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?
Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.
Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.
Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).
I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.
Something really interesting is beginning to emerge from this discussion. People have varying requirements in terms of transience/permanence. Some features, like tabs are less permanent, but still permanent enough for many uses. Other features like bookmarks are far more permanent, maybe even too permanent.
All of this is beginning to look like the communication tool hierarchy (calling, email, teams etc). There’s clearly a similar hierarchy of permanence, and when a given topic does not cross the permanence threshold required for a bookmark, it stays in the tabs. That is something I hadn’t really considered before, although I was already applying this concept.