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?
It’s a to do list
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
Rookie numbers
CGP grey once spoke about those links on Cortex.
Instead of reading everything that seems important and interesting today, he just saves those links and gets back to them later. A few weeks later, he just ends up deleting most of that stuff anyway, because it wasn’t actually all that important.
I usually just bookmark after a few weeks. Might come back to it in a few years
I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks
I have those too…
Firefox has that pocket thing. Could be worth a try.
RIP Pocket. I did use it for a time before it was killed, but I had moved to self-hosted solution (readeck) prior to it being killed.
Oh it died already? Haven’t been following the news on that. I just couldn’t figure out what it’s good for, so I simply ignored it.
It was around for a long time but pretty recently Mozilla decided to kill it
I used to love that shit in the iPod Touch web browsing days… But in the end it ended up being another tab hoarding container for me lol.
I push shit to read-it-later things all the time but even when I don’t read them I think it’s good. I don’t have the annoying tab clutter anymore and clearly it wasn’t that important if I haven’t ever gotten around to reading it
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
Not all disabilities are visible.
This may or may not be a joke, but yes, this is very often talked about among ADHDers!
I’m AuDHD and thankfully this is one area where my ordered, autistic side wins out – i.e. I have meticulously organised bookmarks and “Raindrop” tags for everything instead. 😄 I couldn’t stand having tons of tabs open.
So much this. My one monitor is basically nothing but tabs open to remind me to do things like pay my bills.
And tabs with internet searches so I know what I was thinking of doing.
I’ll grant you that, but are you implying that a large fraction, maybe close to half, of my coworkers are disabled? Surely there are other reasons.
Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
deleted by creator
Just tried that extension, and it’s pretty cool. Might actually keep it.
Also tried OneTab which condenses open tabs into a single list of links. Could be ideal for people who always need more RAM.
For people who are overwhelmed by tidying up (or can’t find anything afterwards xD) or managing bookmarks. So they simply use a chaotic system.
Interesting. I get it that making bookmarks takes some effort, so it’s easier to just ignore that system and use tabs instead. If you have hundreds of tabs open, how can you find anything? I just use the history of Firefox to find old stuff. The search feature actually works. Just sort by date and you can find that news article you almost read two months go.
My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
Same here, but the but my history is sorted by last visited. Usually I’m looking for something that’s relatively recent, so it should be among the first 10 results. However, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of having more tabs.
I split the tabs into multiple windows by category, personally (tho firefox’s tab grouping is pretty great too). And it’s more about it being present - bookmarks are fine, but if I am not actively reminded of something I likely will just forget about it entirely. Bookmarks aren’t visible all the time, so they just get forgotten.
Well, that is a good point. Tabs are always more or less visible, so you may remember to check something that looked interesting last week.
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
I will come back to it eventually, when the time is right.
It’s not important enough to bookmark, it’s not urgent enough to get to right now, but it’s too interesting to ignore entirely. When the time is right for a tab, I will return to it. Sometimes I scroll through them to jog my memory. Sometimes I’ll decide it wasn’t as interesting as I thought and delete it.
That’s sort of like the “watch later” feature in YouTube. Hey, wasn’t Firefox Pocket meant to be like that?
The problem with Pocket is that it’s out of sight. That’s like writing yourself a reminder note and putting it in a box under your bed. It also doesn’t maintain tab groups, so a collection of tabs will get scattered and messy.
That visibility seems to be a reoccurring theme in this thread. Some other people have brought that up as well.
On one hand I totally get it that if you see 10 tabs open all the time, they remind you of the 10 things you were planning to get back to at some point. On the other hand, I’m a bit skeptical about how functional that really is. I guess there is a way to make it work, otherwise nobody would do it that way.
What about 50 tabs? Does it still work that way? If you have a 100 tabs, you can’t even read the names any more, so it’s just one pile at that point, isn’t it. Although, some people treat that as a timeline of sorts, so I guess there can be some order too.
Anyway, recently I bumped into Raindrop, which seems to be like Pocket, but better. Still testing it, so I can’t tell you much yet. So far, it seems to be pretty good at organizing the stuff you throw in there.
Can you not read the labels? I know Chrome will shrink tabs to just the icon, but you mention Pocket, so I assume you know about firefox, where there’s always at least 6 or so characters shown.
I have no issue navigating 150+ tabs (except that it takes a moment to scroll over them). It’s like a kitchen; half of the cupboads just have baking supplies in them, but I know exactly where anything is, or at least where to look. Baking soda is in the first cupboard right of the fridge, next to the vanilla, behind the salt. The paper on planetary radius vs mass I’m using for worldbuilding in my TTRPG is just to the right of the chunkbase map, and a bit left of the second youtube island, next to the other 12 worldbuilding research tabs.
This was before tab groups too. Now I can collapse those 12 tabs into one item, and do that for each of ~10 topics, which makes navigating tabs much faster.
Firefox mobile is a different beast though, because I can’t organize the tabs, and they’ll get reorganized by time (I think?) after 2 weeks when they get moved to Inactive Tabs. That’s more of a big pile that I sort through when I’m bored.
I see those shrunk tabs on Chrome, as it’s a popular browser among my colleagues. I still prefer to use Firefox on my devices. So, in a way, I was making references to both browsers.
Some other people have also mentioned that they can find the tab they’re looking for even though there may be hundreds. Thanks for the kitchen analogy; it’s beginning to make sense.
Those inactive tabs are probably just a RAM-saving measure. Mobile devices tend to be pretty strict with that. Probably a bit annoying when you use tabs that way.
ADHD.
Overly the last year or so I’ve become entirely convinced I have developed ADHD. Is it possible to concuss yourself into ADHD?
It is possible to develop ADHD like symptoms from a TBI of some kind. It’s not ADHD from a technical definition standpoint, but from lived experience of symptoms, it can line up with ADHD
Surprisingly many people have brought that up. Probably not a coincidence. Maybe that’s the thing I didn’t think of.
People with ADHD (I speak from experience) have shitty working memory, poor organisational skills, are easily distracted, and a tendancy to procrasate.
Therefore you start researching something for work/uni (4tabs) I’ll come back to that after a little YouTube break (+3tabs) I’ll watch those videos later I need to get back to work (+4 tabs that are duplicates of the first 4). Time for home, when do I need to catch the bus (+1) and the first 12 tabs will just stay open till the next day because you know you won’t remember what you were doing.
Firefox’s “search in tabs” is an invaluable feature to reduce duplication.
Prefix with ‘%’ in the search bar
You can also use ^ to search your history instead, and do away with the tabs!
Thanks! I’ll save that for later.
Thanks
Oh, so that’s how the numbers go up. Keep on doing that for a week or two, and having only 100 tabs open is an achievement.
Have you seen the price of RAM lately? You gotta do something to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth.
Saw a Loops video about it a few days ago. Other than that, I have no idea.
No need to worry about RAM prices since you can always just download more RAM.
but once I’m done, I close them all
Same. But I also have a continuous stream of new projects that never get finished.
When I have a lot of unfinished things going on, they begin to bother me. I need to close things and start from a clean slate. Doesn’t that bother you at all?
Oh, so much. I’m still trying to figure out how to actually complete things.
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 typically have 100-200. It’s usually a “let me come back to this in a day or three”, which may or may not happen. Or a thread of “doing research on a topic” and then getting pulled to something else, but not having time to summarize/organize for later. Plus, as others have mentioned, sometimes you need the tab session history.
I really appreciate y’all saying what a monster or computer illiterate I am, though. Don’t tell my boss, she’ll wonder what I do all day.
Hmm… The “lemmy get back to that” feeling is familiar, especially the second part where you never actually do.
Back when I had a hundred neatly organized bookmarks, there were several links like that. Some site seemed like a neat tool or an interesting article, but I never actually ended up revisiting that site. Fast forward 10 years, and I start going through all of those bookmarks to see which ones are actually worth keeping. That’s when I find out that more than half of those sites don’t even exist any more.
Nowadays, I’m better at letting go of digital things and discarding useless junk. My current bookmark list consists of sites I actually use frequently enough to appreciate the shortcut.
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
I suspect they lack whatever visceral reaction makes me start to panic if I have more tabs open than fit neatly across the top of the browser.
I have that sort of desire for order too. Seems to come with anxiety when seeing a pile of tabs spiraling out of control. So far, that set of traits have served me well, but some people are clearly built different. Maybe they’re immune to chaos.
Oh, I like chaos fine. With me it’s… fear of loss? I have to close all unnecessary tabs myself so I don’t lose track of and accidentally close the few important ones.
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.
It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.
I hear what you’re saying, but not once have I ever seen somebody with lots of tabs be able to find what they’re looking for in those tabs. They almost always click through several, then open a new tab and navigate to the content they need.
Good for you.
I simply scroll down my tab bar to what I’m looking for.
I’m down to 130 tabs from 170
Sucks to be them I guess?
