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?
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
I’m never actually going to look in the bookmarks folder so why would I put anything there?
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.
Edit: anyone care to explain why this is funny? Y’all are insane.
Hahahaha, right.
Pardon? Why was that funny?
The level people are willing to delude themselves into their poor habit in this thread is breathtaking to me.
Hilarious
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. Turns out, people use their browsers in vastly different ways.
While I was writing my master’s thesis I tried to put things in the bookmarks folder and ended up re-researching a lot of topics. It ended up being much less work having 6 browser windows open across 2 monitors with a bunch of tabs relating to related subjects. For example window 1 might have only papers related to retrograde tracer studies in the medial entorhinal cortex, window 2 has anterograde tracer studies in the insular cortex etc that way if I needed info on any of those subjects I could flip through the tabs related to that topic before searching for a paper.
In other words, that’s the kind of stuff you need to reference frequently, so having those tabs constantly open is quite useful for the task at hand.
Other people seem to just neglect and abandon a bunch of tab. That’s a very different crowd though.
No I also tend to have about 12 irrelevant tabs open too. But it’s all down to executive dysfunction.
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.
Shockingly, some people function differently to you.
Maybe they have a superpower for staying calm even though everything around them is a total mess. I know I don’t have that power.
The whole entire world is a giant fucked up mess run by mentally handicapped billionaires. Shits fucking terrifying and we’re all cooked. Having a neat browser window isn’t going to fix that.
True.
I just like to do what I can to keep certain things neat and tidy. Gives me some sense of control even though the rest of the world is far beyond fixing.
The point is that it may look like a mess to you but that doesn’t mean it is objectively a mess. Hundreds of open tabs can still have logic and organisation even if that is not obvious to you.
Fair enough.
Many people here have a system where different topics are isolated to their own browser windows, and each window can have 10-20 tabs. That sort of system makes sense to me.
So, what’s the system where you keep 100 tabs in a single window? How does that work?
Well I guess I don’t have a particular or consistent system but I can find what I need pretty quickly. I have a few tab groups for stuff like youtube, bandcamp which helps a lot, and I use Simple Tab Groups in firefox which has been amazing (but I’ve only been using one group/window so this is kind of defunct now), but otherwise there are areas of tabs which are related and they are roughly in chronological order. I will manually move tabs so there are areas of certain topics. I know I can scroll all the way to the right for old tabs, and then left of that a specific topic I was learning about at that time, then left of that something roughly related by topic or time, and so on until all the way to the left is the most recent tabs (and then a bunch of pinned tabs that I use very often). It’s like a map of time and topic, and not just a bunch of random tabs like you might imagine.
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.