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?
From some comments I’ve seen about this back on Reddit, it seems like some people don’t know about bookmarks.
But also professionals, like a lot of Lemmings, tend to keep a lot of tabs open for references or other material they need to check often and quickly. Faster to leave tabs open than reopening the page every time you need to check something on it.
To some extent, I do that as well. However, in my case, it’s not hundreds of tabs. More like 5 sites that I reference frequently enough to keep them open most of the time. I also have bookmarks for the same sites so I can quickly open them when I need to.
However, what I’m really curious about is the people who have hundreds of tabs open all the time. What kind of workflow is that how does it work?