No Stupid Questions

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.

It’s a to do list

Not all disabilities are visible.

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.

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.

Have you seen the price of RAM lately? You gotta do something to make sure you're getting your moneys worth.

its kind of "log", so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark

When I asked someone about it, they basically used them like 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.

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?

Simple.

1. I'm reading tab A
2. Tab A links to tab B
3. Open B in new tab, since I know I'm going back to tab A soon.
4. Go to tab A
5. Go to tab B again
6. I'm finished reading tab B so I close it.

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:

1. I'm reading tab C
2. Something comes up that makes me either switch to another task or shut down the computer

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.

Those are fucking rookie numbers.

ADHD.

but once I’m done, I close them all

Same. But I also have a continuous stream of new projects that never get finished.

My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.

ADHD.

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!

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.

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

If I need them again, browser history is there.

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 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.

Uhhh because I need them all

Hoarding

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 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