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?


I have no reason to assume that my way of doing thins is better than any other. I just know what works for me, and that doesn’t mean some other way should’t work for someone else.
Based on what I’ve seen, most people seem to have a rather small number of tabs open, while a smaller group of people like to do the exact opposite. That’s not a tiny minority though. Maybe something like 10-20% approximately. Since that many people do things in a completely different way, I got curious as to why that is.