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?
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.
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 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.
I can’t even have 5 tabs open even if I try. I always close a tab when I am done with it.
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because I’m working on multiple tasks at once, and some of those tasks require comparing things like data sheets or products or reading multiple documents
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because I don’t want to dig up the thing I was looking at yesterday with a 10-tab group, but I also ran out of time yesterday to complete the task
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because I can and it’s convenient
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because I keep something open until I have dealt with it, so it functions as a task list
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Because I’m going to need those! Not this second / day / week / month, but I’m going to need those and I have way too many bookmarks!
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.
Because I want to and it’s weird that it bothers you.
Let’s explore that instead.
What allows you to assume you’re not the abnormal one?
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
So I don’t lose that one porn video I found 3 years ago.
ADHD.
If I need them again, browser history is there.
I think that browser history sucks in Firefox, I don’t know why, if it has, well history, recently viewed and recently closed sections, YET I can’t ever quickly find the one tab that I closed recently (but not that recently, recently enough to remember that I did) and it is shown days ago in the browser history which makes me always manually search for it and, oh boy if I remember a word differently from the site title I am in for a hard time…
I don’t specifically hoard tabs (I do with Simple Tab Groups) but this seemed like the perfect chance for me to rant about this… Man I remember that the history option showed you the last recent visited/viewed or closed page :/
In many cases are issues to keep dealing with later after the current urgency is solved, is faster and more effective than trying to register the progress somewhere and save it for later… eventually some fell out forever and just accumulate, also start cleaning/clossing often reveal sooner than later something pending and the maintenance stops abruptly there
All those tabs open with telemetry tracking scripts and cookies that are designed to de-anonymize you. Those persons would be completely identified. I wonder how much spam they get a day.
Hoarding
