Finally, 30% of our participants agreed that they “have a tab hoarding problem,’’ echoing a common sentiment found more generally in digital file preservation. For example, we found that having too many tabs opened can harm productivity with 28% of participants (N=64) agreeing that they often struggle with finding tabs they needed in their browser, and 25% of the participants reported that they had experienced browsers or computers crashing from having too many browser tabs. These results suggest that there are alternative factors to a simplistic laziness explanation causing users to keep tabs open even though they were no longer useful and potentially causing adverse effects. At the same time, only 19% agreed that laziness contributed to not closing them in the first place, and more than half (55%) of the participants agreed that they feel like they can't let go of their tabs. Based on self-reporting, 59% of our participants agreed that if they went through their browser tabs at the time when the survey took place, they would find some that should be closed. Building on this, we conducted a preliminary survey to collect more empirical evidence about tab clutter (N=64, Age: 19-67 M=33.7 SD=10.6 57% male 77% from the US). Most recently, empirical evidence from a survey conducted in 2019 showed that around half (50.7%, N=75) of their participants considered tab clutter a problem. This includes difficulty in re-finding specific tabs, uncertainty in whether to keep open or to close tabs, being constantly distracted, harming productivity, causing feelings of stress and clutter, and, in extreme cases, causing users’ browsers or computers to slow or crash. In summary, there appears to be a disconnect between the increasing scope and complexity of users’ online activities, and the design of tabbed browsing that we aim to explore in this paper.Īs a result of this disconnect, recent anecdotal and empirical evidence suggests that tabbed browser interfaces now engender significant challenges, popularly referred to as “tab overload’’. Indeed, the fixation on tabs as a metaphor is so strong that the most popular changes to using tabs involve relatively small design adjustments, such as making them a vertical instead of horizontal list, building tabs of tabs, or saving sets of tabs as archived sessions. Tabs continue to be instantiated as simple temporally-ordered lists of independent pages with limited contextual cues and opportunities for manipulation. However, while the Web has gone through dramatic changes in size, complexity, and usage, tabbed browsing interfaces remain largely the same. People open browser tabs to check email inboxes, control music and video players, stash articles to read later, chat with friends, organize reviews and articles to plan trips, compare products, and research to write articles. As the Web becomes all-encompassing with complex applications and rich information, browser tabs have also become the portals for how people access information and make sense of the world today. Tabs have become an integral part of how people browse and navigate the Web since they were introduced in the early 2000s, and they are now a ubiquitous feature in all major web browsers. Finally, we developed design implications for future browser interfaces that can better support managing these pressures. We then surveyed 103 participants to estimate the frequencies of these pressures at scale. We uncovered competing pressures pushing for keeping tabs open (ranging from interaction to emotional costs) versus pushing for closing them (such as limited attention and resources). We interviewed ten information workers asking about their tab management strategies and walk through each open tab on their work computers four times over two weeks. This paper investigates how tabs today are overloaded with a diverse set of functionalities and issues users face when managing them. In contrast, the internet has gone through dramatic changes, with users increasingly moving from navigating to websites to exploring information across many sources to support online sensemaking. Tabs have become integral to browsing the Web yet have changed little since their introduction nearly 20 years ago.
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