SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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 looorg on Tuesday May 16, @10:27PM
It probably wasn't as efficient to have multiple instances of the browser running. I seem to recall. but could be wrong, that you could usually run multiple instances of the browser so you sort of had tabs just in different applications or instances of the same application and you could copy-n-paste things over etc. Also running multiple different browsers was an option, at times also a necessity since some browser engines decided to render html differently etc. But it had similar issues, if one of the browsers you had open crashed or consumed all the memory it brought the whole thing crashing down. Just like now, except with tabs and we now have gigabytes of ram instead of megabytes. The broswer is in some regard a massive resource hog if I look at what apps use the most memory and cpu time.
What I'm sort of wondering here is if there is Browser (software) clutter or is the clutter part of the Web design? I don't think my browser have really become more cluttered over the years. The authors appear to disagree. If anything a lot of the annoying large buttons, bars, animations and stuff have gone away. Now everyone have embraced the minimalism UI. What is cluttered is usually the web design. It seems to go in waves and trends and some of them are really annoying -- there is a reason noscript to disable javascript and such was invented and it was not just for the ads. A lot of pages do appear to put style over substance and the UI is weird, they want to have things that move etc. I'm sure some UI specialists will tell us all about how it makes the pages come alive and it's there to engage with users yada-yada.
Sometimes I miss the Lynx-web. Here have some text. A lot of text.