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.

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.

ADHD.

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

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 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.

You know when you make a sandwich or some buttered toast and you set the knife carefully on the edge of the sink. Well because you might decided to make another sandwich latter or your SO goes that looks good can I get one too. And bam your the hero because you now have one less knife to clean in the dishwasher.

That is why I have so many tabs open. I know I probably won't need most of them and it's safe to close them. But oh dang do I feel like a hero when I get that itch for a video I want to watch and I don't have to look through my history for next 20 minutes because, bam, its right their in that tab.

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.

Those are fucking rookie numbers.

Uhhh because I need them all

its kind of "log", so i dont forget about some website or it displays what i have been doing earlier. Kind of temporary bookmark

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.

Bookmarks are where projects go to die.

Most people I know who do that use them as kinda bookmarks. Tbh, I do also sort of do this on my phone. I keep some tabs open with stuff I still wanted to check out. And every now and then I go through them and close the ones I don't need. But on PC I just close the whole session with all tabs when I'm done

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.

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

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

For me it's because I have ADHD and thrive among organized clutter.

I may have 100 tabs open, but they're all categorized: One tab group for YouTube, one for porn, one for my website, and one for everything else. I keep stuff in there that's good enough to hang onto for a while, but not good enough to bookmark.

ADHD.

Because I want to and it's weird that it bothers you.

Let's explore that instead.

What allows you to assume you're not the abnormal one?

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.

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.

They can't organise bookmarks

If I need them again, browser history is there.

I think that browser history sucks in Firefox, I don't know why, if it has, well history, recently viewed and recently closed sections, YET I can't ever quickly find the one tab that I closed recently (but not that recently, recently enough to remember that I did) and it is shown days ago in the browser history which makes me always manually search for it and, oh boy if I remember a word differently from the site title I am in for a hard time...

I don't specifically hoard tabs (I do with Simple Tab Groups) but this seemed like the perfect chance for me to rant about this... Man I remember that the history option showed you the last recent visited/viewed or closed page :/

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 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! 😁

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.