It has happened to everyone. You’re surfing the web, clicking links, opening new tabs or new windows, and suddenly you realize you have too many browser sessions going. Have you ever wondered how many internet browser sessions can be open at one time? It can be hard to keep track of all the browser sessions you have open and the amount of memory used. The computing resources, especially memory, required by all these sessions can be the answer when asking what slows down my internet?
Keep reading to find out about what limits individual browsers may put on open tabs and what might happen when you have too many internet browser sessions running at one time.
Individual Browser Limits
They are called “tab junkies,” those who supposedly open a ton of tabs in their web browsers without regard for internet speed or decorum. Heck, you might be a tab junkie or love someone who is! The good news is that new versions of your favorite browsers have largely done away with tab limits.
Chrome
Google Chrome does not have any limits on open tabs. Most users seem to keep an average of 10-20 tabs open at a time, with little reported slowdowns of speed and responsiveness. A user-generated code tested how many tabs could be open at once and indicated that a user could have as many as 9,000 tabs running simultaneously. Needless to say, that is far from recommended. If you want to keep control over your unruly open tabs, some great Chrome extensions can help you manage your tab usage.
Safari
Apple previously capped open tabs at 30. However, in recent years they got rid of this practice. With the iOS 10 release in 2016, numerous sources reported that Apple completely lifted the cap, allowing unlimited tabs. With the new iOS 14 update, users have confirmed that the current limit for open tabs is 500.
Microsoft Edge
There are no reported caps on open tabs in Microsoft Edge. However, Microsoft’s support team recommends you have 50 or fewer open tabs to prevent straining your system and causing any unwanted behavior.
What Happens When Too Many Tabs Are Open?
This question is not an easy one to answer. No one thing happens when you have too many tabs open. Instead, it’s more like a game of whack-a-mole. What possibilities are there, and how do you fix them?
First, you could experience significant slowdowns. This is more likely if you’re loading video, gaming, or other graphics-heavy web pages. To learn more about graphics and how they affect web speed, you can read more at this website. Second, your browser could freeze up or simply close in the middle of browsing. All of this happens because browsers are very resource-heavy. Each web page can use up to 2 GB of RAM, and having continuously-running tabs in the background is a real threat to your system’s available resources.
As far as fixing system problems from excessive tab use, the easiest thing to do is to close some tabs! We realize that this won’t be possible for everyone. Some of you require a lot of open tabs for research and work. You could try using one of the many tab managers and organizers out there. Most allow you to change the orientation of tabs within your browser, and certain extensions allow you to effectively snooze tabs that you want to keep open but aren’t actively using.
Conclusion
Being a tab junkie isn’t a bad thing. However, if you want to open many tabs in your browser, you need to be aware of the possible consequences. Too many browser tabs can cause dramatic slowdowns to your system. Close some tabs, or use an organizer or browser extension to maintain speed and your open tabs.
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