How many tabs do you have open? This question often surfaces on social media. Just as we might boast about our busy schedules, we share screenshots of crowded Chrome tabs with a mix of pride and maybe a bit of embarrassment. 155 tabs? That's nothing… I have 324 open in Chrome right now!
However, this style of online browsing has a hidden downside, negatively impacting our brain health and efficiency, unless properly managed. In this post, we will look at the effects of having too many tabs open and its link to multi-tasking, which negatively affects our productivity and stress levels. We’ll also share how to fix the problem.
What Is the Link Between ‘Too Many Tabs’ and Multi-tasking?
Psychology Today recently published an article which likened our modern multi-tasking brains to a web browser, with too many open tabs. However, it's not as straightforward as seeing computers and brains as two separate entities. The reality is that our daily use of computers is actually directly impacting our brains.
In our fast-paced digital age with instant intercontinental communication, speed is essential, and multitasking has become the norm. Being able to open numerous tabs in our browsers, allows us to work faster while encouraging us to constantly switch between pages and sites. It's typical to juggle dozens, or even hundreds, of tabs, each representing a different task or piece of information.
A person may initially intend to focus on one task online, but it's easy to become sidetracked or lost across various open tabs.
How Does ‘Too Many Tabs’ Impact Us?
Researchers have found that multitasking can negatively affect short-term working memory and potentially long-term memory as well. What’s more, too much multi-tasking can also create problems with performance, with multi-taskers more prone to mistakes than single-taskers.
Accumulating open tabs in your browser can also increase the mental burden of context-switching, as you sift through tabs to find the sites you need. Research indicates that regaining focus after context-switching takes an average of 9.5 minutes. Consider the number of times you might switch between tabs or use your browser's back button during a day. This suggests that our current internet browsers could be causing substantial productivity loss over time.
In the same study, a concerning 45% of individuals reported being less productive and 43% felt more fatigued due to daily context-switching at work.
Why Do We Need A Solution to ‘Too Many Tabs’?
With growing research into the impact that context-switching and multi-tasking have on our brains, it’s becoming clear that we desperately need to solve the issue of ‘too many tabs’. Not only does the way we browse lead to mental stress, it also causes a huge loss of productivity over time.
Modern web browsers are slowly catching onto the issue by implementing Tab Groups, Tree Style Tabs and offering external extensions but these don’t fix the underlying issue. They still leave internet users confused by poor navigation and overwhelmed by cluttered, disorganised Tabs.
How To Fix ‘Too Many Tabs’
So here’s how we’re fixing the ‘too many tabs’ issue at Horse Browser. Rather than trying to re-design Tabs, we’ve removed them completely, replacing them with our own unique navigation method, named Trails.
Horse Browser captures a Trail of pages as you browse, merging Tabs, History and Bookmarks into one easy-to-read vertical sidebar. Every time you click on a link, a new page is opened on the Trail. All the pages you need are readily accessible and never get in your way.
No more cluttered Tabs or trying to remember random pieces of information as you leave a page behind. You can open as many pages as you want, but the overwhelm is gone. And you can delete, move, rename and customise every page. Trails were designed to be intuitive, taking the hassle out of tab management and leaving you feeling calm, collected, and totally zen as you navigate the web.
In Conclusion
Research has shown that context-switching and multi-tasking negatively impact both our stress and productivity levels. The use of Tabs in web browsers encourage both these practices and so it is imperative that we fix the issue. While modern browsers have made some attempts to find a solution, the problem remains with disorganised and cluttered Tabs.
Here at Horse Browser we’re determined to make the question - ‘How many tabs do you have open?’ - a thing of the past. We have removed Tabs completely to replace them with a transformative navigation system, named Trails.
You can goodbye to tab overload and hello to a new era of stress-free browsing with Horse Browser. We recommend you experience the difference for yourself. To find out more, visit here.
