Products · Pattern or everyday thing
Browser tabs
Raised as a usability problem by 54 people on Hacker News over 19 years (2008–2026), in 47 threads.
No issue was raised by at least 3 people in 3 threads this year.
- 1Too many open tabs are hard to manageUnreviewed
Every issue, all time, most people first
Too many open tabs are hard to manageUnreviewed
20082026- Finding an already open tab is harder than opening a new duplicate one2026-01-07
- Too many open tabs with no way to see how they relate to the problem being solved2025-12-14
- Browser tabs aren't organized, so tab overhead grows and idle auto-close closes the wrong tab2025-07-26
Favicons are too small to find tabs when 35+ are openUnreviewed
20082026- Tabs shrink to favicon size and become unusable with many open2021-04-12
- Hard to find tabs without favicons displayed2021-01-25
- With many tabs open, only tiny favicons or close buttons are visible2017-12-07
Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.
The newest 50 complaints
- Finding an already open tab is harder than opening a new duplicate one2026-01-07
- Too many open tabs with no way to see how they relate to the problem being solved2025-12-14
- Browser tabs aren't organized, so tab overhead grows and idle auto-close closes the wrong tab2025-07-26
- Tabs quickly destroy productivity, forcing the user to aggressively close them2025-07-08
- With hundreds of tabs open, people struggle to find the right one2025-03-06
- Finding a specific tab is hit or miss and time consuming without remembering its title2025-03-01
- Tree-style tab implementations are hard to use and feel cluttered2025-02-09
- Too many open tabs become hard to navigate, prompting extra tab managers2024-10-22
- Users struggle to organize and find information among many open browser tabs2024-06-07
- Blur slider has no label, so users don't know what it does2024-04-19
- Dynamically opened tabs clutter the tab bar and are hard to navigate2023-06-23
- Loses track of many open tabs and repeats or duplicates them2022-11-17
- With many tabs open, finding a specific one is difficult and inconvenient2022-10-25
- Can't find old tabs once there are hundreds, so duplicates get opened2022-08-02
- Juggling many web app tabs is more cumbersome than managing native apps2022-07-03
- Finding the right tab among hundreds of open tabs is slow2022-04-30
- Gets lost in a maze of tabs and can't work through them all2022-02-15
- Selects the wrong tab when ready to comment after opening many2021-12-30
- Minimized tab windows get lost quickly, adding to tab clutter2021-07-02
- Piles of open windows make the desktop cluttered and hard to keep tidy2021-06-04
- Switching between two arbitrary tabs requires mouse and tracking which tab is which2021-05-15
- Too many open tabs become unmanageable, and going back to them is too much friction2021-05-10
- People with hundreds of tabs spend ages finding the right one2021-05-09
- Colleagues with too many tabs can't tell which is which and waste time finding the right one2021-05-09
- Too many open tabs are hard to manage, causing frustration and information overload2021-05-09
- Tabs shrink to favicon size and become unusable with many open2021-04-12
- Hard to find tabs without favicons displayed2021-01-25
- Can't find a page read earlier without remembering which site it was on2020-09-19
- Browsers lack good ways to organize, restore and revisit many open tabs2020-09-19
- Impossible to navigate tabs once there are a few dozen open2020-09-19
- Tabs keep every page open, using memory and making noise; no clear way to manage session state2020-09-18
- Creating a new window is faster than finding and reusing existing tabs2020-05-17
- Existing tab interfaces are not ergonomic enough for users who keep hundreds of tabs open2020-05-14
- Too many tabs makes it hard to find and open the wanted site2020-02-11
- Hard to find the audio-playing tab among 100+ open tabs2020-01-20
- Switching between tabs with Ctrl+PageDown is harder than clicking links2019-10-16
- Too many tabs across the top of the page are hard to use and read2019-06-14
- Tabs, bookmarks and history require manual micromanagement to find previously visited places2017-12-07
- With many tabs open, only tiny favicons or close buttons are visible2017-12-07
- Tabs don't show how the user got to a page, so back-navigation and history are hard to track2017-07-25
- People spend long periods hunting through many open tabs to find the right one2017-07-21
- Hundreds of tabs don't sync across browsers and marking items done is awkward2017-02-25
- Horizontal tabs become unusable with 20 or 30 tabs open2017-01-30
- Horizontal tabs become unusable once many tabs are open2017-01-28
- Closing a window permanently loses its tabs, and it's easy to lose track of which window holds them2015-07-10
- Hard to identify which of many open tabs is playing sound2014-01-15
- Can be slow on very large directories when finding files2013-08-29
- Finding a specific tab means scanning through many tabs, hurting readability2013-08-02
- With 35+ tabs open, favicons are too small to find needed tabs2013-05-22
- Too many open tabs pile up and are hard to manage or clear2011-09-10