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Study reveals that some coping strategies only make the problem worse:
Five billion people spend almost half of their waking hours online. According to a new study from Aalto University, browser clutter is a serious problem for one in four of them. The results will be presented on April 27 at CHI 2023, the leading conference for human-computer interaction research.
'We began exploring which challenges make users feel overwhelmed when browsing the internet. We also mapped the behaviors that cause the clutter and how users react to the stress,' says Associate Professor and Head of Department Janne Lindqvist.
Browsing habits play a major role in cluttering up a browser. Using interviews and an online survey, the researchers found that clutter-related stress goes up when users keep a large number of tabs and browser windows open, as well as because of interactive elements like ads and pop-up windows.
Multitasking adds to the problem, and it gets worse if users are hesitant to close tabs or are dealing with complex tasks. Clutter also accumulates when users have tabs open related to different online activities – for example, if they're managing a travel reservation in one tab and chatting with friends or colleagues in another.
[...] The study found that many users react to stress by trying to change either their behavior or their attitude towards the clutter. Only the former, problem-focused solutions, proved helpful in solving the issue. An example solution would be to consciously minimize clutter by deciding on an upper limit to the number of tabs you have open.
[...] The researchers pointed out that 'organizing' techniques, such as using tools to manage tabs, might just lead to more clutter. 'These approaches are similar to someone not actually cleaning but just rearranging things in the same space – the problem doesn't go away,' says Lindqvist.
[...] 'We use computers every day, and it's definitely not always ideal. Many things would actually be much better handled only on paper,' he says. 'I look at this from the point of view of how we can live a meaningful and good life despite computers.'
How many tabs do you have open right now?
Journal Reference:
Rongjun Ma, Henrik Lassila, Leysan Nurgalieva, Janne Lindqvist, When Browsing Gets Cluttered: Exploring and Modeling Interactions of Browsing Clutter, Browsing Habits, and Coping [open], CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023 https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580690
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 16, @06:03PM (2 children)
On top of using a mix of .desktop files and a few markdown files for bookmarks, I also use tabs (often ~100 or more) as bookmarks with tree style tab [mozilla.org] while manually unloading the stuff I don't use with tab unloader [mozilla.org].
Mind, I'm not "lost" through it all. It's just that there's no good alternative to https://github.com/Erisa/save-all-tab-urls [github.com] when handling bookmarks so I could care less how it's called internally so long as it works.
Every once in a while I test out stuff like https://github.com/TCB13/LoFloccus [github.com] but I always go back to text files and a shit ton of open tabs for one reason or the next.
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(Score: 1) by pTamok on Tuesday May 16, @09:06PM (1 child)
I close my tabs when performance gets a bit laggy* on my PC, about once every 3 weeks to a month, so the number open is between about 500 to 1000. I save them all into the Bookmarks database before closing**; and very useful it has been too to go back to a tab I remember from a few years ago, The search capability within Firefox's 'Manage Bookmarks' has been very useful.
Scrolling back and forth though the tabs helps me remember the context of the tasks I am working on.
*Currently a dual core Celeron N3350*** with 4 GBytes RAM and quite a large SSD with a big swap partition. When the load average is over 30, it's definitely time to clear out the tabs. My workflow is different to many people's. I ad-block and terminate ads with extreme prejudice. My cpu cycles are for me, not advertisers.
**I'm tempted to write a script to save each web-page to disk when its tab is closed, because it gets irritating when web-sites close down or get revised. The Internet Archive has been very useful.
***No fan. I like having a quiet office.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday May 16, @10:23PM
Yeah I think that's the "normal" use case. I think I had the same workflow back in the day but since I never used the search option and had syncing issues between different browsers and devices I ended up moving more and more toward external files in a syncthing dir...
Anyhow, again, floccus should work but I'm just too lazy to bother migrating everything. Maybe one of these days...
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