I’m addicted to browser tabs. Right now on my work computer I have 50 tabs open and that’s after I closed the unimportant ones. I have a fairly large screen but with this many tabs open I can’t even see the tab titles anymore. I usually just forget about what’s there until some point in the future when I end up deleting a bunch of them just so I can see which tab my email’s on.
Of course, every tab is important to me. Each one is a blog post I want to read or a tutorial I just don’t have time to go through yet. I’ve tried bookmarking pages instead but without something in front of me I usually just forget that I have things bookmarked. Of course I usually just forget that I have things tabbed too.
One thing that sort of works, sometimes, is to organize my bookmarks into logical folders and then show those folders on my bookmarks bar. But then my bookmarks bar gets too long and a lot of the folders get hidden and I end up forgetting about them anyway.
My work computer has a solid state hard drive, a 3.4 GHz i7 processor and 32 GB of ram. It has no problem holding 40+ tabs open in Chrome along with running five to ten other programs I regularly use. My problem is just being able to see what the tabs hold so I can read them later.
At home, however, I have a different problem. My home computer is a 7 year old laptop with a core 2 duo and only 3GB of ram running Windows 10. But I still have my tab addiction. Unfortunately, I’ve hooked my wife on tabs too. Now two of us want to bounce from site to site and keep everything we’ve seen open. Arrggghhh, there’s too much interesting stuff on the internet!
My home laptop slows to a crawl if I use Chrome with more than about four tabs open. And good luck having any other programs open at the same time. The best solution would probably be to just close tabs or at least bookmark them and hope to someday remember to look at the bookmarks. But no, I found a way to force my ancient computer to keep my tabs up without crashing.
I loaded the Chrome extension called The Great Suspender. It suspends (surprise, surprise) tabs that haven’t been focused for more than a set amount of time. When you click on a suspended tab it reloads and away you go. This way I can keep lots of tabs open without affecting my system’s performance.
Yes, it’s a band aid for a problem that should be fixed by bookmarking or something. Of course, now that I think about it, when I have a screen full of tabs open I usually forget to go back and look at them anyway. My parents used to tell me that if I couldn’t remember something, it probably wasn’t that important anyway. And if most of the things my tabs hold aren’t that important, maybe I shouldn’t keep them around in the first place.
I need to get out more.