I think a good way to treat tabs and open files in other apps is like the 'zero inbox' when 'open' means 'do something about it', it's your task list.

Hence, I could never understand how people have more than like 20 tabs open — what are you working on in this case? For myself, I only go to 20-ish territories when aggressively looking for docs or opening something for quick batch-like extraction, it's a very short-timed situation.

Usually it's just three pinned mailboxes and something I'm currently on, like 2-5 tabs, one of them is likely a search engine.

I have mostly 3-4 tabs open. It's more if I am searching something, but I soon as I have found it, I close unnecessary tabs. I don't understand people keeping many tabs open - why?

More than 6,000 just on my phone. No tabs groups. I only use that browser for recreation. It’s an undifferentiated stream of “things that look interesting” and I may or may not ever look at the tabs again, which is fine.

Far fewer on browsers I use for productive pursuits, but hundreds across multiple windows and many tab groups. I have a lot of projects, and haven’t found a great way ‘shelve’ and ‘unshelve’ them.

About 20- 40 open for office laptop. It's for my memory and context switching.

A whole bunch of them. Because they all seem “useful” and I’m not “done” with them yet.

A lot. Often a couple dozen for pages that are currently queued up to read, with pages further to the left being older and often forgotten (or they're pages that I would like to have read, but don't want to take the time to read, and I haven't accepted that distinction yet). Another window might have reference material for whatever I'm working on. If I've only got one page open there, it usually means that I'm not deep into the process.

On my work computer, at least four - one each for the web apps, like Notion or Monday.com in which I'm working. Sometimes, I have a couple of tabs open for each app.

On my own computer, two maybe three - one for email, one for Nextcloud, and whatever one I'm using for browsing.

For me it’s usually not about the number, it’s about unfinished decisions.

Most tabs are just “I’ll come back to this”, and they pile up because I never actually decide to either use it or drop it.

Right this second, four.

Mail, Hermes Agent Dashboard, ESPN draft tracker, HN

I harvest tabs mercilessly, I either read and close or if its something I want to keep I have the bot clip into my obsidian vault