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?
Hoarding
Hah I once reached the ∞ on Firefox on my phone. It just stopped counting… 😅 Apparently you can configure Kagi to open a new tab when you click on one of the search results… (probably other search engines as well, but I don’t think they do that by default)
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
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
I am reading a text and there’s a link in it, that I want to follow up. But first I want to finish the text, so I open the link in the background.
porn? some people watch some embarrasing content that they dont want people seeing.
For me, it’s because of ADHD.
To combat this I installed 128GB of the fastest ram I could afford.
My computer still lags out after a week of never closing any tabs.
Please be trolling
Too stupid to use bookmarks.
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.
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?
People have that many tabs open for the same reason people have full piss bottles next to their computers.
That is disgusting.
For what it’s worth, I never have less than hundreds of tabs across dozens of windows, and I don’t think I’ve ever pissed in a bottle.
Also, it’s not about bookmarks, I have a ton of those too - many of them with keywords for power querying.
I never said you had any piss bottles I’m saying people keep tabs open that much for the same reason people have piss bottles.
You’re just messy disorganized and lazy 🤷
I’m seeing a lot of excuses in this thread for their poor habit.
At about 10 I start questioning things. You’ll either forget what the tab was about so it wasn’t important, and if it is important, well, you found it somehow in the first place, you’ll find it again.
“Close tabs to the right” and we’re done.
I have close to 200. Every task I start has a new set of tabs. In theory I’ll complete them and work my way back through the stack
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 😈
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.
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
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. 🤷
I used to use sideberry too, now I’m on the zen browser firefox fork and its pretty great
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?
