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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[–] 9 points 8 months ago (1 child)

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

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

    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

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

    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.

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  • [–] 4 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    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.

    I want to start using workspaces or tab groups to improve my discipline but haven’t yet

    Edit: and yes there are times when I don’t remember I started a task or can’t find my set of tabs so open a new set.

    And no, multiple windows was a horrible idea. Instead of making it easier to organized tab sets, it made it easier to open many more tabs

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

    Why not just close them and open them back up later?

    Because that's extra steps for no actual improvement.

    I close the tabs that I'm done with and add new ones when I want to not forget to look at something a bit later.

    That doesn't need the "permanence" of a bookmark. (And, obviously I know editing bookmarks is a thing, but that is also extra steps for something I'll only want once in about 15 min from now)

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

    Isn’t there a vast improvement by having a clean set of tabs that you can read the names of compared to 100 little tabs that you have to click through?

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