If you connected to the Internet in the 90s, or early 2000s, you will know well what it was to navigate slow and, also, complicated. At a time when Internet Explorer had the largest market share, it was necessary to open a new browser window each time we wanted to open a page. This meant that, instead of having a window with tabs , as now, we had 10, 20 or more windows open. With the consumption of RAM and CPU that that implies. Fortunately, things have changed, although there are times when, for convenience, we make the same mistakes of the past.
Of course, browser tabs are nothing new. The first tab-based interface for browsing was first seen in 1997, although it wasn’t until 2000, with Opera, and 2001, with Firefox, that they really started to gain popularity. From then on, all browsers began to bring these sub-windows, radically changing the way you navigate.
Browser tabs have many advantages. For example, they allow us to open visiting several websites at the same time, or to open new pages, in tabs, to visit them later. A tab is an object that is much simpler and lighter to create than a new browser instance, and it can just as easily be closed to free up resources.
Unfortunately, bad habits make it easy for us to find dozens of websites open in tabs. And this is bad.
Problems opening many tabs at the same time
Of course, the main problem we find when browsing with tabs is that we settle and open a large number of them without realizing how much RAM we are using. Although these consume less memory than a new instance of the browser, by accumulating many open at the same time we are using even more RAM than we imagine. And this is one of the reasons why our PC can go very slow, and even crash.
In addition, if we open many tabs, they will accumulate at the top (or vertically, with scroll, if we use a browser with this function) to the point that, probably, we will not be able to distinguish some websites from others, losing a lot time and productivity .
And we can’t forget how expensive an eyelash confusion can be . If we make a mistake when sending a form, email or making a purchase due to having many tabs open , we may have problems, depending on the severity of the information we filter and how it affects us.
Possible solutions to these problems
Currently, several browsers are experimenting with new ways to revolutionize, and improve, tabbed browsing. For example, Chrome is working on a function called “groups of tabs” that will allow us to group related tabs to have them more organized in “groups”. These groups can be collapsed and hidden, and they can also be suspended to free up resources when they are not used, recovering them completely when we need them again.
Edge , for its part, is experimenting with a concept of vertical tabs (along with groups) to move them, once and for all, from the top. And Vivaldi is the one with the riskiest bet, with an engine that allows us to open tabs within other tabs as if they were “sub-tabs”.
Of course, tabbed browsing is here to stay. Now, will we manage not to repeat the problems of the past?