Every study of browsing behaviour comes back with the same finding: the average person has more tabs open than they can name. The record I've personally seen was three hundred and forty-two, on a laptop that had not been rebooted in four months, belonging to a friend who insisted that she used every single one.

The tab is one of the few interface elements the modern web has left more or less untouched since it was introduced. It survived the move from desktop to mobile, roughly. It survived the arrival of extensions, session managers, workspaces. It survived because it makes an offer that people cannot resist: the promise that you will come back to this later, and that the machine will hold your place for you.

The machine, of course, does not hold your place for you. It holds a URL. If the underlying page has changed — and on the modern web it always has — you will return not to the thing you were reading, but to whatever the site has decided to show you now. The tab is not a bookmark. The tab is a receipt for an intention.

This is why tab hoarding feels different from other kinds of hoarding. A pile of physical magazines is at least stable; the article you meant to read is still the article, in the same words, whenever you get to it. A pile of tabs is a pile of doors, and the rooms behind them are being redecorated while you sleep. Some of them have been demolished. You just haven't checked.

There is a second, quieter cost that nobody itemises: attention residue. Each open tab is a small unfinished thought, and the mind does not fully release an unfinished thought. Thirty tabs is not thirty bytes of overhead; it is thirty faint hums, each one a task you have promised yourself you will return to, none of them quite quiet enough to ignore.

The economics of a tab are three things: the memory to keep it warm, the cognitive weight of the visual noise, and the small ongoing debt to the future self who will one day have to decide, tab by tab, whether to keep or to close. The first cost is paid by the machine. The other two are paid by you, silently, forever, until you declare tab bankruptcy and start over.

The industry's answer has been tab groups, workspaces, session managers, vertical sidebars that let you keep four hundred tabs in tidy folders instead of a cramped strip. But this treats a discipline problem as a storage problem. Giving a hoarder a bigger house does not cure the hoarding; it just raises the ceiling on how much can accumulate before the reckoning.

What I actually want is a tab that knows it is a promise and behaves like one. A tab that, after a week untouched, gently asks whether I still mean to keep it. A tab that can tell me the page behind it has changed since I opened it, so I know whether I am returning to a document or to a stranger wearing its clothes. None of this is hard. It just isn't anyone's KPI.

There is no elegant fix for this. The good software habit — reviewed and defended by people I respect — is to close everything on Fridays. The bad habit, my habit, is to trust that the tab I opened at 2am will still mean something to me in the morning. It rarely does. But the small hope of the tab bar is why I keep opening more of them.