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?
My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.
When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like bookmarks.
More like a “level 1 bookmarks”.
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.
It’s a to do list
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.
