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 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.
This really resonates with me. At least in the sense I operate like this without the tree structure but would vastly benefit from it. If you don’t mind my asking, what browser and extensions do you use?
Firefox and https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en That’s the creators page, but it’s also on the Mozilla site.
I use a bunch of other stuff too, that synergizes and whatnot, but that’s the tree style tabs that I’ve been using since like 2011. I’ve also been telling people that this is the future the entire time, and nobody ever believes me. But that’s fine, it’s going to be an inevitable option. But maybe at this rate, the internet will die before people adopt tree tabs hahaha.
If you do use that extension, I suggest going through the options, as it’s pretty well fleshed out. An option that makes a big difference to me is the the theme or whatever, to clearly see the boxes around each tab, and therefore the indentation. Another meaningful option is the tree behavior that auto-collapses the tree is you open a new one - I don’t like that, and prefer the trees stay option and me in control. But to each their own. After all, this is all just tools for you to optimize and explore.