this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2025
128 points (94.4% liked)

No Stupid Questions

44497 readers
782 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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?

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Dumbkid@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip 3 points 12 hours ago

That’s a familiar feeling. However, some people have an absurd number of tabs open all the time. Makes me wonder if they actually use them for something.

[–] MadMadBunny@lemmy.ca 55 points 19 hours ago (8 children)
[–] cRazi_man@europe.pub 22 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Hard to explain that tab I've had open for 8 months for something I've been meaning to read.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 12 points 18 hours ago

Rookie numbers

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] serpineslair@lemmy.world 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Fair enough, for that purpose I use either an actual list, or bookmarks.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)
[–] Nemo@slrpnk.net 13 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] mriormro@lemmy.zip 22 points 17 hours ago
[–] Ludicrous0251@piefed.zip 39 points 19 hours ago (4 children)

Not all disabilities are visible.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] Strider@lemmy.world 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Empricorn@feddit.nl 5 points 13 hours ago (2 children)

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

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Steve@communick.news 38 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (10 children)

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

[–] bufalo1973@piefed.social 20 points 18 hours ago

More like a "level 1 bookmarks".

[–] witty_username@feddit.nl 12 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (1 children)

I use them as a sort of bookmark cache. Stuff I'm unlikely to want to keep for long but also not stuff I want to discard immediately. I use the tree style tabs plugin in ff, works beautifully

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
[–] owenfromcanada@lemmy.ca 24 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

My wife calls them her emotional support tabs.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] rumschlumpel@feddit.org 29 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] TrickDacy@lemmy.world 5 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (10 children)

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.

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] DrSteveBrule@mander.xyz 2 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

All my life I never saved tabs and everytime I closed the browser I would open it again with just the home oage. Then about a year ago I downloaded Zen Browser and I really liked the tab management that came with it. I created some profiles and folders to organize the tabs in so now I have maybe 20-30 tabs always open, but they are almost always used regularly. I might have 5 for my school. 5 for torrenting/hosting. A few for music related things, gaming, etc. It's very organized and basically replaces the need for a custom html homepage.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Deceptichum@quokk.au 8 points 17 hours ago (3 children)

I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.

It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] Mika@piefed.ca 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

I regularly filter out tabs on laptop, bookmarking things and closing stuff that isn't on todo list for the next 24h.

Mobile though, clicling that through UI takes so much time I can't be bothered. I just open new stuff on top, and maybe sometimes go through tabs like as if that's browser history.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›