Do You Have Too Many Tabs Open?

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My husband and I were laughing about this the other day — we are vastly different in terms of our tab situations. I, for example, have learned the hard way that Safari has a 500 tab limit… and my husband prefers to keep one tab open at a time. (And yet we get along!) I thought it might make a kind of fun discussion — are you a “many tabs” kind of girl, or a one-tab-at-a-time person? Why?

For my $.02, I suppose my biggest problem is that as I peruse a listing of things, whether it’s clothes or articles, I like to peruse all at once so I can prioritize which article or product I want to look at first. This means I open everything into new tabs while I continue perusing… and then boom, suddenly I’ve opened 20 new tabs.

That said, a lot of my tab problem is occupational hazard. At the moment I have about 15 different posts open in the background, often because I’m re-editing them for SEO type of things. (Today it’s because I’m reviewing the past week or so of comments.) I also have about ten windows open of an app called Clariti that I use to help me assess SEO things, for each of those posts that I’m re-editing. In another browser window (lol) I have about 10 tabs open from various clothing stores where I saw cute things while looking for the Suit of the Week yesterday and need to “process” them, either by suggesting to Elizabeth for a morning report, putting into my own list for coffee breaks, or adding them to a previous post.

Other habits that frequently result in a bunch of tabs being open: I have a browser plugin that lets me open any links that I highlight, all at once, so it’s easier to check links for product recommendations and the like, and I have a lot of bookmarked folders in Chrome full of 10-60 sites that I want to check all at once, so I open them all at once. Yes, it takes forever!

On my phone there tends to be a few major culprits of the tab situation… at any given moment there are 50+ iterations of the comment moderation page up because I usually start a new tab to approve comments but then forget to close whatever tabs existed before (and sometimes there are reasons those pages are up, like if I’m looking at someone’s commenting history). Facebook is another culprit, which is dumb because all Facebook pages refresh to the home page the second I go back to them. And finally we have the New York Times, which I try to read every morning and only JUST realized that they have a “save article” feature the way the WSJ does. (Is that new or have I just not realized it?) Once I realized there was a way to save articles rather than keeping them up in the browser, I was able to close about 100 tabs.

There are, of course, “reading lists” and other easy ways of saving articles and the like for perusal at a later date… somehow that later date never seems to come for me. Ditto for OneTab, which I love as a browser extension because it lets me quickly collapse ALL of the tabs open at any given point in time and then SAVES those tabs in a helpful list that I can go back to at any point if I want to. Spoiler alert: I almost never go back to review the list.

Readers, how about you — if we were to grab your phone, how many tabs would be open? How about your browser right now?

(Photo: I’m not usually an “art with words” kind of person but when I saw this silly sign I couldn’t resist… it’s definitely true.)