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?
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.
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
ADHD.
If I need them again, browser history is there.
I think that browser history sucks in Firefox, I don’t know why, if it has, well history, recently viewed and recently closed sections, YET I can’t ever quickly find the one tab that I closed recently (but not that recently, recently enough to remember that I did) and it is shown days ago in the browser history which makes me always manually search for it and, oh boy if I remember a word differently from the site title I am in for a hard time…
I don’t specifically hoard tabs (I do with Simple Tab Groups) but this seemed like the perfect chance for me to rant about this… Man I remember that the history option showed you the last recent visited/viewed or closed page :/
All those tabs open with telemetry tracking scripts and cookies that are designed to de-anonymize you. Those persons would be completely identified. I wonder how much spam they get a day.
In many cases are issues to keep dealing with later after the current urgency is solved, is faster and more effective than trying to register the progress somewhere and save it for later… eventually some fell out forever and just accumulate, also start cleaning/clossing often reveal sooner than later something pending and the maintenance stops abruptly there
Hoarding
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
Even those 500 tabs in mobile Safari?
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
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
There’s that zen browser again. I keep hearing about it, and now I can’t stop myself from trying it out.
