As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first.

I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.

Why?

Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).

I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.

This is broadly my process, too.

I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.

Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.

This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.

YM, as always, MV.

I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed.

Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.

If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.

> Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem.

I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.

> I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers

For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!

On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.

I wonder if Google has enough data to look at the search history of (150+) tab users and make a correlation with mental health searches.

I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.

Yes, this breadth-first description is a good way to characterize my reason for having lots of tabs (though I don't have nearly as many as some people here say they have).

One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).

Try using Pilgrim[0] if it's breadth you're concerned with. It's a simple reader bookmarklet that also creates a linked map of all links in a page[1], letting you visualize the breadth of linked info in a tree and glide back and forth between them in a simple way.

I just found it today and already I love it.

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0. http://pilgrim.are.na/ 1. http://i.imgur.com/z78eybj.png

Kudos for the great explanation!

In a lot of ways, my open tabs are my to-do list. Some of them are things that I need to do, some are "I want to read this article when I have time", some are long term research.

I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.

So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.

I too use tabs as ad-hoc to-do list. In fact I have tab open right now that is open since at least 2011 as the relevant project is on kind of on back burner right now and the tab got in some way repurposed as a separator between stuff linked from HN/Twitter/FB/wherever and stuff that I explicitly searched for.

Also, 150 isn't really that many, resource-wise. A modern computer should be able to handle that trivially. So even if my use case was unreasonable (I obviously don't think it is, obviously), there's no good reason a browser shouldn't still be able to support it well.

Modern webpages aren't just electric paper though. Often they are very dynamic and interactive applications. (Regardless of whether or not the content warrants it)

Personally, I keep generally 1 window per topic and multiple tabs in that window. They're kind of like medium-term bookmarks. For example, I'm shopping for a carseat, looking for a replacement for my front gate, working on a React project, a RaspberryPi project, and playing with Vagrant and Ansible for something else. I start something, but have to set it aside because of something is blocking me (I need to solder stuff together for rPi, verify my kid's hight/weight for the baby seat, talk to the wife about the gate, or I just get in the mood for switching projects).

After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.

Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.

At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.

I use them instead of bookmarks: with Tree Style Tabs, I can pause a task, collapse it's subtree(s) and come back later with the complete state intact.

I wonder if the 100+ tab people are also the ones who can handle dozens of cups of coffee a day. I guess I'm boring. Whether tabs or coffee, I do 1-2 at a time/per day.

It's not like people are suddenly opening up 150 or 1000 tabs due to hyperactivity! :p. I know in my case I just keep my browser open and things tend to just keep going and eventually I have hundreds of tabs open over the course of ... a week? A month? I'm not exactly sure. Occasionally I just shut the browser down and start over.

FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.

I often have close to 1000 tabs open (How do I get the count?) I'm also very sensitive to coffee and cannot do more than 2 a day.

I use tabs like I used to use bookmarks. I use tab groups, so I will maybe have a group of rust tabs, C++ tabs, and HN tabs open. This can add up over time.