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?

  • BussyCat@lemmy.world
    31·
    18 hours ago

    Why not just close them and open them back up later? Like you can bookmark the pages so you don’t lose your spot but I find it annoying to find the tab I am looking for at around 10 I would imagine it’s much worse at 200

    • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Why not just close them and open them back up later?

      Because that’s extra steps for no actual improvement.

      I close the tabs that I’m done with and add new ones when I want to not forget to look at something a bit later.

      That doesn’t need the “permanence” of a bookmark. (And, obviously I know editing bookmarks is a thing, but that is also extra steps for something I’ll only want once in about 15 min from now)

      • BussyCat@lemmy.world
        1·
        9 minutes ago

        Isn’t there a vast improvement by having a clean set of tabs that you can read the names of compared to 100 little tabs that you have to click through?

    • AA5B@lemmy.world
      3·
      5 hours ago

      I don’t generally find any tab. I work with the set related to my task then close them. The tabs for the previous task are right there, so I can just continue that task until completed, then close those tabs.

      It partly works, but I don’t always close tabs for interruptions and aren’t always able to work my way back to uncompleted tasks, so it builds up.

      I want to start using workspaces or tab groups to improve my discipline but haven’t yet

      Edit: and yes there are times when I don’t remember I started a task or can’t find my set of tabs so open a new set.

      And no, multiple windows was a horrible idea. Instead of making it easier to organized tab sets, it made it easier to open many more tabs

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.org
      6·
      13 hours ago

      You can search specifically for open tabs in Firefox and probably most other browsers (enter % [keyword] in Firefox’ address bar). If you tend to have related tabs near it, it’s less work than opening all those tabs back up through bookmarks or history.