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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[–] 100 points 8 months ago (3 children)
  • [–] 54 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    Hard to explain that tab I've had open for 8 months for something I've been meaning to read.

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  • [–] [S] 19 points 8 months ago

    CGP grey once spoke about those links on Cortex.

    Instead of reading everything that seems important and interesting today, he just saves those links and gets back to them later. A few weeks later, he just ends up deleting most of that stuff anyway, because it wasn’t actually all that important.

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

    I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks

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  • [–] [S] 0 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Firefox has that pocket thing. Could be worth a try.

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

    RIP Pocket. I did use it for a time before it was killed, but I had moved to self-hosted solution (readeck) prior to it being killed.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Oh it died already? Haven’t been following the news on that. I just couldn’t figure out what it’s good for, so I simply ignored it.

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

    It was around for a long time but pretty recently Mozilla decided to kill it

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

    I used to love that shit in the iPod Touch web browsing days... But in the end it ended up being another tab hoarding container for me lol.

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

    I push shit to read-it-later things all the time but even when I don't read them I think it's good. I don't have the annoying tab clutter anymore and clearly it wasn't that important if I haven't ever gotten around to reading it

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