How many browser tabs do you have open right now?
If you keep a long line of tabs marking pages that you might not even need to go back to, you’re certainly not alone.
A team of researchers from Carnegie Mellon University has carried out a study to look at the way that we use internet browser tabs and some of the problems they present – with a view to finding a solution.
The interview-based study was presented at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2021.
It found that nearly a third (30%) of participants had such a problem with keeping tabs open that they were essentially ‘browser tab hoarding’.
28% reported that they struggled to find the pages they actually wanted to revisit amid all the clutter, while a quarter said that they sometimes had so many tabs open that their browser or computer crashed.
The research closely matched the findings of a previous Japanese study that found that more than half of respondents had a problem with tab clutter.
This might not be a revelation if you’re currently sitting with a string of tabs that you mean to get to at some unspecified time in the future, but the reasoning behind tab hoarding is more interesting.
Only a fifth (19%) of respondents said that their failure to close tabs was related to laziness.
‘Black hole effect’ compelled some people to hoard tabs
Aniket Kittur, a professor working in the field of human cognition, explained that many people felt pressure to keep the tabs open as they would otherwise lose reminders of tasks that they still had to do, or have to start again in finding the information that they need.
He referred to this as the ‘black hole effect’ and said that people feared that once something was out of sight, it was gone.
This fear was strong enough to compel some people to keep the tabs open even when their numbers became unmanageable.
Tab overload was also likely when people were undertaking a specific task, such as researching a major purchase.
The team noted that browser tabs have essentially remained the same since 2001, while the internet itself and the content available on it have expanded massively, with a billion times more information available.
The researchers are now working on a tool called Skeema that uses machine learning to organise tabs and tasks more effectively with a view to addressing the stress caused by tab overload.
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