through all 20 tabs, it’s going to max out my ancient CPU for a minute or two. Somehow 24 GB is still fine but the CPU seems to be the biggest bottle neck with my computer.
  
  BTW I recall seeing something about tabs going to sleep automatically. If your browser does that, then the RAM shouldn’t be a problem. You could easily open a thousand pages, and only a fraction of them would actually be in RAM.
  
  Anyway, 40 windows seems pretty intense. I don’t think I would enjoy doing that. Occasionally, when I have a lot of active topics, I just copy those URLs to a txt file to keep things organized. If I did that more frequently, I might try bookmarks too. Anyway, the point of doing that is to keep the window count down to something that I can easily manage.
  
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mriormro@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Image

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Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.

It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.

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- friend_of_satan@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Good for you.
    
    I simply scroll down my tab bar to what I’m looking for.
    
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  - Deceptichum@quokk.au ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Sucks to be them I guess?
    
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tty5@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Imagine you start researching something else before you’ve had the opportunity to finish your last. I have 10-20 tabs open for each of several in progress projects on my tablet

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Yeah, that does happen from time to time. In that case, I tend to use separate browser windows for each topic. There could be 5-20 tabs in each, and maybe about 30 tabs in total. It’s pretty rare to go over that.
  
  However, some people seem to have 100+ tabs in a single window with no other windows or even tab groups. They just dump everything into something that looks like a huge mountain of pure chaos.
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    So you admit to doing the same thing.
    
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Son_of_Macha@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They can’t organise bookmarks

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- Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  My bookmarks are organized. Haven’t used any of them in 10 years.
  
  It’s a great idea that I like, it just doesn’t work for me.
  
  Tabs in the sidebar do.
  
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That takes time and effort, which most people don’t have. Most links don’t deserve that much of my energy, so that’s why I have only a handful of sites bookmarked. Everything else is chucked in the infinitely growing trash pile known as “history”.
  
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    It really doesn’t. There is literally a star next to the URL in the URL bar that you click once
    
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- Unquote0270@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  For me it is not about being unable to organise them but once it is bookmarked it is basically gone from my sight and memory.
  
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  - kratoz29@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I am 33 years old (so not a new internet user) and I somehow feel bookmarks need a redesign… Not exactly sure how I’d improve it (tags, AI grouping? Daily bookmark to see section? I don’t really know) but if the site I have saved doesn’t show up in the FF search bar… It might as well be lost forever (and that feature is case sensitive).
    
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  - twistypencil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This. If I spend the time organizing them, I’ve spent more time on the tab than I originally wanted to, but didn’t end up taking care of what the original reason I have the tab opened was.
    
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  - prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Bookmarks bar.
    
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  - ThrowawayPermanente@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Yep, same. I should research solutions to this problem with a bunch of new tabs.
    
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  - Mesophar@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I want to ask genuinely, how is the bookmark different than a tab with tab grouping in this instance? I have the bookmarks bar always visible, and have folders organized on the main bar (rather than the drop down extended bar). Wouldn’t tab grouping do the same thing, just slightly higher?
    
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  - unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    In my case, bookmarking things is something I do to remove it from my sight and memory, but not lose it entirely.
    
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melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
They use to be new window (not like a pop up, but a new window). Today every new page or "new window" becomes a new tab.

And before you know it, you have dozens of tabs open. But no way you use to have 30 different windows open, since that would drive you crazy with alt+tab.

So the bar is low and it's easy to keep them open as well. So people will.

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- melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That being said. Do we want to go back to 30 windows? I don't think so.
  
  Floorp has additional features that keep you managed. Like Workspaces. And also you can group tabs. Or even use colored tabs.
  
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  - twistypencil@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    FF now has tab groups, it’s basically the same, and a nice easy to bridge bookmarks and tabs
    
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  - TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Oh that sounds nice. I keep bumping into Floorp surprisingly often. Must be something worth checking out.
    
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RisingSwell@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My friend has ADHD and 300 tabs. I’m pretty sure they are related.

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- uniquethrowagay@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I don’t save tabs between sessions because of my ADHD. Otherwise I’d drown in them. This way I’m forced to use bookmarks for things I really need and the useless clutter gets removed once I close my browser.
  
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pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
because i forget to close useless ones.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And you just leave them? Do you ever get back to them? How about clicking the “close all tabs” button from time to time?
  
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  - pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    eventually i either get to closing them or i start a new Firefox session.
    
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  - ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    That button should be able to be turned off; is there a delete all button on your hard drive? No, that’s insane. Tabs are files. Tabs are life.
    
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NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Just checked and I've got 24 tabs open right now. Basically in my case I have a list of things I'd want to do at any given moment (chat on Whatsapp, watch anime, learn Chinese, etc), so each one gets its own tab group with things I'd usually want for the thing in question easily accessible. For example in my anime tab group I have My Anime List, two tabs with different anime and Reddit discussion threads. Also in my defense I'm looking for an oven right now so that's inflating my tab numbers a little.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Sounds like a very functional workflow to me. When there’s a lot of stuff going on, it tends to result in more tabs. That number isn’t out of control, so apparently you also close the tabs when they’re no longer needed.
  
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SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I can almost never find things in my browser history. I keep windows with relevant tabs open on separate workspaces.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  But are they open for several weeks?
  
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  - SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Months, even.
    
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zxqwas@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.

There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.

I am never close to 100. I don’t even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ok, so you have a lot of stuff going on, which is fine. You’re also keeping under control, so the numbers never get totally crazy.
  
  That’s not at all what I see some other people doing. They have like hundreds of tabs open all the time, and I have no idea if there’s any method to that madness.
  
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  - zxqwas@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    More madness and less method the more tabs are open is my guess.
    
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owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.

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- pleasestopasking@reddthat.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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celeste@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Looking at what I have now, it's a mix of tasks I don't want to forget to do, a long article I was reading but felt i wasn't absorbing, some fanfic I am probably going to read in the next couple days plus the rec list I got them from, a podcast I'm still midway through for when I'm driving, an article for a work thing I'll need tomorrow, a couple dnd race pages open as I'm making a character for a new campaign, and two bsky people who post interesting articles on the daily so I read them daily. Some stuff is bookmarked, but if I'm using it in the next week, it stays in tabs.

They all get closed when I'm done with them, but new things get rotated in. I'm at my max now, but it's rare I have under five open. It's a to-do list, basically, and there are always new things to do, and read, and think about, and learn. Bookmarks are for when I want to save a link to look at much later. Like, webcomics I've caught up with, artists I like, utility pages, resources, etc.

I used to be "worse" because I had fun in the early 00s generating link lists for character fan pages. It involved opening every relevant link on an already vetted and tagged page, and then checking each one (and opening pages from their links if they turned out to be relevant). When I finished a character, I'd start on the next, so I'd have one or two hundred open most of the time. I lost interest, eventually. The impulse to link to relevant topics still exists in me, however, which is a big reason I'm on this website.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  That sounds like all of them are actually more or less active. It’s not like vast majority of them are neglected and forgotten.
  
  Maybe you’re some sort of a power user who just needs a lot of tabs to get stuff done. I don’t see any problem with that. Since you also use bookmarks, you’re effectively controlling the chaos. That doesn’t look anything like the chaotic mess I’ve seen with some other people.
  
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  - celeste@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    "power user" is such a kind way to describe that, thank you!
    
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soyboy77@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I always mean to go back to them but never do. at some point they reach critical mass and I lose the whole session. Tab savers mitigate this, however. Funny thing is I never used to be a tab guy - I always just opened new pages.

Do tabs use less memory or something? Are they more system resource efficient overall?

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Some article may seem interesting, important and urgent today, but if you just save that link for later, it can feel very liberating. Usually, there’s no real urgency to actually read it today. If you get back to it a week later, you’ll probably realize it wasn’t that useful after all, and end up deleting the link immediately.
  
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Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Not all disabilities are visible.

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- karashta@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
  
  Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
  
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- meejle@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Confused_Emus@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    
    AuDHD
    
    Intrusive thought when I first read that, “Gold tier ADHD!”
    
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Melobol@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
My browser in my phone opens a new tab every time I put in a new url. I should really change that setting…
I probably have 10 lemmy home open right now. Not that I can see aside of a flat 8 as amount of tabs open.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Same. Every once in a while, I just close all tabs to get rid of all the junk I no longer care about.
  
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Perspectivist@feddit.uk ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I wonder the same about people with hundreds of unread emails. Almost as if they don’t know that you can unsubscribe from newsletters.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  When your inbox is a mess, email stops working for you. It’s impossible to find anything worth reading, so you end up reading nothing.
  
  Same with notifications. If you allow all of them, it’s functionally the same as disabling the whole notification system.
  
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- Evil_Incarnate@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  I go through and unsub to stuff, but some keep coming back. Then I make a filter to delete them when they come.
  
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sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I usually have 50-70 tabs open, spread across 6-8 windows.

Each window is for a particular client, usually with various pages from their website, plus the equivalent CMS editing page, their socials, etc. I’m regularly doing a small job for one client here and other there, and so on, so it’s easier to just leave them open.

I also usually have at least one or two windows with my own stuff - Lemmy, BlueSky, a football ⚽ forum I use, YouTube, BBC News, etc.

It’s messy, but it works on the whole. It’s a pain whenever I need to restart or run updates though, since I need to check every tab to make sure it’s safe to close! 😁

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- melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
  
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Totally understandable in a work context. At work, I can have like 50 tabs and several windows open when comparing products, prices or whatever. When there’s nothing urgent like that going on, there’s no need to keep them open. I’ll just close a bunch of tabs when they’ve served their purpose.
  
  At home though, that’s a bit rare. When researching something, I can have 10-30 tabs easily, but they are also very temporary. When I’m done, I just close them.
  
  Some people seem to hoard tabs instead. They just keep opening more and more without ever really closing the ones they no longer need. Or do they still need them like 3 weeks later? Seems doubtful to me.
  
  There are also a few things I need regularly, so I’ll just bookmark those places for easy access. After an update, I’ll click those links and I’m ready to continue where I left off earlier.
  
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NaibofTabr@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
  
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rumschlumpel@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
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, which helps a lot with keeping down resource use.

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- phed@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  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.
  
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ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I have 2 or 3 open at once at most. If I can’t remember what it’s for, it gets closed. And if I need to find it again, searching my history is easier than searching my open tabs

I just can’t handle tab frenzy

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DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec

Image

I open a tab, read half of it.

“I’ll finishe it later”

opens another tab

repeat forever…

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thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
ADHD. Lack of education with computers growing up are the one I commonly see. Basically America society failing them.

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MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
It’s a to do list

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MurrayL@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
The weirdest thing to me is how some people brag about how many tabs they have open as if it’s a competition. Like, it shouldn’t be a point of pride, it just shows you don’t know how to use bookmarks.

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Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
When I asked someone, they basically used them like bookmarks.

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