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?

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[–] 50 points 8 months ago* (4 children)

When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Interesting. I get it that making bookmarks takes some effort, so it’s easier to just ignore that system and use tabs instead. If you have hundreds of tabs open, how can you find anything? I just use the history of Firefox to find old stuff. The search feature actually works. Just sort by date and you can find that news article you almost read two months go.

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  • [–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Firefox actually searches tabs first when you enter something into the adress bar and switches to the tab automatically when you press enter.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 8 months ago*

    Oh that feature. I bump into it all the time when I want to open the same site 4 times and then fork them into 4 different things. Could be handy for other people, but I tend to find that feature more annoying than useful. Fortunately ctrl+l, ctrl+c, ctrl+t, ctrl+v works too. I do that so often that I should probably set up a macro that does that ctrl+LCTV combo in one click.

    Anyway, that means tabs can be searched conveniently. Even if you have a hundred tabs open, you can actually find what you need.

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  • [–] 7 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 8 months ago

    Same here, but the but my history is sorted by last visited. Usually I’m looking for something that’s relatively recent, so it should be among the first 10 results. However, I’m beginning to warm up to the idea of having more tabs.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    I split the tabs into multiple windows by category, personally (tho firefox's tab grouping is pretty great too). And it's more about it being present - bookmarks are fine, but if I am not actively reminded of something I likely will just forget about it entirely. Bookmarks aren't visible all the time, so they just get forgotten.

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