By Lee Yi Ning Megan (27A01B)

Working online often begins innocently enough. You open a document, a few sources for research, perhaps a dictionary or a video in the background. Before long, however, the number of tabs begins to multiply.

Some are immediately useful. Others are kept open because they might be needed later. A few have probably been sitting there for days, long after you have forgotten why you opened them in the first place.

For many students, this has become a familiar part of studying online. Tabs often serve as reminders of unfinished tasks and pages we intend to revisit, but as they accumulate, the tab bar can quickly become cluttered and difficult to navigate.

So, why are we so reluctant to close them, and what can we do when our tab bar starts getting out of hand?

Why do we hoard tabs in the first place?

Before declaring war on our tab bars, it is perhaps worth asking why we accumulate so many tabs to begin with.

More often than not, an open tab is a reminder: an article we intend to read or a task we promise ourselves we will return to later. Closing it, then, can feel oddly consequential. Once it disappears from sight, what guarantees that we will ever remember it again?

One student described this dilemma particularly well. While having too many tabs open makes it difficult for her to remember where everything is, closing them does not feel like much of a solution either.

It is a slightly self-defeating cycle. We leave tabs open so that we do not forget them, only to accumulate so many that finding the one we need becomes a task in itself. Our browsers gradually stop functioning as workspaces and start resembling rather unwieldy visual reminders of everything we have yet to do.

Sometimes, it is better to let go

Perhaps, then, the first solution is also the least exciting one: close some tabs.

Not every webpage needs to remain permanently within reach. The article you opened two weeks ago and have not looked at since is unlikely to become indispensable overnight; neither is the search result you kept open “just in case”. Anything genuinely worth returning to can always be bookmarked or saved elsewhere.

For some, making this a habit helps. Teo Kai Xu (27A01B), for instance, clears his tabs “every one hour of working or two hours, depending on how many tabs there are”. Rather than waiting for his browser to force the issue, he periodically decides what is still useful and what has outlived its purpose.

Of course, letting go is easier said than done. For those who still find themselves hovering nervously over the little “x”, there are several ways to keep important pages close without allowing them to take over the entire screen.

Pin down the essentials

Admittedly, some tabs deserve to stay.

Email, calendars, school portals and other websites we return to throughout the day can easily disappear amongst the revolving door of Google searches. This is where pinned tabs come in.

Pinned tabs shrink frequently used webpages into compact icons and anchor them to the left of the tab bar, separating them from the more temporary pages opened over the course of a work session. To create one, simply right-click a tab and select “Pin”.

The important word here, however, is frequently. Pinning every vaguely useful webpage merely produces a smaller, more colourful version of the problem you started with.

A little organisation goes a long way

If closing tabs is not the problem so much as distinguishing between them, Chrome’s built-in tab groups offer another solution.

Tabs can be sorted into labelled, colour-coded groups according to project, subject or purpose, which can then be collapsed when they are not in use. For Kai Xu, this has become a central part of his workflow. “I have tab groups for every project or assignment I’m working on,” he explained. “When I’m working on it, I’ll just open a tab group and everything is there already.”

The appeal is straightforward: tab groups can impose some structure on the chaos instead of reducing the number of tabs. For anyone juggling several assignments at once, that distinction can make all the difference.

Calling in reinforcements

However, for the particularly committed tab hoarder, Chrome’s built-in tools may only go so far.

A quick search reveals no shortage of browser extensions promising to restore order to your tab bar. Yet beneath the similar-sounding descriptions are tools designed for rather different problems, meaning that the “best” extension depends largely on what you need it to do.

For those whose greatest struggle is simply finding a tab, Tab Manager Plus displays open tabs across different windows in one searchable visual overview. Workona, on the other hand, is better suited to users juggling multiple projects, separating sets of tabs into distinct workspaces that can be switched between as needed.

Then there are tools intended less for organisation than preservation. OneTab condenses all your open tabs into a single list of links, freeing up memory while keeping the pages accessible for later. Session Buddy saves entire browsing sessions, offering some reassurance to those whose greatest fear is closing a window and immediately regretting it. Meanwhile, users already devoted to Chrome’s native tab groups may find Tab Group Vault useful for saving and restoring those groups while retaining their original organisation.

Not all of these tools are free, and installing every tab manager you encounter quite defeats the purpose. The important question is: What do you actually need help with? Whether the answer is finding tabs, separating projects, saving sessions or reducing memory usage, this should determine the tool you choose.

A crowded tab bar can seem trivial, but it is easy for tabs to accumulate as we put things off or keep pages open in case we need them later. So the next time your browser starts filling up, take a moment to sort, save or close what you no longer need.