Too Many Tabs

Oh, the good ‘ole days… remember when you could only view one window at a time? Tabbed browsing has been around for a long time but probably gained wide adoption about 20 years ago. Of course, tabbed browsing would have been even better five years earlier than that when there was only dial up Internet and it took forever for a page to load.

However, I long for being able to focus on one task without hopping through 20 tabs. It’s so easy to get into this almost reflexive trance of checking a site for an update and another and just moving in a cycle until something new pops up within one of the tabs. In our quest to “maximize time”, we end up jumping to a new tab the moment there’s a millisecond delay in something loading. It’s actually boredom we’re running away from.

Maybe there’s a way to engage our boredom automatically without the focus killing tab jumping? Maybe it would involve playing a video clip or animation whenever an website takes more than half a second to load? Maybe it’d be random and unexpected, entertaining, and attention grabbing for a few seconds. It’d be enough to keep us from going to another tab so we can continue our work. It’s like fighting setting a control burn to prevent losing more focus and time.