At some point, the browser tab stopped being a navigation tool and became a to-do list, a reading queue, a reference library, and a guilt archive - all at once. Most people with more than twenty tabs open aren’t browsing. They’re hoarding.
This isn’t entirely a behaviour problem. Browser makers have done almost nothing to help. Chrome’s tab groups, introduced in 2020, are fine in the way that Post-it notes are fine: they work for a moment, then they accumulate, then they become part of the problem. Firefox’s approach is functionally the same. Arc Browser tried to rethink the model with spaces and automatic tab archiving, but Arc’s parent company, The Browser Company, announced in 2024 that it was effectively moving away from Arc toward a new AI-native product - which rather undercut the argument that anyone had solved the tab problem.
What’s actually happening when someone keeps 60 tabs open isn’t disorganisation. It’s deferred decision-making. Each tab represents something a person wasn’t ready to act on or discard, and the browser’s infinite horizontal scroll makes it trivially easy to defer again. There’s no friction. No cost. Tabs are free, fast, and silent - until your fan spins up.
The Memory Angle Is a Distraction
Tech coverage tends to frame this as a RAM issue, and browser makers reinforce that by advertising memory-saving features. Chrome’s Memory Saver mode, for instance, suspends inactive tabs to reduce overhead. That’s a performance fix, not a workflow fix. It treats the symptom while the underlying dysfunction - using tabs as a persistence layer for unresolved intentions - goes unaddressed.
The irony is that browsers have become the dominant work environment on most machines, yet they remain among the least opinionated tools in daily use. A spreadsheet pushes back when your data doesn’t fit. A tab does not.
What Would Actually Help
An honest tab limit - a hard cap, user-configurable, that requires you to close something before opening something new - would do more for most people’s focus than any AI sidebar feature announced in the last three years. It’s not a sophisticated solution. That’s the point.
The tools that have genuinely changed how people manage browser content, things like Raindrop.io for bookmarking or Readwise Reader for articles, exist outside the browser entirely. The browser itself remains oddly passive about the chaos it enables, and nobody seems particularly motivated to change that.