When I visited Oslo, I bumped into some pakistani lads, and we had a nice long chat about the history of immigration in Norway.

Back in the 70s, Norway imported lots of workers for the oil industry. At the time, most of them imagined that they would go back home sooner or later. if you live like your mind is in Pakistan, but your body is in Norway, it’s just not going to work long term.

In the next 30 years, more and more of them realized that they actually quite like it in Norway, since they have a job, house, car, family, children and so on. In the 00s they also started acting like it. Now, the immigrants and their children have been living like regular people for about 20+ years.

However, that applies to the fraction of immigrants who have already spent about 30 years in that country. Contrast that with the Afghani, Iraqi and Syrian immigrants in Sweden. They haven’t been there for 30 years yet, which means that they haven’t fully come to terms with the fact that they’ve left their home country behind and they aren’t going back. Once they cross that mental threshold, they begin to act like this is their new home country. Before that though, you can expect to see all sorts of nasty side effects.

But I have seen some offices with enormous stacks of books and papers reaching all the way to the ceiling. I don’t know how that system works, but these people claim they can somehow find everything in there.

Same. Having a logical subfolder structure and maybe even tags just makes it so much nicer IMO.

However, that’s not the only way to roll. Lots of people here prefer to use tabs instead.

In other words, that’s the kind of stuff you need to reference frequently, so having those tabs constantly open is quite useful for the task at hand.

Other people seem to just neglect and abandon a bunch of tab. That’s a very different crowd though.

Out of sight, out of mind, which means it comes with pros and cons though. If you feel like 500 tabs is consuming too much of your mental bandwidth, then offloading some of them to bookmarks should help. The idea is that only active stuff would be in the tabs, while everything a bit less active would be in the bookmarks.

Some people just don’t roll that way, and this thread has some interesting comments about that style too. Turns out, people use their browsers in vastly different ways.

That’s what I thought, but many people here say otherwise.

Fair enough. Smooth workflow matters too, and tabs certainly provide that.

Oh, so maybe that’s why Linus couldn’t open more than a few thousand tabs in Chrome. He used a server board and 2 TB or RAM, but the system got ridiculously slow when he hit about 10% usage. The whole system was specifically designed to sacrifice speed for capacity, so I guess that was a mistake. There could have also been software related issues with the setup. Who knows. Maybe Windows or Chrome just can’t handle absurd tab counts gracefully.

I have a few tabs open all the time as well, but I also have bookmarks for them so that I can easily reopen them after updating and restarting. However, I think Firefox can remember my tabs, so maybe I don’t necessarily need to do it that way. Should probably try that out at some point.

Other people here have suggested using bookmarks, tab groups,tree style tab, OneTab or even Raindrop for keeping things organized. Do you think some of those might serve your purposes?

It sounds like you do close tabs, but they also tend to accumulate over time anyway. It’s actually quite familiar to me that paths fork all the time, which can result in exponential growth of the tab count. Ok, so that should cover where all the tabs come from.

But why do you keep them as tabs as opposed to unloading them to any other “read it later” feature? People have proposed a variety of solutions in this thread, but some people still have their reasons to stick with tabs instead.

Like folders and tags? Are there fancier ways too?

Oh, ok so it’s just links for us plebs. Either way, it’s nice to know the option is there.

Being overwhelmed sounds like a very plausible explanation for some cases. When you’re constantly bounced between tasks, there’s no time to tidy things up. Sounds like an early warning sign of burnout, and being tech illiterate will only aggravate it.

Next time I see a coworker with a hundred tabs, I better ask if they’re feeling ok.

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.

That is the other extreme, and both groups say they have ADHD. Seems like a pretty complex term to me.

That was a really interesting chapter. I don’t mind a wall of text like this.

Since you’re using tree-style tabs, you can actually keep things organized. This thread has turned out to be very educational to me. I didn’t really know ADHD could be involved in this, let alone that it could produce such a variety of different results when it comes to tab usage.

Anyway, tabs have a tendency to disappear sooner or later, and that’s a real problem. In this thread, I’ve found some interesting tools like Raindrop. I get the feeling you might appreciate it. I’m still testing it myself, but so far it seems like solution for that problem. I’ve also quickly tested OneTab, but I don’t really know how permanent that storage option is in the long run.

Yeah, I have lots of stuff open on several desktops too. On my work computer, there are usually a few desktops for different topics. I don’t really call that multitasking, as I’m only focussing on one thing at a time, and usually at least 30 minutes each. I think of it more in the terms of keeping things organized. Back in the old days when Windows didn’t natively support virtual desktops, people had like 20 windows open in a single desktop, and that looked incredibly cluttered to me. Actually, some people still do that since they haven’t discovered virtual desktops yet.

The default was something amazingly stupid like alphabetical or whatever. Completely useless, so it’s no wonder why people ignore the history altogether.

What do you use bookmarks for then? How important and permanent does it have to be to earn a dedicated bookmark?

Thanks! Just saved them to Raindrop. Planning to test them properly when I get back to an actual computer.