Two women shown from the back looking at a laptop opened to a web browser

Recently, I posted on Mastodon, “I do not understand the 100+ tabs open at the time people. Not saying you’re wrong, I just don’t get it. Did you get attacked by a bookmarks.html file as a young child? Is yours the laptop with a petabyte of RAM? What gives?” Surprisingly, I got a lot of feedback from had been no more than a wisecrack. I’m interested in the way people do everything on their computers, from what apps they use, to, yes, how many tabs they work with. Please reach out and describe your browser setup if you’re up to it.

At work, I normally have two or three windows open in Edge, my browser of choice (because it really doesn’t suck). At home, I only run two windows.

Work Setup

Edge has both profiles and workspaces. Profiles have separate settings, bookmarks and extensions. Workspaces have separate bookmarks bars and tabs. At work, I sign into a separate profile to access my university Microsoft 365 account. Group policies don’t allow the installation of any extensions, so it’s pretty bare bones. I normally have the following tabs open:

  • Company directory
  • Outlook email
  • Microsoft Admin Center (plus a tab each for Entra, Defender, Intune)
  • Asset management app
  • CBT Nuggets (for training)
  • Student Database
  • Six different Excel spreadsheets from Office 365 online

Total work tabs = 15

Personal Setup

At work, I also run a window logged in to my personal profile with at least one of my personal workspaces. I do this to have access to extensions (like my password manager) and bookmarks. I have two personal workspaces: one for social media and blogging and another general workspace.

My social and blogging workspace has tabs open for:

Total social and blogging tags = 13

My general browsing workspace has tabs for:

  • Gmail (personal email)
  • Yahoo mail (used only for newsletters)
  • Google Drive
  • Raindrop.io bookmarks
  • Gemini (google.com)
  • Reddit - Dive into anything
  • Plus whatever I happen to be interested in at any given moment, usually about a half-dozen tabs

Total general browsing tabs = 12

Total Tabs = 40

Other Considerations

I use the great Mac app, Velja, to let me pick what browser or app opens links. I have five browsers installed, Edge, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Orion and Arc. I prefer to open YouTube links in Freetube. And though I usually use the default web interface for Mastodon, I also use Ivory for its notification center actions. Inoreader is my RSS provider and I use an Edge PWA to access my feed.