One, Two, Three… Infinity. Here it doesn’t mean the title of George Gamow’s book but the number of tabs you–OK, we–open in our browser. Anybody who believes he is not into this is a Martian; worse, you’re a landlubber.  

Your browser is a portal to your own world,  and also, at times, the digitised version of the actual world.  Chrome, Edge, Safari, Opera, Firefox and many others take your portable self to wherever you want to ride. Since you cannot be all over the place even if it’s a world of your own making, you need to build it. And build you do–tab by tab, window by window. The repeated act of tabbing—excuse the habit of turning nouns into verbs, called, if we may be allowed, verbing—and you expect the act to crystallise into a world; your world.  

The browsers and their worlds, however, sometimes crash if you load them with a gazillion tabs. Crashes don’t bother you much though. You simply “restore” your world. At this stage, all you care for is opening another gazillion tabs. A diffuse self—who am I—develops a sense of itself. By tabbing, you’re unconsciously building the infrastructure of your own self and your own world, however ephemeral; however senseless. Like a tab for how many bristles your toothbrush has. Or what flavour would my coffee be? Or who would I be with? You’re now a world builder. If you’re not building a world, you’re at least building a hologram of your own self and that’s no mean feat either.

The moral: don’t be squeamish. You and your tabs talking with each other is not a big deal in the larger scheme of things.  Finally, it’s how you amuse yourself that defines who you are.

 Software developer Adam Stiles invented and released the first tabbed browser called SimulBrowse in 1998. It helped in that people did not need to open more and more windows, and instead, have all the tabs in there itself, and flip and toggle between them. By the aughts, it became the norm. In the burgeoning web, a tab is a convenience tool, a digital levee staving off overwhelming information, and also forgetting. Tabs allow us to curate ourselves and there is no cure for that.

We build mansions and mausoleums, as enduring testaments to self-glorification. Our craving for knowledge is endless, we want to know, know, and know some more. It even gives a sense of physical expansion. The more tabs we have in our browser, the more expansive we feel; the more tabs we load, the more expanded our mind, we feel. 

Our world doesn’t seem big enough for us. Moreover, our thoughts say bad things to us; sometimes silly things too. In many ways, it makes tabs in our browser indispensable, because, yes, now you can watch and listen to banal audios and videos, for which you should be thankful because it’s not your banality but that of some jock’s and we can comment on them, fling emojis at them, which makes others fling some other texts and images and emojis at us in an  escalation that goes nowhere, after which—assuming it ends, and in reality, it doesn’t—you feel you’re really working hard in engaging with the world and cosmos, in a in-your-shoes kind of way , and that is there some solace in the fact that all this is happening in your browser. 

The browser and your world can freeze anytime, because you, let’s face it, packed it with tabs of your polymorphously perverse leanings and inclinations, and thoughts reflections that are sane, bizarre, absurd but are endemic to you and to you alone. It feels like living in what the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman calls liquid modernity. It is a reference to the human condition where in a world of dizzying change, individuals are rootless and identity is fluid.

You even start feeling an affinity for some of these tabs that are teasingly physical, appropriately chemical, endearingly spiritual. Tab opening is a compulsion that has no balm or salve.

 

Slowly, ineluctably, surely nevertheless, each opened tab pricks you: it demands to be seen, to be read now and not later. Now you and your little tabs battle it out. You want a fair fight. The tab is tiny, nothing to fight against. You’re, after all, a democrat, an Indian democrat. You cannot countenance tyranny in whatever form. You don’t mind grovelling, though.  Tabs, in the meantime, seem to become sentient, like that Google employee who said AI had become sentient. Google, of course, put him to out to pasture for finding sentience in AI.

You start reading the tab you’re on, the others become jittery. They want you to pay them the courtesy of attention. Otherwise, they seem to say, why in the name of heaven have thou opened me? Then the next phase comes, you are simultaneously battling the tyranny of others and skimming the one you are reading. In your mind and in physiology too, you’re furious at the tabs pecking at your knuckles and heels. It may all look silly––and it is—but that’s how you feel by this time.

You think you’re the multitasker. You, after all, drive your motorcycle or car, while talking on the phone, listening to music and picking your nose and you are not yet in jail for having killed a hapless pedestrian. You think you can simultaneously do justice to all the tabs you lined up in your browser. In this continuing interaction between you and those tabs, the tabs and you fight. What to do with the one I am on and the rest?  Short answer, you don’t read. Long answer, you don’t read. That’s when you feel guilty. All those newsletters and websites and substacks come with a million links that you click. There is even research that says the more links you put in an article the more guilt-ridden you make the reader. 

Websites, newsletters and others come with a mission: to guide you through the noise, to filter the chaos for you down to an email. Each newsletter purports to have readers in mind, in caring for their time. In these tabs, they contain some heavy stuff. Insights on happenings in the world, history, climate, sports, finance, economics, science, literature. Can we handle that much seriousness? By now, you’re completely depleted, deflated and feel guilty. This is the point where you secretly wish your browser crashed. 

At this point, the tabs have become pesky, clamouring for your attention. They even demand it. Then you start mollycoddling them,  saying I am coming to you, I am coming to you, then the next one and on. You may sniff at this deliberate anthropomorphism and call it crazy. But tabs do talk. The thing is, while you're reading or watching the freshly-opened tab, something from the other tabs keeps coming to you; may be a picture, a piece of news, or whatever it is that made you open it in the first place. You even start feeling an affinity for some of these tabs that are teasingly physical, appropriately chemical, endearingly spiritual. Tab opening is a compulsion that has no balm or salve. 

Now you’re battling the distraction you have created and that somehow feels soothing and recreational. Speaking of which, a friend of yours finds enormous joy in constantly removing temp files.  As many heads, so many worlds, you might want to say. Your talking with tabs is just a small step in the evolution of communications after talking with humans and animals. The moral: don’t be squeamish. You and your tabs talking with each other is not a big deal in the larger scheme of things.  Finally, it’s how you amuse yourself that defines who you are.

Amusing and thrilling as it is, world building by tabs has another side too. You want to grow out of the tab you opened. How long would you open yourself to the benefits of nail polish? Chronically online people face these problems. Tribes of your own self–many avatars of yourself—populate the tabs and the world you built, and that’s always a good thing. You might find a version of yourself too embarrassing, and not good enough for the present version. Tabs can mess with your head in many ways.

You can wake up, have breakfast, spend the entire day on these apps and platforms, have dinner and go to sleep.

Shibaji Bose, an independent consultant on participatory and visual arts, writer, researcher and journalist, has co-curated photo voice exhibitions and directed films and documentaries. Most of his work concerns research on the subject he is working on. He reads reports that can run into hundreds of pages. He reads a number of journals, which makes him open tabs and more tabs. He has at least 20-25 tabs open at any time. “It’s like a quest, it goes on and on,” he says.

Browsing and flipping between tabs is both exhilarating and exhausting. Bose says when you get new knowledge or information for all this digging around, then there is personal and professional satisfaction. Sometimes it so happens that he is on marathon browsing, and he takes breaks in between, maybe after an hour or so for a few minutes, for a cup of tea or a smoke. Consciously, he allots, say, three hours for browsing but it does go on endlessly “as if in a rabbit hole. It goes on and on until my forehead and temples throb”. He logs off then, and only then, because you cannot read while holding your eyes in the cup of your palms like berries.

It’s not even necessary to have a million tabs open to feel you’re living. A single tab will do. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp–-all these are loops you wound yourself in. You cannot break free. Bose zeroes in on an important act of online life, something meta even: subsuming things. An app subsumes many tabs, so to say; whatever you do on different tabs is subsumed into a single app. And apps are kind of circular. A person who has Facebook usually has accounts on Instagram, Tiktok, Whatsapp and flits between them across platforms. 

Tabs are reading lists for our aspirational future self who we hope someday will get to them but secretly know will never have the time  

A tab is a memory holder and a memory expander. It’s what  Vannevar Bush—inventor and engineer, designer and builder of analogue computers—called Memex, a word that comes from blending memory and expansion. Bush (1890-1974) headed the military research and development programme during WWII. His thought experiment later paved the way for revolutionary developments. 

Bush, in his 1945 essay “As We May Think,” describes “a memex as an electromechanical device enabling individuals to develop and read a large self-contained research library, create and follow associative trails of links and personal annotations, and recall these trails at any time to share them with other researchers. This device would closely mimic the associative processes of the human mind, but it would be gifted with permanent recollection.”

His ideas paved the way for the creation of hypertext and the World Wide Web. 

*** 

The idea of tabs has a lot to do with ideas about distributed cognition, where our thinking is embedded in and takes advantage of our environment, according to Aniket Kittur.

The world was smaller when the Internet was smaller. Kittur was a designer on early web apps when the Internet was a billion times smaller than it is today. He realised that information on the Internet was growing exponentially but was also fragmenting and overwhelming. That made him delve into how we interact with computers, and he felt the need for a scalable counterbalancing force to pull the Web together and make sense of it. 

Now a professor at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, Kittur has been working on versions of this force combining people and AI in different forms. He and his team have recently been focusing on tabs because much of our work and lives are now in our browsers, and they believe there is a lot of room for improvement and the potential to create a scalable force for stitching together all our digital information.

There are several jobs that tabs do for us, Kittur says. The most common are that they allow us to quickly re-access pages that would be otherwise hard to re-find––that Google drive link would take you 30 minutes to find again.  Tabs, Kittur says, serve as reminders of to-dos we need to come back to at some point; they are reading lists for our aspirational future self who we hope someday will get to them but secretly know will never have the time; and they are collections of useful resources for our interests and hobbies.  

The problem, he says, is that we are constantly encountering new information related to one of the above functions of tabs . For example,  a new product we’re researching, a new trip we’re planning, another article we want to read, and leave them open as a kind of external working memory.

Researchers note that, in practice, they have seen very few people opening more than 100 tabs. There is, of course, no hard limit for the number tabs you might want to open. All this hogs computer memory, and browsers are gluttonous memory eaters. Google Chrome uses 1000MB or 1GB of memory with 10 tabs; Firefox 960MB with 10 tabs. The memory use of browsers and tabs, among tech junkies, is an interesting back-forth, but, for you—OK, us—who want tabs open for booking cinema tickets and biryani, that’s not much of an issue. 

Internet browsers, and by extension tabs, are big business. The first major Internet corporate war was over browsers, between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft’s erstwhile Internet Explorer. Now there is only one winner, Google’s Chrome, launched in September 2008. Chrome has nearly 65 per cent of the market, Apple’s Safari browser about 19 per cent. Firefox, Edge, and others make the rest. 

Last year in an antitrust litigation in the United States, it was revealed—despite Google’s objections—that being the default search engine on browsers brings Alphabet about $26 billion in revenues. Google pays Mozilla, for example, more than $400 million a year to be the default search engine on its Firefox browser. Being the default search engine aids in collecting user data which helps its real business—ads. Google makes about 80 percent of its revenues from ads that accompany search engine results. The more tabs you open, the richer Google gets. 

Kittur reminds us of the realities of what our online lives look like and the cognitive tasks that we spend so much time on: foraging, cross-referencing, putting away and reloading information about all the different projects we’re switching between all day every day. 

What Kittur and his team have found through several studies is that tabs are used by people for a lot of purposes—for example, reminders of to-dos, aspirational reading lists, quick bookmarks for frequently accessed pages, etc.—but don’t serve any of them particularly well.

In a psychological sense too, tabs play a role. “Our tabs represent opportunities for a better life, and closing them feels like giving up on those opportunities. Our tabs extend our working memory and in some sense can be thought of as our lives in the browser,” says Kittur. 

However, sticking too many tabs causes “tab overload.” 

“As the number of tabs increases, they cause tab overload and get worse at serving all of their purposes, but existing browsers don’t address the root causes of this overload which means that people still feel the need to keep all those tabs open,” Kittur says.

Kittur’s team's work has been built on what has gone on before. Earlier research, published in Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Digital Library, showed that both opening and closing tabs leaves people conflicted. New work  from the ACM-DL, says clutter in our browsers overwhelms us. The research, to put it in our terms, says, we muck up our browsers in many ways. Multitasking is one, they say; not wanting to close a tab even after work is done is another; getting snagged on another interesting thing and link, is yet another.

Kittur believes that there is a real opportunity to rethink tabs in the browser to solve for the root causes of why we use them in the first place.

“How can we use technology to intelligently get us what we need next while trusting it to not lose what we need to switch away from? Unfortunately we have seen many of the same approaches taken over and over again that only superficially address tab overload,” says Kittur

In the ongoing interaction between people and computers, the way forward, according to Kittur, is “having an AI copilot that acts as a true partner and extension of your brain. 

For example, he explains, allowing people to combine tabs into tab groups is a step forward, but then it just leads to tab group overload in the end. Other approaches try to put away your tabs but trigger the feeling of the black hole of lost opportunities and fail to support their reminding and to-do functions. 

Finally, there are some tab managers that try to help users switch between different task contexts but run into problems with keeping all those contexts clean and organized over time.

So, is there a solution to these problems? 

Skeema is Kittur’s team’s attempt to rethink the browser based on supporting the core functions that tabs serve in a more scalable and personalised way. The current version of Skeema lets you structure your tabs into different contexts for all the different aspects of your life, and prioritise and annotate them. 

“What I’m excited about is the new version of Skeema that’s coming soon which will use AI to help you seamlessly switch between all the different contexts in your life with much less work on your part.  The nice thing about Skeema is that you don’t have to switch browsers—it’s an extension that aims to fit into your normal browsing and supercharge it,” Kittur says.

In the ongoing interaction between people and computers, the way forward, according to Kittur, is “having an AI copilot that acts as a true partner and extension of your brain. It will look at the same things you do, try to learn what you like and are trying to do, and help you accomplish those things by collecting, organising, and synthesising information on your behalf and with your input and feedback”.

In this future, tabs will probably look a lot different: they’ll be rich workspaces that are intelligent, organising, and will actively help us synthesise all the information inside of them.

“We’re currently trying to realise this future in our lab at Carnegie Mellon, and would love to hear from others that would be interested in that future as well.”

Till then tabs will rule with tyranny. 

You can join the waitlist for for the new AI-powered version of Skeema here: