Tabs have been in existence since 2001, but there hasn’t been a great deal of research on their effects.
A team of scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, pursuing the first in-depth research on tabs in a decade has found that many users simply feel exhausted by the page-saving tools.
Joseph Chee Chang, a postdoctoral fellow says that:
- Does This Mean We Stopped Being Animal and Started Being Human Due to ‘Copy Paste’ Errors?
- The One Lifestyle Choice That Could Reduce Your Heart Disease Risk By More Than 22%
- Aging: This Is What Happens Inside Your Body Right After Exercise
- Immune-Boosting Drink that Mimics Fasting to Reduce Fat – Scientists ‘Were Surprised’ By New Findings
- Gun Violence in America: What They Don’t Talk About at the Debate
Chang and his team questioned internet users to see why people kept so many tabs open. They discovered that users often felt invested in the tabs they had open in their browser.
This made it hard for people to close tabs, even when they became ashamed or overwhelmed by them.
Users also resisted moving tabs out of a fear they would forget about them.
Roughly a quarter of people in one area of the study had kept so many tabs open their computers or browsers had crashed.
Black Hole effect
Aniket Kittur, a professor and lead research team, says:
According to them, tabs are too simplistic to capture the complex ways we think, perform tasks and interact with information online.
Tabs require a user to make decisions based on information from a number of sources, for example when choosing between a number of different products.
The researchers, who presented their findings at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, say they’ve designed a system to improve on traditional tabs.
Their Google Chrome browser extension Skeema groups tabs into tasks, and uses machine learning to suggest better groupings.
They said users who tested their tool found it decreased the number of tabs they used and helped them stay more focused online.
- Does This Mean We Stopped Being Animal and Started Being Human Due to ‘Copy Paste’ Errors?
- The One Lifestyle Choice That Could Reduce Your Heart Disease Risk By More Than 22%
- Aging: This Is What Happens Inside Your Body Right After Exercise
- Immune-Boosting Drink that Mimics Fasting to Reduce Fat – Scientists ‘Were Surprised’ By New Findings
- Gun Violence in America: What They Don’t Talk About at the Debate
Many have since started using it in their daily lives.
According to Chang: