No Stupid Questions

It’s a to do list

Not all disabilities are visible.

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.

My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.

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.

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.

I suspect they lack whatever visceral reaction makes me start to panic if I have more tabs open than fit neatly across the top of the browser.

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

I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.

There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.

I am never close to 100. I don't even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.

At work? Every shit is a browser app now. Hard to organize.

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.

Bad parenting

They can't organise bookmarks

Those are fucking rookie numbers.

Bookmarks are where projects go to die.

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.

Idk how many tabs I even have on my Fennec

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I open a tab, read half of it.

"I'll finish it later"

opens another tab

repeat forever...

Most of my projects require like 2-4 web apps so i constantly have two browser windows open side by side, with a bunch tabs on each

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

... 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.

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 don't really see anyone admitting the truth: digital hoarding. At a certain number of tabs it becomes nearly impossible to find anything so it's hard for me to believe people really find the practice as useful as they claim. I probably have 50 tabs open but I use a tab group extension that keeps most hidden (and Firefox doesn't load the content in inactive tabs after you restart it). Most are essentially bookmarks but I'd be lying if I said even 20% of them end up being useful to keep open.

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

because i forget to close useless ones.