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?
Something really interesting is beginning to emerge from this discussion. People have varying requirements in terms of transience/permanence. Some features, like tabs are less permanent, but still permanent enough for many uses. Other features like bookmarks are far more permanent, maybe even too permanent.
All of this is beginning to look like the communication tool hierarchy (calling, email, teams etc). There’s clearly a similar hierarchy of permanence, and when a given topic does not cross the permanence threshold required for a bookmark, it stays in the tabs. That is something I hadn’t really considered before, although I was already applying this concept.