Why do some people have so many browser tabs open?
from TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 28 Nov 08:31
https://lemmy.zip/post/53923519
from TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world on 28 Nov 08:31
https://lemmy.zip/post/53923519
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?
#nostupidquestions
threaded - newest
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
For people who are overwhelmed by tidying up (or can’t find anything afterwards xD) or managing bookmarks. So they simply use a chaotic system.
I use them as a sort of bookmark cache. Stuff I’m unlikely to want to keep for long but also not stuff I want to discard immediately. I use the tree style tabs plugin in ff, works beautifully
Just tried that extension, and it’s pretty cool. Might actually keep it.
Also tried OneTab which condenses open tabs into a single list of links. Could be ideal for people who always need more RAM.
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.
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.
Well, that is a good point. Tabs are always more or less visible, so you may remember to check something that looked interesting last week.
My history has thousands of results, my tabs don’t.
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.
Firefox actually searches tabs first when you enter something into the adress bar and switches to the tab automatically when you press enter.
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.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
The weirdest thing to me is how some people brag about how many tabs they have open as if it’s a competition. Like, it shouldn’t be a point of pride, it just shows you don’t know how to use bookmarks.
I think it’s closely related to people with tens of thousands of emails in their inbox, and people who keep all their files on their desktop. Some people just live in chaos.
Didn’t Linus do some completely absurd tab setup a few years ago? They had like a crazy amount of ram, and started opening thousands of tabs to see if they can max out the ram or whatever. I’m pretty sure Linus has the bragging rights when it comes to tab count.
When you accumulate hundreds of tabs as a part of normal everyday life, that just looks messy and unorganized to me. Maybe this post will enlighten me. Maybe there is a valid use case other than stress testing hardware.
BTW that with 500 tabs also uses the desktop as a dumping for all their digital trash and treasures. It’s true, some people really do live in chaos.
i use hundreds of tabs, have disabled desktop icons, and run inbox zero. i refuse to fit in your boxes!
Okay, I was curious what Inbox Zero is, and I went ‘ew’ at the ‘ai’ angle, but then I fucking lost it when I got to the prices. They want $18 a month (per user) on the annual plan, to:
I do everything except the ai replies through cpanel and my email client, for free. Fucking hell, that’s almost 3x what I pay for my web/email hosting. And I don’t have to prepay for a year of service, and I get way more granular control over incoming messages. That service is highway robbery, and they have 15k users?! What the actual fuck. $18 a year, kinda high, but a fucking month…
okay i’ve never heard of that. inbox zero just means having nothing in your inbox.
Yeah, lol, I figured it wasn’t a real thing but search turned up this immediately: www.getinboxzero.com
oh ew
Inbox zero means handling your emails in such a way that you keep your inbox empty. Sounds like someone named a shitty SAAS product after the concept.
See my other comment :p
Why spend all that time making and deleting bookmarks when I can just leave some tabs open? Also, too many sites are poorly designed and the desired data can’t be directly accessed from a URL.
Can confirm. Nowadays the URL doesn’t really say much. Even if you bookmark something, what you see there isn’t really saved anywhere. The link will lead you to something that’s somewhere in the approximate neighborhood, but not exactly what you wanted to save.
One of these first world problems again…
It takes literally no time. You click the star in the URL bar and save it to your bookmarks bar
And what about when I don’t need it any more? Just leave them all in there, eventually cluttering up my bookmarks even worse than the tab situation?
Yep, it’s simply open and close. Bookmarks is open, bookmark, close, open again sometime later from bookmarks, close, then go back in and delete bookmark.
Bookmarks for me are super long term saves, not normal daily use.
And if you use a good extension or something, open tabs are fine. Im using simple tab groups in Firefox and it’s fantastic.
You can right click it and click “delete” if it bothers you that much.
Tabs are temporary and were never meant to be kept from session to session. The only reason they do now is because people like yourself kept eating up all your RAM with them and then complaining when everything got slow.
Show me where I was complaining thusly.
Nope.
I have a half dozen email address, about 20 aliases.
My inbox rarely has even 5 unopened emails.
I have 100+ tabs on desktop, over 100 on phone.
Do you ever close those tabs?
Bad parenting
It’s a to do list
Hard to explain that tab I’ve had open for 8 months for something I’ve been meaning to read.
Rookie numbers
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.
I usually just bookmark after a few weeks. Might come back to it in a few years
I feel like actual to-do list and actual read-it-later thing would be better for those. Or just bookmarks
Firefox has that pocket thing. Could be worth a try.
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.
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.
It was around for a long time but pretty recently Mozilla decided to kill it
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.
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
I think that’s a good way to ease the mental burden of an endless to-do list. You still have the list but it’s no longer actively making you feel overwhelmed.
I have those too…
Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.
Oh, I have those too!
Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec
<img alt="" src="https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/e46b985d-40a7-4f82-bf78-27070f17ddf9.jpeg">
I open a tab, read half of it.
“I’ll finish it later”
opens another tab
repeat forever…
Infinite tabs. The question of “how many” isn’t even relevant at that point. The real question is: countable or uncountable infinity?
ADHD. Lack of education with computers growing up are the one I commonly see. Basically America society failing them.
Because the whole world is America, right?
I live in America and I don’t live in other countries I’m hoping that’s not the same in other countries though, but that is what my experience is living in America. As always your milage may very depending on your location.
I was programming long before PC’s existed.
Your paradigm of the world isn’t everyone’s.
That’s their truth
I have 2 or 3 open at once at most. If I can’t remember what it’s for, it gets closed. And if I need to find it again, searching my history is easier than searching my open tabs
I just can’t handle tab frenzy
“i wonder what that article said about the thing i was thinking of. what was the article about again? …what site was it?”
anyway, ask me about my 400 open tabs
Do you ever close any of them?
sure, when i’m done with them
Ok that makes sense. It’s not an infinitely growing mess then.
weeeeeeeeell
Sounds like “when I’m done with them” comes with a caveat, right?
You’ll close them eventually, but let’s not worry about it this week. Next month could be too early, but within the next 6 months should be doable.
i had to recreate my profile a few years ago because some settings and tabs were coming up on 20 years old and started affecting the performance of the browser.
Today I tried a few tab management extensions, and I found OneTab.
You might want to look into that one. It just saves all the tabs into a list that looks and feels a bit like a vertical tab bar. Since none of the tabs are actually loaded, they don’t really take any more RAM than a line of text. This way, you never have to close any tabs again. Just condense all of with OneTab and you’ll always be able to find them later. The only downside is that they aren’t quite as visible as normal tabs.
tried em all. i hate onetab because it removes the tabs from my vision. i also used panorama when that was a thing and the same thing happened. tree style tab and a low setting for discard works best.
I mean, you can scan the page titles in your history just as easily as you can scan the titles of 400 tabs. So it’s kind of same same if you can’t remember any pertinent details
yeah but i can remember that they exist if i can see them
Tab History shows every instance of a tab, not just 1 for the 300 times you visited it.
Some browsers will not keep your history indefinitely (or even more than a month) any more
Same. I tend to tidy up my tabs regularly. If I have more than 10 tabs open, I usually don’t care about them any more, so it’s time for them to go. Also, I’m a huge fan of searching the history. It has saved the day more than a few times.
Apparently, some people operate differently. Makes me wonder why.
Keeping them open keeps them more visible than if you only rely on bookmarks or browser history. Personally I use a browser extension for vertical tabs (Tree Style Tab) that allows you to make subgroups, which does a great job organizing the tabs - I could replicate something similar with bookmarks, but that would be additional work.
I also use an extension that automaticaly unloads tabs after a while (you can toggle it off on a per-tab basis, of course), which helps a lot with keeping down resource use.
you get it.
i tried using bookmark tags for a while but it’s just a lot of extra work.
that’s one thing firefox could actually improve with their insistence on pushing ai into everything: tag my bookmarks for me and allow searching through them by topic rather than title.
That is very interesting. I should probably try that automatic tab management thing. Any recommendations?
I have to refer to between 25-40 tabs to do my job at work, plus then there’s the stuff “to do” for today, stuff I just know is going to come up again or I’m actively tracking or referring to, etc.
At home I have several tabs I refer to or visit often, and then there’s the stuff I mean to follow up on, and the stuff I’m actively doing/reading.
Bookmarks are where projects go to die.
Fair enough. If you can’t see that that, it’s easy to forget it even exists.
I usually have 50-70 tabs open, spread across 6-8 windows.
Each window is for a particular client, usually with various pages from their website, plus the equivalent CMS editing page, their socials, etc. I’m regularly doing a small job for one client here, another there, and so on, so it’s easier to just leave them open.
I also usually have at least one or two windows with my own stuff - Lemmy, BlueSky, a football ⚽ forum I use, YouTube, BBC News, etc.
It’s messy, but it works on the whole. It’s a pain whenever I need to restart or run updates though, since I need to check every tab to make sure it’s safe to close! 😁
Totally understandable in a work context. At work, I can have like 50 tabs and several windows open when comparing products, prices or whatever. When there’s nothing urgent like that going on, there’s no need to keep them open. I’ll just close a bunch of tabs when they’ve served their purpose.
At home though, that’s a bit rare. When researching something, I can have 10-30 tabs easily, but they are also very temporary. When I’m done, I just close them.
Some people seem to hoard tabs instead. They just keep opening more and more without ever really closing the ones they no longer need. Or do they still need them like 3 weeks later? Seems doubtful to me.
There are also a few things I need regularly, so I’ll just bookmark those places for easy access. After an update, I’ll click those links and I’m ready to continue where I left off earlier.
Try floorp and use workspaces or colored tabs
I wonder the same about people with hundreds of unread emails. Almost as if they don’t know that you can unsubscribe from newsletters.
I go through and unsub to stuff, but some keep coming back. Then I make a filter to delete them when they come.
When your inbox is a mess, email stops working for you. It’s impossible to find anything worth reading, so you end up reading nothing.
Same with notifications. If you allow all of them, it’s functionally the same as disabling the whole notification system.
Not all disabilities are visible.
This may or may not be a joke, but yes, this is very often talked about among ADHDers!
I’m AuDHD and thankfully this is one area where my ordered, autistic side wins out – i.e. I have meticulously organised bookmarks and “Raindrop” tags for everything instead. 😄 I couldn’t stand having tons of tabs open.
Intrusive thought when I first read that, “Gold tier ADHD!”
Ouch! That’s pretty brutal.😀
Next time I see someone with too many tabs, I’ll think of that line.
So much this. My one monitor is basically nothing but tabs open to remind me to do things like pay my bills.
And tabs with internet searches so I know what I was thinking of doing.
I’ll grant you that, but are you implying that a large fraction, maybe close to half, of my coworkers are disabled? Surely there are other reasons.
My browser in my phone opens a new tab every time I put in a new url. I should really change that setting…
I probably have 10 lemmy home open right now. Not that I can see aside of a flat 8 as amount of tabs open.
Same. Every once in a while, I just close all tabs to get rid of all the junk I no longer care about.
I always mean to go back to them but never do. It’s usually something that is not quite important enough to bookmark. At some point they reach critical mass and I lose the whole session. Tab savers mitigate this, however. Funny thing is, I never used to be a tab guy - I always just opened new pages.
Do tabs use less memory or something? Are they more system resource efficient overall?
Some article may seem interesting, important and urgent today, but if you just save that link for later, it can feel very liberating. Usually, there’s no real urgency to actually read it today. If you get back to it a week later, you’ll probably realize it wasn’t that useful after all, and end up deleting the link immediately.
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
Yes, exactly. But also when I have to force quit my browser and it asks me if I want to reopen the tabs, I immediately click no. It’s like I’ve been released from an evil wizard’s curse. Then I can start a fresh tab hoard.
I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.
There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.
I am never close to 100. I don’t even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.
Ok, so you have a lot of stuff going on, which is fine. You’re also keeping under control, so the numbers never get totally crazy.
That’s not at all what I see some other people doing. They have like hundreds of tabs open all the time, and I have no idea if there’s any method to that madness.
More madness and less method the more tabs are open is my guess.
I can almost never find things in my browser history. I keep windows with relevant tabs open on separate workspaces.
But are they open for several weeks?
Months, even.
So, do you ever clear them or do they just sit there util you forget they ever existed?
They’re there for a reason. Once the context no longer exists - the task is complete, the partnership has lapsed, or I’ve decided that my cup of fucks runneth dry - I will close the relevant tabs, or even the entire window.
Looking at what I have now, it's a mix of tasks I don't want to forget to do, a long article I was reading but felt i wasn't absorbing, some fanfic I am probably going to read in the next couple days plus the rec list I got them from, a podcast I'm still midway through for when I'm driving, an article for a work thing I'll need tomorrow, a couple dnd race pages open as I'm making a character for a new campaign, and two bsky people who post interesting articles on the daily so I read them daily. Some stuff is bookmarked, but if I'm using it in the next week, it stays in tabs.
They all get closed when I'm done with them, but new things get rotated in. I'm at my max now, but it's rare I have under five open. It's a to-do list, basically, and there are always new things to do, and read, and think about, and learn. Bookmarks are for when I want to save a link to look at much later. Like, webcomics I've caught up with, artists I like, utility pages, resources, etc.
I used to be "worse" because I had fun in the early 00s generating link lists for character fan pages. It involved opening every relevant link on an already vetted and tagged page, and then checking each one (and opening pages from their links if they turned out to be relevant). When I finished a character, I'd start on the next, so I'd have one or two hundred open most of the time. I lost interest, eventually. The impulse to link to relevant topics still exists in me, however, which is a big reason I'm on this website.
That sounds like all of them are actually more or less active. It’s not like vast majority of them are neglected and forgotten.
Maybe you’re some sort of a power user who just needs a lot of tabs to get stuff done. I don’t see any problem with that. Since you also use bookmarks, you’re effectively controlling the chaos. That doesn’t look anything like the chaotic mess I’ve seen with some other people.
"power user" is such a kind way to describe that, thank you!
😄 You’re welcome!
Just checked and I've got 24 tabs open right now. Basically in my case I have a list of things I'd want to do at any given moment (chat on Whatsapp, watch anime, learn Chinese, etc), so each one gets its own tab group with things I'd usually want for the thing in question easily accessible. For example in my anime tab group I have My Anime List, two tabs with different anime and Reddit discussion threads. Also in my defense I'm looking for an oven right now so that's inflating my tab numbers a little.
Sounds like a very functional workflow to me. When there’s a lot of stuff going on, it tends to result in more tabs. That number isn’t out of control, so apparently you also close the tabs when they’re no longer needed.
because i forget to close useless ones.
And you just leave them? Do you ever get back to them? How about clicking the “close all tabs” button from time to time?
That button should be able to be turned off; is there a delete all button on your hard drive? No, that’s insane. Tabs are files. Tabs are life.
That’s interesting. Sounds like you don’t view tabs as a temporary thing. I guess they were initially designed to be very temporary, but apparently many people have started to use them in a very different way. Any ideas why?
ADHD overhead to further organisation?
I have folders of folders of bookmarks, save all tabs as a new dated bookmark folder at intervals (some bookmarks are therefore duplicated as many times as they continue to exist), just in case I hit the dreaded close all button.
I do try to get rid of them as much as I can, but it’s like in my mind when I’m deleting them the question is “is this process still running?” and (due to ADHD?) I guess 300 tabs is the answer?
Some things are not reproducible as bookmarks, for example pages with post content will be reposted on reload (or thawing)… which while perhaps is not great web design (and you would hope they would have error catching for safety), is a benefit of tab vs bookmark? Also I would say thumbnails as a visual reference, and they have actually saved me if a website has disappeared and all urls now get redirected, I have caught the title from the cached thumbnail.
I have found “history”, even if you select “keep forever” is always being deleted, and bookmarks do not get surfaced on search, presumably due to inefficient search/index/storage, however, tabs are very reliably right there.
If I could have a system, it would be no number of tabs, and they silently slip off into cold storage and lose their metadata over time, perhaps just a list of titles at the very top/bottom/oldest.
This is insane, I understand that :-)
Yeah, it’s true that many sites don’t really use them URL for much. It’s really annoying trying to bookmark a site like that. Sure the URL says it ThatReallyCoolSite.com/whatever. Once you click that, it just takes you to the main page, which is not at all where you thought you were going. However, if you leave sites open tabs, can the browser really restore that location after you update and restart? If it can, tabs really are more useful than bookmarks in that case.
eventually i either get to closing them or i start a new Firefox session.
They use to be new window (not like a pop up, but a new window). Today every new page or "new window" becomes a new tab.
And before you know it, you have dozens of tabs open. But no way you use to have 30 different windows open, since that would drive you crazy with alt+tab.
So the bar is low and it's easy to keep them open as well. So people will.
That being said. Do we want to go back to 30 windows? I don't think so.
Floorp has additional features that keep you managed. Like Workspaces. And also you can group tabs. Or even use colored tabs.
Oh that sounds nice. I keep bumping into Floorp surprisingly often. Must be something worth checking out.
Anyway, alt+tabbing through a hundred windows just isn’t realistic, but scrolling through a hundred tabs is as long as you keep your tabs in a sidebar. Nowadays displays are also wide enough that there’s actually enough room for that sort of thing. Seems like a practical solution to me.
FF now has tab groups, it’s basically the same, and a nice easy to bridge bookmarks and tabs
yeah. I just don't recommend Mozilla anymore. Do some searches online about the recent developments about Mozilla, "AI" and also bought an ad company: https://blog.mozilla.org/en/advertising/mozilla-anonym-raising-the-bar-for-privacy-preserving-digital-advertising/ (ps this is a marketing blog article of course.. read between the lines)
Look.. I will not use FF anymore. Hence I use a fork instead.
My friend has ADHD and 300 tabs. I’m pretty sure they are related.
I don’t save tabs between sessions because of my ADHD. Otherwise I’d drown in them. This way I’m forced to use bookmarks for things I really need and the useless clutter gets removed once I close my browser.
They can’t organise bookmarks
For me it is not about being unable to organise them but once it is bookmarked it is basically gone from my sight and memory.
In my case, bookmarking things is something I do to remove it from my sight and memory, but not lose it entirely.
I want to ask genuinely, how is the bookmark different than a tab with tab grouping in this instance? I have the bookmarks bar always visible, and have folders organized on the main bar (rather than the drop down extended bar). Wouldn’t tab grouping do the same thing, just slightly higher?
It probably is functionally not too different. I have the bookmark bar open but I mostly have all the sites I regularly go to there. Additionally, I have thousands of bookmarks from many years so wading through them for something I briefly saw and was interested in last week but can’t remember enough detail on to find isn’t very fun or easy. And where do I look for it? One bookmark could be categorised in many ways so I also have to remember where I saved it. Tags are good but I have too many for that to be very useful or quick.
I do use grouping as well, and I really like it, but this just causes me to have even more tabs because there is less pressure to trim down the endless list since I can hide them.
Yep, same. I should research solutions to this problem with a bunch of new tabs.
Bookmarks bar.
Yes, and?
There’s no reason not to use it instead of having a million tabs open.
Bold of you assume that it is not being used.
Same problem as bookmarks.
This. If I spend the time organizing them, I’ve spent more time on the tab than I originally wanted to, but didn’t end up taking care of what the original reason I have the tab opened was.
I am 33 years old (so not a new internet user) and I somehow feel bookmarks need a redesign… Not exactly sure how I’d improve it (tags, AI grouping? Daily bookmark to see section? I don’t really know) but if the site I have saved doesn’t show up in the FF search bar… It might as well be lost forever (and that feature is case sensitive).
AI tags could help. You still need to give them tags that are relevant to your intention, but an LLM can handle all the boring tags that are pretty obvious from the text itself.
That takes time and effort, which most people don’t have. Most links don’t deserve that much of my energy, so that’s why I have only a handful of sites bookmarked. Everything else is chucked in the infinitely growing trash pile known as “history”.
It really doesn’t. There is literally a star next to the URL in the URL bar that you click once
Yeah, but keeping them organized in sensible folders takes effort. If you just throw bookmarks into an enormous trash pile, it gets hard to find stuff. Some sites just have weird names and you can’t find them unless they’re sorted into reasonable folders.
If you’re looking for color themes, you won’t find Paletton. If you’re looking for synonyms, you won’t find Visuwords. The list goes on and on.
You don’t need to keep them organized, mine certainly aren’t. Just throw them on the bookmarks bar and it will always be under your URL bar, just not in a freaking tab
Yeah, that should work too. What if you want to find that one article you almost read few months ago? Yes, that one about the history of cat memes. It’s in the bookmark pile, right? Is it still possible to find it today?
URL bar searches your bookmarks, or open the bookmark manager and search there
Unorganized bookmarks tend to be a lot less useful compared to open tabs once you do actually go back to them. I already organized my tabs when I opened them.
My bookmarks are organized. Haven’t used any of them in 10 years.
It’s a great idea that I like, it just doesn’t work for me.
Tabs in the sidebar do.
Imagine you start researching something else before you’ve had the opportunity to finish your last. I have 10-20 tabs open for each of several in progress projects on my tablet
Yeah, that does happen from time to time. In that case, I tend to use separate browser windows for each topic. There could be 5-20 tabs in each, and maybe about 30 tabs in total. It’s pretty rare to go over that.
However, some people seem to have 100+ tabs in a single window with no other windows or even tab groups. They just dump everything into something that looks like a huge mountain of pure chaos.
So you admit to doing the same thing.
Only for an hour or two when the situation calls for it. When I’m done researching that topic, I close the tabs and windows. During normal days, I have 3-10 tabs and only one window. Usually, all of those tabs can be closed and forgotten.
I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.
It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.
I hear what you’re saying, but not once have I ever seen somebody with lots of tabs be able to find what they’re looking for in those tabs. They almost always click through several, then open a new tab and navigate to the content they need.
Sucks to be them I guess?
Good for you.
I simply scroll down my tab bar to what I’m looking for.
I’m down to 130 tabs from 170
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.zip/pictrs/image/fc5af490-cc11-434a-8a11-fa2c7756feca.gif">
I easily hit 500+ tabs, usually against 1000 or so, and usually spread around over 40 windows on 4 different desktops, so it’s fairly wellp organized as all tabs in a window are about the same subject.
Most auto close after about 15 mins to spare resources because websites these days just are insanely heavy. I used to do 2000 sites with maybe 32GB mem, now I need a tab auto closer to be able to manage half of that.
When I’m doing youtube research, I search for something, and open 10-20 tabs from the search results (ctrl+click). They don’t really fully open in the background, but when I switch to those tabs, that’s when they really starts loading. If I quickly flip through all 20 tabs, it’s going to max out my ancient CPU for a minute or two. Somehow 24 GB is still fine but the CPU seems to be the biggest bottle neck with my computer.
BTW I recall seeing something about tabs going to sleep automatically. If your browser does that, then the RAM shouldn’t be a problem. You could easily open a thousand pages, and only a fraction of them would actually be in RAM.
Anyway, 40 windows seems pretty intense. I don’t think I would enjoy doing that. Occasionally, when I have a lot of active topics, I just copy those URLs to a txt file to keep things organized. If I did that more frequently, I might try bookmarks too. Anyway, the point of doing that is to keep the window count down to something that I can easily manage.
The question was “why?” Not "can you demonstrate the world’s most extreme case of this thing that baffles me?’
ADHD.
Surprisingly many people have brought that up. Probably not a coincidence. Maybe that’s the thing I didn’t think of.
People with ADHD (I speak from experience) have shitty working memory, poor organisational skills, are easily distracted, and a tendancy to procrasate.
Therefore you start researching something for work/uni (4tabs) I’ll come back to that after a little YouTube break (+3tabs) I’ll watch those videos later I need to get back to work (+4 tabs that are duplicates of the first 4). Time for home, when do I need to catch the bus (+1) and the first 12 tabs will just stay open till the next day because you know you won’t remember what you were doing.
Oh, so that’s how the numbers go up. Keep on doing that for a week or two, and having only 100 tabs open is an achievement.
Yeah, I was thinking the 30 from your original post is rookie numbers.
Well, a coworker of mine has so many tabs that it was difficult to tell exactly how many there were. The top bar was completely full, so I guess that’s way more than 20. Probably not a hundred yet.
Firefox’s “search in tabs” is an invaluable feature to reduce duplication.
Prefix with ‘%’ in the search bar
You can also use ^ to search your history instead, and do away with the tabs!
Thanks! I’ll save that for later.
Thanks
Overly the last year or so I’ve become entirely convinced I have developed ADHD. Is it possible to concuss yourself into ADHD?
No, but life style changes may reveal you had ADHD all along and had just been lucky enough to be unaffected by it.
It is possible to develop ADHD like symptoms from a TBI of some kind. It’s not ADHD from a technical definition standpoint, but from lived experience of symptoms, it can line up with ADHD
Do none of these people know about the bookmarks bar? And that you can literally put folders on it if you want?
What do you mean they’re not visible, of course they are
I guess these people just can’t be bothered to organize stuff. I find a bit puzzling that they prefer to live with chaos like that. I would feel very anxious and frustrated if I had to deal with a hundred tabs in a single window all the time.
Shockingly, some people function differently to you.
Maybe they have a superpower for staying calm even though everything around them is a total mess. I know I don’t have that power.
The point is that it may look like a mess to you but that doesn’t mean it is objectively a mess. Hundreds of open tabs can still have logic and organisation even if that is not obvious to you.
Fair enough.
Many people here have a system where different topics are isolated to their own browser windows, and each window can have 10-20 tabs. That sort of system makes sense to me.
So, what’s the system where you keep 100 tabs in a single window? How does that work?
Well I guess I don’t have a particular or consistent system but I can find what I need pretty quickly. I have a few tab groups for stuff like youtube, bandcamp which helps a lot, and I use Simple Tab Groups in firefox which has been amazing (but I’ve only been using one group/window so this is kind of defunct now), but otherwise there are areas of tabs which are related and they are roughly in chronological order. I will manually move tabs so there are areas of certain topics. I know I can scroll all the way to the right for old tabs, and then left of that a specific topic I was learning about at that time, then left of that something roughly related by topic or time, and so on until all the way to the left is the most recent tabs (and then a bunch of pinned tabs that I use very often). It’s like a map of time and topic, and not just a bunch of random tabs like you might imagine.
The whole entire world is a giant fucked up mess run by mentally handicapped billionaires. Shits fucking terrifying and we’re all cooked. Having a neat browser window isn’t going to fix that.
True.
I just like to do what I can to keep certain things neat and tidy. Gives me some sense of control even though the rest of the world is far beyond fixing.
I don’t even really have mine organized. I tried at one point, but meh…
It’s still all there at the top of my browser, right under the URL bar, except they are all open tabs, because that’s not what tabs are for.
I’m never actually going to look in the bookmarks folder so why would I put anything there?
Bookmarks bar. It’s literally a toolbar under your URL bar that you can have displaying always.
You can put folders on that bar (with no name if you want so it takes up almost no space) if you want.
Edit: anyone care to explain why this is funny? Y’all are insane.
Hahahaha, right.
Pardon? Why was that funny?
The level people are willing to delude themselves into their poor habit in this thread is breathtaking to me.
Hilarious
Out of sight, out of mind, which means it comes with pros and cons though. If you feel like 500 tabs is consuming too much of your mental bandwidth, then offloading some of them to bookmarks should help. The idea is that only active stuff would be in the tabs, while everything a bit less active would be in the bookmarks.
Some people just don’t roll that way, and this thread has some interesting comments about that style too. Turns out, people use their browsers in vastly different ways.
While I was writing my master’s thesis I tried to put things in the bookmarks folder and ended up re-researching a lot of topics. It ended up being much less work having 6 browser windows open across 2 monitors with a bunch of tabs relating to related subjects. For example window 1 might have only papers related to retrograde tracer studies in the medial entorhinal cortex, window 2 has anterograde tracer studies in the insular cortex etc that way if I needed info on any of those subjects I could flip through the tabs related to that topic before searching for a paper.
In other words, that’s the kind of stuff you need to reference frequently, so having those tabs constantly open is quite useful for the task at hand.
Other people seem to just neglect and abandon a bunch of tab. That’s a very different crowd though.
No I also tend to have about 12 irrelevant tabs open too. But it’s all down to executive dysfunction.
I don’t really see anyone admitting the truth: digital hoarding. At a certain number of tabs it becomes nearly impossible to find anything so it’s hard for me to believe people really find the practice as useful as they claim. I probably have 50 tabs open but I use a tab group extension that keeps most hidden (and Firefox doesn’t load the content in inactive tabs after you restart it). Most are essentially bookmarks but I’d be lying if I said even 20% of them end up being useful to keep open.
Ok, so is it just the feeling of keeping something that might be useful? Isn’t that what hoarding really is? I guess it’s better to hoard tabs than photos, let alone physical papers.
Yup, that’s also the reason I have them a lot.
Other times it’s just me being too lazy to close them, cause I feel lost in all the tabs and don’t know anymore which to close. There should be a toggleable option to default close tabs when they’ve not been opened for 30 days or more. Perhaps with a question “this tab is about to be closed, do you want it closed or bookmarked?”
Just tried a cool extension called OneTab. It condenses all of your tabs into a neat list of links. That way, each site doesn’t take any more RAM than line of text. The tab is technically closed, but you can easily access it from the OneTab menu. Looks and feels more like a vertical tab bar really. Might want to try it out. That way, you never have to let go any tabs ever again.
Neat. Does it somehow save session info along with the link?
Haven’t used it enough to know. In any case, the link list stays with the browser even if I restart. Is that good enough, or were you looking for something more granular?
Eh just curious about the session info (what all that entails I’m not 100% on). I just know in Firefox tabs retain session info which keeps you logged in typically for sites where that’s a thing
Oh that sort of login session stuff. Nah, I don’t think it saves any of that. As far as I can tell, it’s just a link. Nothing more. If you’re logged in somewhere, the cookies should allow you to continue where you left off, but they will expire at some point.
Yes and yes, to a degree. I think most people are hoarders on some small scale but at a certain point it’s harmful. But yeah digital hoarding is probably the least harmful type.
The decline of good search engines and the AI slopocalypse has made it difficult to find good resources. Let alone, to find it a second time. So a lot of us close the tab only after the related task is completed. Bookmarks are too permanent for one-off tasks (plus, we probably have way too many bookmarks already).
Yeah that would make sense except the overuse of tabs is at least a decade old phenomenon.
Eh… depends on the interpretation of overuse. One person’s excess is another person’s minimal. Different subjects - like ones that require researching - are expected to need more tabs open. It loosely parallels having multiple books splayed open for quick referencing.
Though, I do feel the number of tabs lately has drastically increased for myself and colleges.
Overuse means you have trouble finding tabs because you have so many open. I don’t think your analogy works very well here. No one would defend having 2000 books open as helpful to a researcher.
But I have seen some offices with enormous stacks of books and papers reaching all the way to the ceiling. I don’t know how that system works, but these people claim they can somehow find everything in there.
I suspect they lack whatever visceral reaction makes me start to panic if I have more tabs open than fit neatly across the top of the browser.
I have that sort of desire for order too. Seems to come with anxiety when seeing a pile of tabs spiraling out of control. So far, that set of traits have served me well, but some people are clearly built different. Maybe they’re immune to chaos.
Oh, I like chaos fine. With me it’s… fear of loss? I have to close all unnecessary tabs myself so I don’t lose track of and accidentally close the few important ones.
Extensions like Tree Style Tabs that display tabs as a vertical list are really good for that, especially if they also let you group the tabs in collapsible sublists. Some browsers have vertical tab bars built in, but it’s considerably less useful if you can’t collapse part of the list.
No idea. I close tabs as soon as I’m done. Also private tab by default
ADHD
That’s a very popular explanation here.
It’s also most likely not an explanation. I’m ADHD too, and I hate having browser tabs open. I keep them as few as possible, closing them as soon as I don’t know what they are or why they’re open.
I am surprised by all the ADHD responses. I have ADHD and being able to see all the tabs I’m not using makes me anxious. I have to close them. If I really need them, I move them to a separate window and pretend it’s not there.
ADHD is a spectrum disorder much like the tism.
At work? Every shit is a browser app now. Hard to organize.
LOL. Can confirm. I have three tabs open every day just to have some basic stuff always open. I’m basically using Edge just for those three things and Firefox for everything else.
Turns out the Excel that was integrated into Teams can’t handle PowerQuery. I guess that’s just basically a website version of Excel and hence lacks 50% of the features of the real application. Isn’t it great now that everything is a website…
Because, shockingly, not everyone sees the world the way you do.
Why do people consider the way others do things as flawed, or pathologize the behaviours of others?
Also, browser history is awful.
People have all sorts of preferences, and that’s ok. The way I do things obviously doesn’t work for everyone, but I’m really curious to find out why people do things the way they do.
Like, what makes the browser history unusable? Maybe there’s a better way to use a browser, but that way just never occurred to me.
The only instances of this I have seen (on mobile) were not very tech-savvy people who click links in messages and apps, rarely open the browser, and/or don’t understand how to use the browser to begin with.
Yeah, I’ve seen that too. They also tend to have a thousand notifications waiting for them. They are basically ignoring the notification system entirely. Pointless spam pops up all the time and the one time they actually receive a message from someone, it’s impossible to know because they never look at the notifications. I guess the red dots are the only way these people know someone has sent them anything.
People like that would hate using SailfishOS, because it’s not holding your hand at all. If you leave everything open, it’s going to suck the RAM and battery in no time, and it’s all your fault. That’s one of the few mobile OSs that made me feel like I had an actual computer in my pocket.
I regularly filter out tabs on laptop, bookmarking things and closing stuff that isn’t on todo list for the next 24h.
Mobile though, clicling that through UI takes so much time I can’t be bothered. I just open new stuff on top, and maybe sometimes go through tabs like as if that’s browser history.
The good thing about tabs on mobile is the fact that the system manages RAM very efficiently. You never actually need to close anything, because the system takes care of kicking things out of RAM all the time. That’s both good and bad, but in your case it’s totally worth it.
No clue. The only time I have more than three open is when I’m researching some stupid question I have, and then I immediately close them after I get the answer. Even then, if I get too many, and am frustrated in my search, I’ll close them all in disgust and start over.
If it’s something I want to save for reference, I save it locally with the SingleFile extension, because contrary to popular belief, shit gets deleted off websites all the time.
I typically have 100-200. It’s usually a “let me come back to this in a day or three”, which may or may not happen. Or a thread of “doing research on a topic” and then getting pulled to something else, but not having time to summarize/organize for later. Plus, as others have mentioned, sometimes you need the tab session history.
I really appreciate y’all saying what a monster or computer illiterate I am, though. Don’t tell my boss, she’ll wonder what I do all day.
Hmm… The “lemmy get back to that” feeling is familiar, especially the second part where you never actually do.
Back when I had a hundred neatly organized bookmarks, there were several links like that. Some site seemed like a neat tool or an interesting article, but I never actually ended up revisiting that site. Fast forward 10 years, and I start going through all of those bookmarks to see which ones are actually worth keeping. That’s when I find out that more than half of those sites don’t even exist any more.
Nowadays, I’m better at letting go of digital things and discarding useless junk. My current bookmark list consists of sites I actually use frequently enough to appreciate the shortcut.
I used to use bookmarks (at home). Now I just keep tabs open.
Any ideas why though? Is it just because it’s easier, it’s a visible reminder or something like that?
I think for me, personally, I bookmark sites at work I need to access regularly. As in, daily. At home, I don’t really visit the same sites. Or at least, it’s more infrequent, and fewer ones. So I just leave open a tab for Lemmy, Metacritic, HotLocalDwarfMilfs, Wikipedia, Spotify, etc. Even if my computer is restarted, Firefox saves them!
But that’s only a handful of sites, which is fine and totally manageable. Not hundreds, like some people have all the time
Most of my projects require like 2-4 web apps so i constantly have two browser windows open side by side, with a bunch tabs on each
That’s a familiar feeling. However, some people have an absurd number of tabs open all the time. Makes me wonder if they actually use them for something.
All my life I never saved tabs and everytime I closed the browser I would open it again with just the home oage. Then about a year ago I downloaded Zen Browser and I really liked the tab management that came with it. I created some profiles and folders to organize the tabs in so now I have maybe 20-30 tabs always open, but they are almost always used regularly. I might have 5 for my school. 5 for torrenting/hosting. A few for music related things, gaming, etc. It’s very organized and basically replaces the need for a custom html homepage.
That sounds pretty cool. Are those tab management tricks something that could be replicated in Firefox with a few extensions?
Possibly. I never messed around with tab management extensions before. Everything in Zen is built in
… because I can’t find the tab I opened 2 days ago, so it’s faster open it again… which just creates a negative feedback loop of having too many tabs and not able to find anything.
Case and point: I’m in IT and we use github. Some code requires reviews (which needs “more time” to complete), then often I’m looking at other 3rd party repos’ for documentation/examples/etc. Some might be useful, some are related to my current problem. Oh, I get a ping - I need to finish that PR review: “which tab is it? They ALL say github!” … and I’m too impatient to hover over them. So, it’s faster to just type the URL in and go.
I loved browser plugin, Vimperator. It was fantastic, I could (at anytime) type “:b <pattern>” and it would search through my open tabs. But I’ve tried a bunch of the “successor”, but universally they seem to get “stuck” when it comes to inputting text - either into text fields (like on a normal email form) or as input into the browser extension.
Recently, I found an extension that would group tabs based on your rules (so, I could separate the company github tabs from the OSS). It’s far from perfect… but it’s endurable.
… but what I really wish for is a Firefox plugin that’ll allow me to type parts of the tabs domain or title and it’ll filter the results.
That’s quite the vicious circle. More tabs means more problems, and you solve them by adding more tabs. LOL
Anyway, when doing work related stuff, it’s common to need a whole bunch of tabs open at times. However, not closing them is the detail that sets you apart from some other people. I think that opening lots of new tabs is a pretty universal experience, but closing them isn’t.
Vivaldi (chromium) lets me set tab rules. Tabs will jump to the correct workspace automatically.
I believe vimium does this with
TEdit: Wait, you don’t even need that. It’s already built-in support.mozilla.org/…/search-open-tabs-firefox
Is that different from searching all open tabs by typing
% [keyword]into the address bar?Holy Snap -
That is exactly what I’ve been looking… and it would explain why I couldn’t find a plugin.
Thank you for sharing this!
For me, it more boils down to keeping my place within a web page or ever-updating feed.
For instance… If I’m going down a rabbit hole, I could have 4 root tabs open. Those tabs may have lengthy articles and would reference secondary sites throughout the page. Rather then having a good chance of the browser losing my place down the page by clicking on a link normally, I open it in a new tab. This allows me to switch to it, skim down to where it was referenced to understand that part of it, then switch back to the root tab while leaving the secondary tab open to fully read through when I finish with the root one. As the rabbit hole deepens, those secondary tabs may eventually become root tabs which may also reference their own secondary sites or even each other. The number of tabs just keeps growing until I either run out of those secondary tabs or I am just satisfied with the amount of info I gained. This can also happen over several days or weeks and have other rabbit holes open at the same time.
Yeah that makes a lot of sense too. That sort of forking is very common, especially when reading Wikipedia articles. Occasionally I have several wikipedia tabs open, but once I’ve drilled down deep enough, I lose interest, and close all of those tabs.
When researching any topic, it’s really common to have lots of tabs open, but I always close them as soon as they have served their purpose. I guess that’s the key difference here. Actually that difference is interesting. Why do I lose interest so quickly or why do you keep yours open for several days or even weeks?
Not OP, but many topics last longer than a week.
I’m not going to finish Factorio in a week, and my collection of tabs on factorioLab, sheets, drawio, and the wiki are both interrelated and mark the several projects I have going. That’s also a topic that would be very annoying to reopen every week, and also would lead to bookmark clutter as most of those tabs will get closed when the projects are finished.
There’s also research tabs for things that will come up later. I have 6 open right now for configuring a smart home system that won’t get opened until I can actually see the system in person, but I don’t know when that will happen.
And there’s also long running series, like text stories, podcasts, or youtube series. That would be a nightmare to update bookmarks for, but those tabs will track progress just fine.
I suppose I keep tabs exactly because I want to keep interest for weeks, but I know I’ll forget all the details between sessions.
Those long projects are a proper use case I don’t really have much experience with. I would probably just end up bookmarking them and opening the sites when I need them.
However, tracking progress is a whole different thing. That’s a very valid use case IMO. Bokmarks just weren’t built for that sort of thing, whereas an open tab works perfectly. Actually, some other people have also pointed out that an open tab will store the place where you were. For example, if it’s a long article, it knows exactly how far you’ve scrolled and it will allow you to easily pick up where you left off last time. That is something I rarely do, but now I can definitely see the value in keeping those tabs open.
Keeping the interest active is also a pretty good point. If the tab is open, it will remind you of its existence. If you bookmark a site, it will be very easy to forget it ever existed. You would have to actively seek it out to be reminded of it. As some other people have already said: bookmarks is the place where tabs go to die.
Because they hadn’t heard of this feature called bookmarks
Bookmarks is where all my open tabs go to die and never be remembered again.
on desktop, hell no. On mobile, I just wanted to see what would happen if I stopped closing them once in a while. it lags my phone so bad every time I scroll through them. It look about 1 minute to get through the entire list lol
my estimate is about 800, but I am not gonna spend time counting them
Stress testing is always a valid reason and a noble cause. Keep those tabs coming. You’re only getting warmed up with 800ish tabs. You can go much higher than that. I believe in you!
I keep seeing people talk about tabs lagging their devices, but I have never had that since 2008. Is that a safari thing?
firefox mobile. Only when I’m scrolling through the list of tabs.
Huh, I’ve never had that happen. My 8 year old phone has difficulty with opening the home screen, but the tab list has always been smooth as butter.
Same. But I also have a continuous stream of new projects that never get finished.
When I have a lot of unfinished things going on, they begin to bother me. I need to close things and start from a clean slate. Doesn’t that bother you at all?
Oh, so much. I’m still trying to figure out how to actually complete things.
Uhhh because I need them all
All 500 of them?
Maybe not now but I will need them eventually
That’s understandable. But why keep them in tabs though? Other people here have recommended a variety of different approaches.
More than a few people have also mentioned Raindrop. Completely new to me. Haven’t tried that one yet, but I’m planning to take a closer look.
I used to use OneTab, then I stopped for some reason. I think it was acting more like Firefox Containers though. Maybe I’ll check raindrop out.
Just installed it and started dumping some of my transient tabs in it.
For example, I have some ideas for the next vacation, so I made a folder for that purpose and dropped a bunch of relevant links in there. I’ll get back to those sooner or later. No need to keep 10 tabs open for a few months, when I can keep my tab bar clean and dump all the unnecessary clutter to Raindrop. So far, I’m still using it in a very basic way, but let’s see what this develops into.
In my case, that clan tab bar may have something to do with my personal preference for tidyness and a sense of control. Other people obviously have different needs and preferences, and that’s ok. Maybe tab hoarders aren’t annoyed by a cluttered UI. Maybe they even see some value in it.
the windows of siracusa county
I keep tabs open so I can refer back to them when working on stuff or when I am planning things.
Right now I’m in the middle of house repairs on a former slumlord property. Will be installing 7.2KW of solar panels in a system that can island without causing issues. Need to rip and replace the back porch because the roof was rotten already and the floor is not much better. Trying to run and build a YouTube channel in the SCUBA diving niche. Planning for a dive trip to Cozumel in April so I can get more footage for said channel. And trying to start a non-profit that will support SCUBA training for teens and young adults who survived childhood abuse. While also running a website for the YouTube channel and the non-profit. All while dealing with life, family, a dog, and two vehicles. I do EVERYTHING with my own hands because I don’t have cash to pay others to do it for me.
When I am preparing to make a purchase I also tend to have even more tabs open as I compare prices and costs for shipping among other things. The replacement materials for our roof was about 5K total for just under 3000sq ft of roof and I had to install venting that previously didn’t exist. Just made the next to last purchase for solar and have 6500 invested and about 1000 left to go for the racking and a few miscellaneous things.
It takes a lot to remember everything so keeping tabs open is a huge stress reliever. Right now my desktop has about 80 tabs open and my tablet has 230.
I can see you have a lot of stuff going on, which naturally results in lots of tabs. That’s basically like using the web for professional purposes.
Comparing prices is one of those cases where I can easily have 20-30 tabs open, sometimes even more. However, once I’ve figured out what I’m going to order, I just close all of them to keep my sanity.
Many other people here have said that tabs act like reminders, and that’s a new approach to me. When I have lots of stuff going on at work, I put them on a long list in OneNote. It’s basically a sortable table that allows me to prioritize things, add additional information and mark tasks as complete. If I didn’t do that, life would feel very overwhelming. I think having lots of tabs could also result in similar discomfort, but obviously many people don’t feel that way.
Everyone has their own way of dealing with things. I do a lot more research on my tablet as it’s almost always with me. My desktop is used for video editing, some gaming, dealing with SBC (small board computing) devices, managing the homelab, and is also acting as my camera DVR.
Since most everything is already in the browser for me using something else to save the links is a slowdown outside of emailing something to myself for use on my desktop. It’s also the reason why I don’t use apps for many things, apps are linear and really don’t allow you to explore tangents like a browser with a new tab opening a link.
Forking the path is the real killer feature of websites. You can open the main page, click 4 subpages open, navigate each of them a little bit, compare different parts of the site and so on. It’s not uncommon, that I need to look up some information from one part of the same site when typing information inton some text box. Try that with an app!
Only 30?
Depends on the taks I’m working on. If it’s a simple tech problem, 10 would be a lot. If it involves comparing various products, specs and prices, hitting 50 is quite normal. The key here is that I always close the tabs as soon as I’m done with that topic.
If it’s something I need to get back to later, it requires a more permanent place than browser tabs.
I do for work because I usually have to recall information and don’t want to look it back up every time.
Pro tip: Auto-unloading the tabs (via extensions) certainly helps retain memory.
You know every modern browser has bookmarks, and I think all of them have a bookmark toolbar, and the ability to organize bookmarks into folders…
right?
I’m fully aware, however, I am not about to start bookmarking job’s labelled as #20000 -> 50000 and all their PDF’s, documents an such. Some jobs last 2+ years, like bridge projects, whereas other last a couple weeks to a month, easier to just leave tabs open for what I am focusing on within that current month.
Edit: If I really wanted to do that I could just self-host a bookmarking service that way bookmarks stay centralized, but then I’m taking work home, so screw that.
You might get some use from Jira or a similar tool…
Yeah, but they you gotta organize it, and garden it, and maintain it. Or it’s just another useless dump of probably useless information. This can be difficult for folks with ADHD and similar.
Not to mention that many tabs are transient, they are not meant to be permanent. Making them permanent means they are out of sight out of mind and will pile up even more
I have ADHD. Open tabs lose context, I forget why they’re open, so they are useless. Bookmarks are categorized and that organization keeps the context apparent. I currently have 5 tabs open, and after submitting this reply, it will be four.
I should have used softer language which I have changed it to be.
Everyone’s experience with neurodiversity is different. If you have a system and that system works for you then that’s awesome. Developing systems that work for your needs can be a significant hurdle.
That’s fascinating. While many here blame ADHD, others argue the opposite. It seems like people like you keep things organised because of ADHD. Based on the comments here, you’re not alone. There are many others just like you.
I view tabs as very transient, but I’ve learned that many people consider them much more permanent than that. Some even compare them to the files on your computer, which is mind blowing to me.
However, everything that is out of sight and out of mind will pile up. For example, various work related files, like documents and spreadsheets tend to accumulate over the years. Most of them are just there waiting for that one day when I might need them. If someone secretly deleted 50% of my files, it might take years before I would notice.
But that’s an interesting point about tabs. If you can’t see them, they will pile up. Totally agree with that. However, many people still prefer to keep sites as tabs rather than bookmarks specifically because they can see them all the time.
Protip: Installing more ram makes for more convenience on keeping tabs alive forever
There’s a reason I plopped in another 32GB stick
For research purposes it’s usually not necessary to keep every tab loaded, though. Extensions like Auto Tab Discard make open tabs about as resource-intensive as bookmarks, for a lot less extra work and much cheaper than new RAM.
Interesting. I should look into that. What’s your favorite auto unload extension?
I use This Firefox extension to auto unload after 15 minutes of inactivity and This extension to rename the tab title.
Hope this helps.
Thanks! Just saved them to Raindrop. Planning to test them properly when I get back to an actual computer.
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.
That visibility seems to be a reoccurring theme in this thread. Some other people have brought that up as well.
On one hand I totally get it that if you see 10 tabs open all the time, they remind you of the 10 things you were planning to get back to at some point. On the other hand, I’m a bit skeptical about how functional that really is. I guess there is a way to make it work, otherwise nobody would do it that way.
What about 50 tabs? Does it still work that way? If you have a 100 tabs, you can’t even read the names any more, so it’s just one pile at that point, isn’t it. Although, some people treat that as a timeline of sorts, so I guess there can be some order too.
Anyway, recently I bumped into Raindrop, which seems to be like Pocket, but better. Still testing it, so I can’t tell you much yet. So far, it seems to be pretty good at organizing the stuff you throw in there.
Can you not read the labels? I know Chrome will shrink tabs to just the icon, but you mention Pocket, so I assume you know about firefox, where there’s always at least 6 or so characters shown.
I have no issue navigating 150+ tabs (except that it takes a moment to scroll over them). It’s like a kitchen; half of the cupboads just have baking supplies in them, but I know exactly where anything is, or at least where to look. Baking soda is in the first cupboard right of the fridge, next to the vanilla, behind the salt. The paper on planetary radius vs mass I’m using for worldbuilding in my TTRPG is just to the right of the chunkbase map, and a bit left of the second youtube island, next to the other 12 worldbuilding research tabs.
This was before tab groups too. Now I can collapse those 12 tabs into one item, and do that for each of ~10 topics, which makes navigating tabs much faster.
Firefox mobile is a different beast though, because I can’t organize the tabs, and they’ll get reorganized by time (I think?) after 2 weeks when they get moved to Inactive Tabs. That’s more of a big pile that I sort through when I’m bored.
I see those shrunk tabs on Chrome, as it’s a popular browser among my colleagues. I still prefer to use Firefox on my devices. So, in a way, I was making references to both browsers.
Some other people have also mentioned that they can find the tab they’re looking for even though there may be hundreds. Thanks for the kitchen analogy; it’s beginning to make sense.
Those inactive tabs are probably just a RAM-saving measure. Mobile devices tend to be pretty strict with that. Probably a bit annoying when you use tabs that way.
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?
Idk it’s crazy to see the browser windows of some teammates during screen share.
Read the thing, write down the relevant stuff / copy it to reference notes, bookmark it with raindrop or something that allows you to tag for context, close the whole browser.
I keep bumping into Raindrop all the time, but nobody explained what it is. As if everyone already knows what it is. I didn’t, until I finally took the time to open that site. In a new tab, obviously 😀
Anyway, seems like a pretty neat idea. So, how does that better than using normal bookmarks of your browser?
The main advantage is, if you keep a lot of “bookmarks” (which I don’t, but I like to be prepared) they are searchable not just by name, but also by tag.
This means when you find that good stack overflow page about resolving cuda issues on a VM you can tag it as “linux” “python” “cuda” “VM” in addition to giving it a name. Then you can search for any of those and find it.
The free version is pretty good and it lets you do one level of folders and as many bookmarks as you want. (Oh yeah. It supports folders so I have one for example that is called Unwatched YouTube, you might guess what I use it for). The paid version is probably better because it includes unlimited folder nesting AND it saves a snapshot of whatever webpage you’re bookmarking so you never lose anything. I would think this would be indespensible if you habitually save things like reddit or Lemmy threads so it doesn’t get deleted from under you.
I don’t use raindrop.io as much as I would like, but I would assume it’s a far cry better than a browser with 200 tabs open.
Wait, so it caches the page too? If the site goes offline, you have your personal copy anyway? That’s a bit like the internet archive, isn’t it?
Yes but only for the paid version which I don’t have so I can’t vouch. I’m cheap in that way
Oh, ok so it’s just links for us plebs. Either way, it’s nice to know the option is there.
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
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 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
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)
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?
I didn’t claim I had a hundred of them going at any give time.
And, regardless, I also don’t keep them open forever. I just close the one I’m finished with, check out the next one, then repeat until I’m through with them.
Ah I thought you were the person with 200 tabs
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.
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 😂
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.
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.
It’s great, it does basically what sideberry does (or at least what it did for me, iirc sideberry had a config page 3 miles long so ymmv) but it’s built-in and that allows for things an extension just couldn’t do.
And then there’s glance and split view which I pretty much can’t live without anymore
That sounds awesome!
Can you give some examples where that browser has made a big difference? What are the kinds of situations where it really shines?
In terms of unique features there’s a few places where it shines.
Glance: You know how you open a link in the background to not lose the tab you’re currently on? Well in Zen you just click it with Alt+click and it pops open in an overlay which you can easily click away when you’re done with it (or open it to a ‘full’ tab if you need it)
Split view: exactly what it sounds like, have multiple tabs open side-by-side or above each other in the same window
Side tabs: exactly what sideberry does except the browser is fully designed around it with features like workspaces (with per workspace themes), essential tabs (are shown on top in each workspace) and pinned tabs (per workspace) all just being great.
Thanks! Those things should come in handy.
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. 🤷
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
After hearing so many recommendations for Sidebery, I finally had the perfect chance to test it out. I was searching for a specific YouTube video I’d seen almost a year ago. Zero idea who made it or the exact title was, just the general topic and a few probable keywords. Even with Gemini’s fancy AI crap and Google integrations, it was a dead end.
I tried various search terms and ended up with a mountain of tabs. That’s when I realized I needed to organize the chaos, and Sidebery was a lifesaver. RAM usage hit about 14 GB, but I finally found the video.
I created three tab panels: one for the main topic, another for interesting but unrelated finds, and a third for random stuff to revisit later today. Sidebery can close duplicates and move tabs between panels, and that made it much easier to manage everything. Regular tabs just can’t handle this kind of workflow.
This experience really drove home why people use dedicated tab managers. Keeping everything in a single row still feels bizarre to me, but with the right tools, having a 100 tabs open is completely understandable.
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.
People have that many tabs open for the same reason people have full piss bottles next to their computers.
I’m seeing a lot of excuses in this thread for their poor habit.
It’s not like it has negative consequences. What right do you have to call it poor?
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 🤷
Bro doesn’t understand how things work
Too stupid to use bookmarks.
Those are fucking rookie numbers.
Even those 500 tabs in mobile Safari?
Anyone that uses Safari isn’t serious about browsing. ;p
There’s this guy who uses his phone for browsing stuff all the time. The way I see it, he is very serious about making his life harder.
porn? some people watch some embarrasing content that they dont want people seeing.
And that’s the reason why some people have 100+ tabs open? Yeah, I guess you can hide pretty much anything in numbers like that. Once the tab bar is completely full and unreadable, who knows what kinds of secrets there could be. Coworkers can walk by and they have no idea what’s just a few tabs away.
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
Mobile tabs are a bit different though, because the system manages RAM so aggressively. With computers though, running out of RAM is usually the user’s fault. If a mobile OS runs out of RAM, it just kicks stuff out, like that Lemmy client where you were writing a comment and then decided to check something on wikipedia before posting.
Same thing with tabs too. Those two week old tabs haven’t been active in a long time.
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.
Sounds reasonable. I do that all the time, but I also close the tabs as soon as I stop caring about them. Do you end up having hundreds of tabs open?
Nope. Once they are done they are gone. 20-30max
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
I can relate. I have 96 GB of RAM in my computer.
Im not trolling. I have ADHD.
I didn’t mean the tabs but the unnecessary RAM amount.
Ya, you can force apps to run exclusively on the ram. I used to do this more often, but the setup is annoying. So to combat the lagging tabs, I also run the heavy web apps in different browsers. So Firefox does the generic browsing, edge does figma and teams. Chrome does asana and slack.
How does the speed matter in this case? It’s not like gigabytes of stuff gets read and written all the time.
The CAS speed of memory start to matter once you get above 64gb of ram.
A system might actually slow down the higher you go if you have slow memory.
Oh, so maybe that’s why Linus couldn’t open more than a few thousand tabs in Chrome. He used a server board and 2 TB or RAM, but the system got ridiculously slow when he hit about 10% usage. The whole system was specifically designed to sacrifice speed for capacity, so I guess that was a mistake. There could have also been software related issues with the setup. Who knows. Maybe Windows or Chrome just can’t handle absurd tab counts gracefully.
I have about 100 open tabs but its all heavy tabs. Figma, miro, teams, slack, asana, jira, slides, power point, and tons of other heavy web apps.
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)
Achievement unlocked! 🤣
Hoarding
There are worse harding habits. Videos, photos, physical items etc.
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.
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 :/
I think the default history sorting mode in Firefox is “By Date”; it actually lists websites by date alphabetically which confused me for a while. Changing the sort mode to “By Last Visited” gives the reverse chronological order that I would expect.
OH that makes more sense. Ty!
This is the way. Last visited is the only option that actually makes any sense.
Hell I gotta give it a try to this… I never even looked into its options because to me history section should work just as you stated it haha.
When I sort by “last visited” I tend to find things rather quickly. Have you tried that yet? The other sorting options are pretty much useless IMO.
No, just as the other user suggested it I have not, hopefully that is not how the default view is… (because I have never modified that).
The default was something amazingly stupid like alphabetical or whatever. Completely useless, so it’s no wonder why people ignore the history altogether.
ADHD.
Care to elaborate? Some people with ADHD hate seeing tabs, and they close all tabs as soon as possible.
And sometimes we will totally come back to that later, maybe, one day. And so it stays forever.
That is the other extreme, and both groups say they have ADHD. Seems like a pretty complex term to me.
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
its kind of “log”, so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark
Yeah, that seems like a good way to use tabs.
However, eventually they have a tendency to accumulate and fill the entire tab bar to such an extent that you can no longer even see the names. Some people like to roll that way, and I’m trying to figure out what’s going with that.
Some people don’t let them accumulate much, but others do. The key difference seems to be how often do you close the tabs. If you close them rarely enough that you still have 100+ tabs open all the time, that’s the kind of situation I have questions about.
when i have had tons and tons of tabs open, it has been due to laziness and just not bothering to sort which tabs are useless to have around and which are not.
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.
So I don’t lose that one porn video I found 3 years ago.
And other ways don’t work because….
Clearly you have never found that one video. That one video that was just perfect. And ever since, you have spent years looking for it. Yeah, there are many. But, there will always be that one that got away.
Because I’m going to need those! Not this second / day / week / month, but I’m going to need those and I have way too many bookmarks!
Speaking of bookmarks, some people have recommended using Raindrop for managing that mess. I’m still testing it, so I don’t really know if it ends up being useful for me. Might wanna take a look anyway.
The need to store things for later is very real, and I totally understand that. I prefer to think of tabs as a very transient storage place, but apparently there are lots of people who treat them as something far more permanent.
because I’m working on multiple tasks at once, and some of those tasks require comparing things like data sheets or products or reading multiple documents
because I don’t want to dig up the thing I was looking at yesterday with a 10-tab group, but I also ran out of time yesterday to complete the task
because I can and it’s convenient
because I keep something open until I have dealt with it, so it functions as a task list
Those are pretty solid arguments. Also, you’re not alone. There are lots of people who have a stack of tabs open for the exact same reasons. I hadn’t considered those reasons before, so thanks for making me aware of them.
I purge them as often as I can, but my phone has some tab groups that just stay up perpetually because it’s convenient, and it’s not like they’re actually all loaded at once. for example I have a few tab groups on vehicle maintenance topic or two that I am slowly working on. chrome on android has tab groups that basically functions as a favourites menu
but yeah on a computer, I have about a dozen core tabs for work that stay pinned on one window at all times, and then I add 1-3 other windows throughout the day as I work. one or two might just be a couple tabs each for comparing stuff. one might be a temp window for tasks somebody asked me to look into when I have a couple spare minutes. one might be a bunch of tabs doing research on something. but they either get processed and completed, or written down to deal with another day, I don’t keep them up until the next day unless I’m really just over work that day lol
I can’t even have 5 tabs open even if I try. I always close a tab when I am done with it.
At least the tabs start under control.
I can multitask.
I know this is foreign to a lot of people but I actually have multiple applications and windows open in my os as well. Even multiple desktops.
Yeah, I have lots of stuff open on several desktops too. On my work computer, there are usually a few desktops for different topics. I don’t really call that multitasking, as I’m only focussing on one thing at a time, and usually at least 30 minutes each. I think of it more in the terms of keeping things organized. Back in the old days when Windows didn’t natively support virtual desktops, people had like 20 windows open in a single desktop, and that looked incredibly cluttered to me. Actually, some people still do that since they haven’t discovered virtual desktops yet.
You know when you make a sandwich or some buttered toast and you set the knife carefully on the edge of the sink. Well because you might decided to make another sandwich latter or your SO goes that looks good can I get one too. And bam your the hero because you now have one less knife to clean in the dishwasher.
That is why I have so many tabs open. I know I probably won’t need most of them and it’s safe to close them. But oh dang do I feel like a hero when I get that itch for a video I want to watch and I don’t have to look through my history for next 20 minutes because, bam, its right their in that tab.
Especially at work when you might need a combination of those 3 tabs from last month.
Shhh. I was mainly talking about porn… But yes that works too. 😏
That’s a pretty good analogy.
There are some YT playlists I visit every now and then. Maybe I should just keep them open all the time…
I regularly sit at anywhere from a thousand to several thousand tabs on my desktop browser. I have a tab-counter extension.
I use tree-style tabs. I use this to organize thoughts into groups, or families, hierarchically, with varying levels and numbers of tabs, depending on topic and my interest.
Most tabs are unloaded. I do close and reopen my browser regularly, and restart my pc. I just have the browser remember the tabs in it.
I do occasionally revisit and complete families of tabs. Sometimes I’ll queue up loads of things to read on a subject, so that nothing ever has to load or reload.
Tabs are like a working space to me, kind of like working memory in your brain.
Sometimes I’ll load in several searches at once.
I have ADHD.
I am also a very passionate and try to be a very thorough person.
I generally do things top-down when researching, but also casually search.
I have waves of purging, myself, but also will randomly close tabs or trees if they are complete or exhausted.
Like once a year or so, the browser has a stroke and decides to flush everything away and I’m sad for a couple weeks.
I have lost amazing things and nearly exhaustive subjects, that alone have been hundreds of tabs.
An example of which was a (near) 100% collection of a web archive that had a complete list and archive of a lost website and organization that personally means a lot to me. I had separated its history into eras, and had found and organized nearly all of a thing that had ever been made by the organization. It’s extremely nitpicky and claims almost no storage in my mind or pc. Think of it like data hoarding or zombifying something I deem important and culturally significant. Nearly impossible to do automatedly, and I wouldn’t want nor trust a bot to do it, so I did it myself, by hand, in line with a hobby.
This really resonates with me. At least in the sense I operate like this without the tree structure but would vastly benefit from it. If you don’t mind my asking, what browser and extensions do you use?
Firefox and piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en That’s the creators page, but it’s also on the Mozilla site.
I use a bunch of other stuff too, that synergizes and whatnot, but that’s the tree style tabs that I’ve been using since like 2011. I’ve also been telling people that this is the future the entire time, and nobody ever believes me. But that’s fine, it’s going to be an inevitable option. But maybe at this rate, the internet will die before people adopt tree tabs hahaha.
If you do use that extension, I suggest going through the options, as it’s pretty well fleshed out. An option that makes a big difference to me is the the theme or whatever, to clearly see the boxes around each tab, and therefore the indentation. Another meaningful option is the tree behavior that auto-collapses the tree is you open a new one - I don’t like that, and prefer the trees stay option and me in control. But to each their own. After all, this is all just tools for you to optimize and explore.
That was a really interesting chapter. I don’t mind a wall of text like this.
Since you’re using tree-style tabs, you can actually keep things organized. This thread has turned out to be very educational to me. I didn’t really know ADHD could be involved in this, let alone that it could produce such a variety of different results when it comes to tab usage.
Anyway, tabs have a tendency to disappear sooner or later, and that’s a real problem. In this thread, I’ve found some interesting tools like Raindrop. I get the feeling you might appreciate it. I’m still testing it myself, but so far it seems like solution for that problem. I’ve also quickly tested OneTab, but I don’t really know how permanent that storage option is in the long run.
This is incredible what you do ! I also saves some webpage thata are important to me, but still have the URL saved in my booksmarks, as duplicate entry if you like.
Because they are important, I have an organised collection of bookmarks which can be saved and archived outside the browser. A bookmark list is just a structured html page that any browser can export, import and share, unlike tabs. I have lot of themed bookmarks folder, for the future.
With so much work to organise your tabs, why make you not use bookmarks instead ? Do you have a lot of RAM and SSD on your computer to save all your tabs ? Your browser needs to keep a copy in RAM for you. The more tabs, the slower your browser runs.
Some tabs are for ongoing things that I keep coming back to, though I don’t have as many of those these days. Like back in the day, I’d have a facebook tab, a few reddit tabs, etc.
Other tabs are for things that I’m not done with in general but was done with for that moment because something else came up or I just wanted to do something else and the task wasn’t urgent enough to stick with it.
Sometimes I get back to it, finish the task, and close the tab. Sometimes I’ll later see the tab and just close it because I decide I am done with it forever (or done enough that I can find it again if I want to go back to it).
I like it better than not keeping my tabs. Though I did disable the inactive tabs thing on mobile firefox because those were too out of sight and just piled up (along with the ambiguous behaviour where sometimes backing up closes newly opened tabs, sometimes it doesn’t, or I don’t back up all the way). Mobile tabs feel a bit more like bookmarks, which are more likely to just disappear entirely from my mind. Visual tabs serve as reminders of the thing.
Something really interesting is beginning to emerge from this discussion. People have varying requirements in terms of transience/permanence. Some features, like tabs are less permanent, but still permanent enough for many uses. Other features like bookmarks are far more permanent, maybe even too permanent.
All of this is beginning to look like the communication tool hierarchy (calling, email, teams etc). There’s clearly a similar hierarchy of permanence, and when a given topic does not cross the permanence threshold required for a bookmark, it stays in the tabs. That is something I hadn’t really considered before, although I was already applying this concept.
Because people are overworked or overwhelmed, in my experience.
I noticed that people who are laid back and or relaxed for whatever reason, will close them.
On the other hand, people I know that regularly overwork themselves have a billion tabs open all the time.
They could also be tech illiterate I guess.
Being overwhelmed sounds like a very plausible explanation for some cases. When you’re constantly bounced between tasks, there’s no time to tidy things up. Sounds like an early warning sign of burnout, and being tech illiterate will only aggravate it.
Next time I see a coworker with a hundred tabs, I better ask if they’re feeling ok.
For me it’s because I have ADHD and thrive among organized clutter.
I may have 100 tabs open, but they’re all categorized: One tab group for YouTube, one for porn, one for my website, and one for everything else. I keep stuff in there that’s good enough to hang onto for a while, but not good enough to bookmark.
What do you use bookmarks for then? How important and permanent does it have to be to earn a dedicated bookmark?
I previously answered a similar question from another user. For your convenience, here is my response:
Your way to manage you tabs is really close to managing bookmarks. It takes time and effort. And categorzing them goes against clutter ! What is your criteria to move a webpage to a bookmark ? I use bookmadks in the toolbar, so they are all accessible and well organized. They are not tab, just a list of pages in different folders (folder = tab group)
The criteria is whatever I feel like at the moment if/when I ultimately decide to bookmark. There is no hard set rule, because again, I have ADHD.
People that don’t know advanced ways to organise bookmarks.
Like folders and tags? Are there fancier ways too?
Simple.
Notice how I didn’t close tab A. Because at that point, I was not in tab A, therefore I don’t think about that tab much so I don’t even think if I should close it or not. Tab A will probably stay open until I decide to clean my tabs when there are 50+ tabs on them.
Another common scenario:
From this point there are 2 paths: either I never resume the task I opened tab C for, so it stays there for a long time, or I resume the task when tab C is too far up (I use vertical tabs), so I open tab D that is the same webpage as tab C. When I finish I close tab D, but tab C remains for a long time.
It sounds like you do close tabs, but they also tend to accumulate over time anyway. It’s actually quite familiar to me that paths fork all the time, which can result in exponential growth of the tab count. Ok, so that should cover where all the tabs come from.
But why do you keep them as tabs as opposed to unloading them to any other “read it later” feature? People have proposed a variety of solutions in this thread, but some people still have their reasons to stick with tabs instead.
Bookmarks are even harder to clear than tabs, since they are more “long term”. furthermore, they require more effort. Opening and closing a tab is 1 click each. Bookmarks take 1 click to create at least, but 2 to delete at least.
The browser history requires a lot of effort to find what you want.
Basically I use tabs because they require less effort than any other method.
Fair enough. Smooth workflow matters too, and tabs certainly provide that.
I’m a tab-o-holic. I probably have ADD. I don’t know but I’ll start researching something and if I don’t finish that research before moving on to something else or if the need for the research is postponed, I don’t want to lose what I was doing.
Also there are sites I go to everyday, email, calendar, YouTube, so I just leave them up all of the time.
Somebody help me!!
I have a few tabs open all the time as well, but I also have bookmarks for them so that I can easily reopen them after updating and restarting. However, I think Firefox can remember my tabs, so maybe I don’t necessarily need to do it that way. Should probably try that out at some point.
Other people here have suggested using bookmarks, tab groups,tree style tab, OneTab or even Raindrop for keeping things organized. Do you think some of those might serve your purposes?
Yeah, actually they might. I do use bookmarks too, but for more permanent things, like recipes and car sites (I’m a car guy). For projects I’m working on and will move along when I’m finished I didn’t want them polluting my bookmarks. I guess I could delete the bookmarks too. Look I never said it made any sense. Ugh.
Yeah I don’t get it, some people have 100s, dude that is what bookmarks are for.
That’s what I thought, but many people here say otherwise.
I like bookmarks because I can categorize them into drop down menus that make sense to me.
Same. Having a logical subfolder structure and maybe even tags just makes it so much nicer IMO.
However, that’s not the only way to roll. Lots of people here prefer to use tabs instead.
In that use-case: Sounds like bookmarks need a feature upgrade