How many tabs do you keep open on your web browser? If you are like most people, I suspect the answer is a lot. It has become such a problem that there are numerous plugins and extensions that seek to combat the problem in some way. These extensions might export the tab bar to a list, to be recalled whenever you wish, or they might extend the tab bar in some way, or hide it, or plenty of other ideas.

Personally I have long used a variation of the list idea. I have an AppleScript that copies the URL of every open tab and records them in a text file, one URL per line, giving the text file the name "URLs" followed by the day's date.

What I do is at the end of the day I run my script and record all my open tabs to a text file which I then save in a /log directory. I have another script that can read this text file and make tabs for every line, therefore restoring the tabs to what they were before, but I find I rarely use this script. Having the log file gives me peace of mind so I don't worry about losing anything, but then I find I rarely actually want to return to anything I previously had open.

In this way, my tab bar rarely grows too big. I just don't have enough free time in my day to open that many tabs, and clearing them out like this every night keeps it small.

And that exactly is it. That's the problem, I think, that makes all of us collect these giant collections of tabs. Some part of our reptile brain worries about losing something important. Rather than risk losing something important, we open a new tab for a new search instead of continuing to use the current tab. After all, the current page we are on might still be useful. Even if we are completely finished with whatever was on that page, there is a part of our brain that is screaming what if I need this information again?? So we keep it open and open a new tab.

This is the same part of our brain that makes us into packrats if we allow it. Judging by how much stuff old people have packed in their houses, most of us give in to this packrat urge. Judging by our problems with tab hoarding, this isn't just an urge we give into with old age, but it hits all ages equally.

Will we ever need the information in that tab again? Probably not. And even if we did, a Google search would find it for us just as easily as it did that last time we searched. But that logic doesn't work for the reptile brain, hence my strategy of tricking it by just recording the tabs to a text file. Even if I never ever return to these text files, just knowing they are there eases the urge to save ALL THE TABS.

If you have problems with too many tabs, I'd fully recommend a similar strategy.

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Twitter or Mastodon.