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.
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.
Rookie numbers
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.
AuDHD
Intrusive thought when I first read that, “Gold tier ADHD!”
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.
Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
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.
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.
Have you seen the price of RAM lately? You gotta do something to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth.
LMAO, as a light “desktop/laptop” user I agree, if it wasn’t for tab hoarding I’d never hit 90% or more of the RAM usage of my 16 GB of RAM MacBook Pro that I have been maining since 2014 😂
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.
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.
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
Even those 500 tabs in mobile Safari?
Anyone that uses Safari isn’t serious about browsing. ;p
There’s this guy who uses his phone for browsing stuff all the time. The way I see it, he is very serious about making his life harder.
Keeping them open keeps them more visible than if you only rely on bookmarks or browser history. Personally I use a browser extension for vertical tabs (Tree Style Tab) that allows you to make subgroups, which does a great job organizing the tabs - I could replicate something similar with bookmarks, but that would be additional work.
I also use an extension that automaticaly unloads tabs after a while (you can toggle it off on a per-tab basis, of course), which helps a lot with keeping down resource use.
you get it.
i tried using bookmark tags for a while but it’s just a lot of extra work.
that’s one thing firefox could actually improve with their insistence on pushing ai into everything: tag my bookmarks for me and allow searching through them by topic rather than title.
That is very interesting. I should probably try that automatic tab management thing. Any recommendations?
I have to refer to between 25-40 tabs to do my job at work, plus then there’s the stuff “to do” for today, stuff I just know is going to come up again or I’m actively tracking or referring to, etc.
At home I have several tabs I refer to or visit often, and then there’s the stuff I mean to follow up on, and the stuff I’m actively doing/reading.
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
Yeah, that seems like a good way to use tabs.
However, eventually they have a tendency to accumulate and fill the entire tab bar to such an extent that you can no longer even see the names. Some people like to roll that way, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going with that.
Some people don’t let them accumulate much, but others do. The key difference seems to be how often do you close the tabs. If you close them rarely enough that you still have 100+ tabs open all the time, that’s the kind of situation I have questions about.
when i have had tons and tons of tabs open, it has been due to laziness and just not bothering to sort which tabs are useless to have around and which are not.
ADHD.
Care to elaborate? Some people with ADHD hate seeing tabs, and they close all tabs as soon as possible.
And sometimes we will totally come back to that later, maybe, one day. And so it stays forever.
That is the other extreme, and both groups say they have ADHD. Seems like a pretty complex term to me.
Most people I know who do that use them as kinda bookmarks. Tbh, I do also sort of do this on my phone. I keep some tabs open with stuff I still wanted to check out. And every now and then I go through them and close the ones I don’t need. But on PC I just close the whole session with all tabs when I’m done
Mobile tabs are a bit different though, because the system manages RAM so aggressively. With computers though, running out of RAM is usually the user’s fault. If a mobile OS runs out of RAM, it just kicks stuff out, like that Lemmy client where you were writing a comment and then decided to check something on wikipedia before posting.
Same thing with tabs too. Those two week old tabs haven’t been active in a long time.
Because I want to and it’s weird that it bothers you.
Let’s explore that instead.
What allows you to assume you’re not the abnormal one?
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.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
I use them as a sort of bookmark cache. Stuff I’m unlikely to want to keep for long but also not stuff I want to discard immediately. I use the tree style tabs plugin in ff, works beautifully
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.
Firefox actually searches tabs first when you enter something into the adress bar and switches to the tab automatically when you press enter.
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 history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
For me it’s because I have ADHD and thrive among organized clutter.
I may have 100 tabs open, but they’re all categorized: One tab group for YouTube, one for porn, one for my website, and one for everything else. I keep stuff in there that’s good enough to hang onto for a while, but not good enough to bookmark.
I hate the default way most browsers handle tabs. Moved over to this setup years ago and I’m definitely never going back.
Firefox plus either Sideberry or Tree Style Tabs - both will organize your tabs vertically along the side of the window in a tree format. Follow a link in a new tab, it opens up as a new branch under the current one.
Pair that with Auto Tab Discard to keep memory usage down, and something like Open Link with New Tab to automatically open links across domains in a new child tab.
Now I tend to just collapse trees of related tabs and further organize broad related subjects in windows.
I used to use sideberry too, now I’m on the zen browser firefox fork and its pretty great
There’s that zen browser again. I keep hearing about it, and now I can’t stop myself from trying it out.
It’s great, it does basically what sideberry does (or at least what it did for me, iirc sideberry had a config page 3 miles long so ymmv) but it’s built-in and that allows for things an extension just couldn’t do.
And then there’s glance and split view which I pretty much can’t live without anymore
That sounds awesome!
Can you give some examples where that browser has made a big difference? What are the kinds of situations where it really shines?
In terms of unique features there’s a few places where it shines.
Glance: You know how you open a link in the background to not lose the tab you’re currently on? Well in Zen you just click it with Alt+click and it pops open in an overlay which you can easily click away when you’re done with it (or open it to a ‘full’ tab if you need it)
Split view: exactly what it sounds like, have multiple tabs open side-by-side or above each other in the same window
Side tabs: exactly what sideberry does except the browser is fully designed around it with features like workspaces (with per workspace themes), essential tabs (are shown on top in each workspace) and pinned tabs (per workspace) all just being great.
Thanks! Those things should come in handy.
Interesting. Let’s open those links in the background.
LOL, and get back to them some time within the next weeks… or months. Who knows how long it will take. 🤷
this is my default setup, i have thousands tabs opened… when i need to search for something i usually search in my opened tabs, and it’s more useful then a search engine
After hearing so many recommendations for Sidebery, I finally had the perfect chance to test it out. I was searching for a specific YouTube video I’d seen almost a year ago. Zero idea who made it or the exact title was, just the general topic and a few probable keywords. Even with Gemini’s fancy AI crap and Google integrations, it was a dead end.
I tried various search terms and ended up with a mountain of tabs. That’s when I realized I needed to organize the chaos, and Sidebery was a lifesaver. RAM usage hit about 14 GB, but I finally found the video.
I created three tab panels: one for the main topic, another for interesting but unrelated finds, and a third for random stuff to revisit later today. Sidebery can close duplicates and move tabs between panels, and that made it much easier to manage everything. Regular tabs just can’t handle this kind of workflow.
This experience really drove home why people use dedicated tab managers. Keeping everything in a single row still feels bizarre to me, but with the right tools, having a 100 tabs open is completely understandable.
