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

Submitted ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
because i forget to close useless ones.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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  - ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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sanguinepar@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
  
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.

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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
  
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url@feddit.fr ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
No idea. I close tabs as soon as I’m done. Also private tab by default

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SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  But are they open for several weeks?
  
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  - SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago
    Months, even.
    
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DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Infinite tabs. The question of “how many” isn’t even relevant at that point. The real question is: countable or uncountable infinity?
  
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thezeesystem@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
ADHD. Lack of education with computers growing up are the one I commonly see. Basically America society failing them.

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- Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  I was programming long before PC’s existed.
  
  You’re paradigm of the world isn’t everyone’s.
  
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  - Formfiller@lemmy.world ⁨25⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago
    That’s their truth
    
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- Unquote0270@programming.dev ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Because the whole world is America, right?
  
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tty5@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨hours⁩ ago
    So you admit to doing the same thing.
    
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melroy@kbin.melroy.org ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ 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 ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Oh that sounds nice. I keep bumping into Floorp surprisingly often. Must be something worth checking out.
    
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ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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- lime@feddit.nu ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  “i wonder what that article said about the thing i was thinking of. what mas the article about again? …what site was it?”
  
  anyway, ask me about my 400 open tabs
  
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  - ada@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I mean, you can scan the page titles in your history just as easily as you can scan the titles of 400 tabs. So it’s kind of same same if you can’t remember any pertinent details
    
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  - TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    Do you ever close any of them?
    
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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Same. I tend to tidy up my tabs regularly. If I have more than 10 tabs open, I usually don’t care about them any more, so it’s time for them to go. Also, I’m a huge fan of searching the history. It has saved the day more than a few times.
  
  Apparently, some people operate differently. Makes me wonder why.
  
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soyboy77@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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Perspectivist@feddit.uk ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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- Evil_Incarnate@sopuli.xyz ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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- TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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celeste@kbin.earth ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨hours⁩ ago
    "power user" is such a kind way to describe that, thank you!
    
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Melobol@lemmy.ml ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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 ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ 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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