Electronic lifestyle: many browser tabs open, continued: hardware consideration

Self-tutoring about computer use: the tutor continues about the idea of having many tabs open in a browser.

The following is according to my understanding.

I mention in my post from Nov 3, 2022, a habit of having multiple tabs open. Lately it’s come to my attention that some people might worry about having even a couple dozen tabs open. (Twenty-four would be a modest number of open tabs, to me.)

A theme I’m noticing, for instance, is that having “too many” tabs open can cause anxiety to the user. I’m not too sure what “too many” means, since a user can, in theory, close a tab whenever they want. However, I’ve even seen the term “tab hoarding,” which is ominous.

The concept seems to be that tab hoarders are people who are afraid of losing valuable information, so they leave tabs open as they change tasks. Yet, it seems to me that, especially doing research, one often can’t “finish” reading about one topic before commencing fact gathering about another. A potential consequence would apparently be to end up with “old” tabs open.

One point mentioned is that having too many tabs open may slow down a computer. Such, it seems to me, was much more significant before the common adoption of solid state drives. The laptop I’m using right now, from three years ago, can have three different browsers open at once, with a total of 70 open tabs among them (not each), without even humming. In such a scenario, CPU usage might bounce between 2 and 15 percent; memory, around 85 percent. Under all that, it’s running Windows 11! Even so, this laptop wasn’t expensive.

It remains true that a given website can stumble even a device with a ssd, as I mention in my post from December 20, 2025. However, that’s uncommon, and due to the specific site, not the visitor’s browsing habits.

The clutter of dozens of open tabs may be hard to wade through when someone returns to their device and has to reconstruct a thread. That’s a separate issue, which I hope to continue about in future posts.

Source:

differentbrains.org