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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 hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @12:16AM (7 children)
I just have a personal website on my home computer in my living room.
There's a directory on the network-connected computer behind my easy chair that's full of html.
That is my website.
When one of my browser tabs stays around more than a day or so, and I think it may be worth keeping,
I bookmark it. And I don't use the browser to do that.
I copy the link and a description into a markdown file. Every now and then I translate it to html and put the result into my website. It's just another file on my hard drive, after all.
And now and then I edit the bookmarks file, rearrange things, add section headers, and the like.
Simple, the way the web used to be.
Website: http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik [pooq.com]
bookmarks: http://topoi.pooq.com/hendrik/bookmarks.html [pooq.com]
Emjoy.
(Oh, of course there are bookmarks that shouldn't be public. I put them in a dfferent markdown file that doesn't get posted to the website.)
(Score: 2) by Common Joe on Wednesday May 17, @03:11AM (2 children)
Your list of "bookmark" links is very long. I thought I was the only one to do this. For me, however, instead of one big file, my list is comprised of a bunch of html files nested into folders, broken down by various topics. I navigate it by keyboard with custom a written JavaScript menu. I hate JavaScript, but recently I decided that native html is now unusable via keyboard in modern GUIs. I'm happy enough with my monstrosity.
It's just nice to know that I'm not the only one who does this.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @12:32PM (1 child)
Embrace JavaScript and CSS like I did and you are able to implement cool features like your own mini search engine, "fixed" and "sticky" positioned UI elements, open random links in a category, and dynamic links like (year % 2 ? year + 1 : year) + " United States elections". You can include encrypted links and text.
I put it all in one file to make it more portable. It's almost 9000 links with other features, and just over 1 megabyte.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @05:32PM
I navigate in the browser by using control-f and then typing in a word to search for. In emacs, when I edit the source file, I use control-s.
I've thought about using a more complex hierarchy of web pages, but there are too many links that would fit on multiple pages, and it would be hard to control-f find them.
-- hendrik
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @11:11AM (2 children)
We have very different colour vision. The white on black is too bold and for me the blue is almost unreadable. (my cheap screen I'm on at athe moment probably isn't helping)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday May 17, @05:28PM (1 child)
I know. I plan to change the blue to another colour, but haven't got around to it yet.
The green links o stand out well, which is useful for frequently used bookmarks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 17, @07:50PM
I use #F99 for links, #F55 for :visited links, a few other colors for emphasizing certain parts like parentheticals (you can put a <span> inside an <a> and give it a class), and a mix of green and white text.
(Score: 2) by ShovelOperator1 on Wednesday May 17, @07:20PM
Congratulations that You could get the site running from home. I also have a similar set-up - when I found that my workflow does not require custom CMS, and the site is static, generated once with a bunch of Perl scripts, I decided to try it - did a highly optimized RPi setup.
The good thing is that even if I have a 128kB/s (kByte, not kbit) upload connection, I can still allocate about half of it to the upload and... the site made of HTML, simple CSS and, don't know, a single, 50-100kB photo per average page will happily load well even when a few users visit it. And I don't expect more than two search engine bots, maybe some spam mail seeker and two meatware users at once.
Then problems came - mostly with the visibility of the server. It is behind a CG-NAT. Sorry, behind at least 3 NATs. ISP has one, his provider another one, and while here their explanations end, I highly suspect that the datacenter they take the connection from has another one. It means that to make the site connectable to the domain, I may have to punch a hole thru 3 walls, paying 3 people significant amount of money. IPv6? We don't do that here!
And this is not an arsehole of the third world, this is the EU country. Yes, 128kB/s upload, Behind 3 CG-NATs, with extra paid IP (about 6 times the link itself), no knowledge that we have solved this problem for at least decade. And "voting with wallet" ends when I tell my address as there's "no infrastructure" there.
Finally, I settled with cramming the Tor with a hidden service running on this poor RPi. The good thing is that it is out there. The bad thing - the accessibility over clearnet still sucks, this is not an underground casino, this is a hobby website.
I decided to run the clearnet version too for some time. The thing is that I don't need much. This RPi acts as a network drive in my LAN too. There's a 16GB card and it is sufficient - usually ~4GB is free all time. A whole website, counting as really whole thing, weights less than 1GB including sources of my software (which I could finally tar.gz instead of zipping). What I found is that in my country to make a website, you have to be at least a web shopping platform developer, and have a lot of money needing hundreds of GBs for data - there are almost no small providers, and these who still are there are highly unreliable.
What I call "highly unreliable" means, in normal country "cheating so much that you could go to the court with them".