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The HCII s Joseph Chee Chang and Aniket Kittur are part of a team that investigated the effectiveness of tabs in web browsers. They ll present their findings next week at CHI2021.
If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually.
Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand.
We re Getting Buried in Browser Tabs And Scientists Want to Fix It
9 MAY 2021
If you re struggling to handle the long line of tabs open in your browser right now, you re not alone.
A small new study has found many people who browse the internet experience tab overload, saving articles to read later, leaving tasks as reminders, or burrowing down an internet hole until the stack of open web pages becomes impossible to navigate.
The clutter can make people feel stressed, distracted, shamed, and overwhelmed. Despite this, we often avoid clearing up the mess.
In surveys and interviews with 103 participants, researchers found more than half the group felt like they could not close any of their tabs. If they did, participants worried they might lose important information, which took time and effort to gather in the first place.
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If you are reading this, chances are you have several other tabs open in your browser that you mean to get to eventually.
Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand.
A research team at Carnegie Mellon University recently completed the first in-depth study of browser tabs in more than a decade. They found that many people struggle with tab overload, an underlying reason being that while tabs serve a variety of functions, they often do so poorly.