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?
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?