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?


Why not just close them and open them back up later? Like you can bookmark the pages so you don’t lose your spot but I find it annoying to find the tab I am looking for at around 10 I would imagine it’s much worse at 200
I don’t generally find any tab. I work with the set related to my task then close them. The tabs for the previous task are right there, so I can just continue that task until completed, then close those tabs.
It partly works, but I don’t always close tabs for interruptions and aren’t always able to work my way back to uncompleted tasks, so it builds up
You can search specifically for open tabs in Firefox and probably most other browsers (enter
% [keyword]in Firefox’ address bar). If you tend to have related tabs near it, it’s less work than opening all those tabs back up through bookmarks or history.HO HO HO BOY you should not have told me that. My tab hoarding is about to become infinitely worse 😈
Join the dark side 😈