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Image: Richy Great/ Unsplash
It’s possible that your stress when using the internet stems from the sheer number of tabs you have open. Okay, at least a portion of it. A survey conducted by students at Finland’s Aalto University (and uncovered by PC Gamer) suggests that internet browser clutter is an issue for the vast majority of users.
What, exactly, is browser chaos? This study, which surveyed 400 people online and conducted 16 in-person interviews, dissects this concept into its component parts, such as the number of tabs that lead to stress and frustration. Included in this principle are such things as page clutter, advertising, and notices that crop up unexpectedly.
However, the study could not find a “sweet spot” for tab counts that mitigated the risk of being overwhelmed. Participants in the study simply indicated whether or not they experienced browser clutter as an issue. (Approximately 57% consider it to be a moderate problem, while over 25% consider it to be a somewhat or big issue. The remaining 18% are unconcerned. Instead, the tab use threshold, or “tab limitation” as it is called in the study, appears to be habitual, as indicated by the responses of study participants. While most people have between three and five windows open at once, there is a wide range from none at all to well over four hundred. (Hello, fellow person who like tabloids.) If you’re getting frustrated with the number of tabs you have open, you’ve probably hit your limit.
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The good news is that you don’t have to flit between tranquilly and visual overload if you have a lot of tabs open for research (a common reason for tab chaos among the research study participants). PCWorld’s editors aren’t researchers, but they do know a thing or two about browsers. If you’re using Chrome or Edge, you may take use of the browser’s built-in tab group feature, which allows you to group together tabs related to the same topic. You may temporarily hide the group of tabs while they aren’t being used by collapsing the group down. Collections is an additional feature of Edge that operates in between tab groups and bookmarks, keeping your bookmarked links a little more comprehensively saved while still being separated for quicker reference.
Website features that together cause brain freeze can also be fixed. Pages may be read more quickly in browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Firefox by switching to their reader modes. Ads may be blocked by installing a browser add-on that filters out promotional content. (You may back your favourite sites by adding them to the extension’s authorised list, making a donation, or signing up for the extension’s newsletter.) While survey participants at Aalto University complained that add-ons like SessionBuddy made the browser too complicated, these methods either already exist in your browser or need very little upkeep on your side. This is how I calmly and efficiently manage dozens or even hundreds of open tabs in my web browser.
Author: Alaina Yee, Senior Editor
Alaina Yee is PCWorld’s resident deal hunter; when she’s not writing about computers or computer parts, mini-PCs, or anything else, she’s out looking for the finest deals in technology. Once upon a time, her articles could be seen in publications like Official Xbox Magazine, PC Gamer, IGN, and Maximum PC. Follow @morphingball to see what she’s up to on Twitter.