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?
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.