I did something Monday night that I've been putting off since roughly the Obama administration: I closed my tabs. All of them. Well, almost all of them. I kept four, and I'll get to why.
For context, if you're new here (unlikely, since this blog has been limping along since November 2011 and at this point mostly attracts people who already know me), I run a laptop the way some people run a junk drawer. Tabs pile up. A tab is a promise: I'll read this later, I'll come back to this recipe, I need to remember to cancel that subscription, and the promise just sits there, taking up a sliver of RAM and a sliver of guilt, forever.
Last night I counted. 187 tabs across two windows on my main machine, plus another 40-ish on the work laptop I try not to touch after 7pm and mostly fail at. Some of these tabs were, no exaggeration, from 2023. There was a Wirecutter review of humidifiers that predates the humidifier I already bought and have been using for two winters. There was a GitHub issue thread I never resolved because the maintainer went quiet and I just... left the tab open as a monument to my own unfinished business.
I don't think tab hoarding is really about the tabs. Its about not wanting to make the decision. Closing a tab is a tiny admission that you're not going to do the thing, and it turns out I would rather carry 187 tiny admissions of failure around in my browser bar than make them all at once. Which, written out like that, sounds like it should go in a therapist's notebook and not a tech blog, but here we are.
The actual cleanup
I didn't do anything clever. No app, no extension, no AI tab-summarizer thing that promises to read all your tabs and tell you which ones matter (I looked at a couple of these over the weekend and they mostly just wanted $8 a month to tell me what I already knew, which is "you have too many tabs, dummy"). I just went window by window, right-clicked, and picked "close tabs to the right" in chunks of maybe fifteen at a time, because doing it one at a time felt like it would take until March.
It took forty minutes. My laptop fan, which has apparently been quietly screaming for longer than I realized, went dead silent about two-thirds of the way through. I didn't know it had been running that whole time until it stopped.
The four I kept: a flight confirmation for a trip in October, the electric bill portal because I still owe them for July, a doc I'm actually mid-edit on, and (this is the small confession part) a Craigslist listing for a free upright piano that I am absolutely not going to go pick up but also cannot bring myself to close. Some tabs you keep because you need them. Some you keep because closing them means admitting who you actually are.
Bookmarks are a lie too, by the way
While I was in there I also glanced at my bookmarks bar, which has 34 folders and at least three that are just named "stuff." I did not touch it. Some restorations are for another night. I think the honest version of "organizing your digital life" is that you do about 20% of it in one sitting, feel very productive, and then let the rest rot for another three years, and I've made peace with that being the actual system rather than the failure of one.
One thing I will say: closing all those tabs made we realize how much of my "research" over the last year was really just me bookmarking my own anxiety. Half of what I had open was stuff like "how to fix squeaky bike brakes" and "best cheap CO2 monitor" — small household fires I lit for myself and then never put out. The tabs weren't reminders. They were guilt with a favicon.
Anyway. My browser bar has four tabs in it right now and it feels like walking into a room after you've finally returned the library books. If you've got a machine somewhere groaning under 150+ tabs of your own, I'm not going to tell you to go close them, because you already know, and telling you would just be one more tab-shaped thing you didn't ask for.