No Stupid Questions

Too stupid to use bookmarks.

People have that many tabs open for the same reason people have full piss bottles next to their computers.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

Idk it's crazy to see the browser windows of some teammates during screen share.

Read the thing, write down the relevant stuff / copy it to reference notes, bookmark it with raindrop or something that allows you to tag for context, close the whole browser.

but once I’m done, I close them all

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

Uhhh because I need them all

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.

Only 30?

I keep tabs open so I can refer back to them when working on stuff or when I am planning things.

Right now I'm in the middle of house repairs on a former slumlord property. Will be installing 7.2KW of solar panels in a system that can island without causing issues. Need to rip and replace the back porch because the roof was rotten already and the floor is not much better. Trying to run and build a YouTube channel in the SCUBA diving niche. Planning for a dive trip to Cozumel in April so I can get more footage for said channel. And trying to start a non-profit that will support SCUBA training for teens and young adults who survived childhood abuse. While also running a website for the YouTube channel and the non-profit. All while dealing with life, family, a dog, and two vehicles. I do EVERYTHING with my own hands because I don't have cash to pay others to do it for me.

When I am preparing to make a purchase I also tend to have even more tabs open as I compare prices and costs for shipping among other things. The replacement materials for our roof was about 5K total for just under 3000sq ft of roof and I had to install venting that previously didn't exist. Just made the next to last purchase for solar and have 6500 invested and about 1000 left to go for the racking and a few miscellaneous things.

It takes a lot to remember everything so keeping tabs open is a huge stress reliever. Right now my desktop has about 80 tabs open and my tablet has 230.

on desktop, hell no. On mobile, I just wanted to see what would happen if I stopped closing them once in a while. it lags my phone so bad every time I scroll through them. It look about 1 minute to get through the entire list lol
my estimate is about 800, but I am not gonna spend time counting them

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.

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.

ADHD.

Because they hadn't heard of this feature called bookmarks

It’s a to do list

... 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.