No Stupid Questions

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! 😁

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.

Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec

I open a tab, read half of it.

"I'll finish it later"

opens another tab

repeat forever...

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.

because i forget to close useless ones.

Bad parenting

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.

Hoarding

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.

... 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 " 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.

Too stupid to use bookmarks.

I used to use bookmarks (at home). Now I just keep tabs open.

I can almost never find things in my browser history. I keep windows with relevant tabs open on separate workspaces.

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.

Only 30?

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.

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.

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.

My friend has ADHD and 300 tabs. I'm pretty sure they are related.