building stackboard: a free chrome new tab that turns your bookmarks into a board
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Joined February 2023
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over half the people in a carnegie mellon study felt they couldn't close a single one of their tabs
only 19% blamed laziness. the real reason was a fear the researchers kept hearing about 🧵
made a little halloween thing: drop in your chrome bookmarks file and every dead site gets a tombstone
runs in your browser, nothing uploads
getstackboard.com/graveyard
The Zeigarnik effect didn't hold up.
A 2025 meta-analysis of 38 papers found people remember unfinished and finished tasks about equally. What did hold up: when people get the chance, they go back to an interrupted task about 67% of the time.
So with tabs, I'd expect the pull to go back to show up anyway. Give it somewhere reliable to go back to, then close the tab. (These were lab tasks. The tab part is my read.)
Stackboard does the saving part: one click puts every tab in the window into stacks on your new tab, as normal Chrome bookmarks, then closes them. Free:
chromewebstore.google.com/de…
Most pages you open, you've opened before.
Three browser-logging studies put repeat visits at 46% to 81% of everything people opened. Bookmarks barely help: in the 90s study, they were 3% of how people got around.
The people who kept bookmarks useful filed as they went. In a 1996 survey, 67% of people with 300+ bookmarks put each one in a folder the moment they saved it. Across everyone it was 23%.
I built Stackboard around that habit: you pick a stack when you save a page, and your new tab shows every stack as a board. Free, open source, all normal Chrome bookmarks.
chromewebstore.google.com/de…
In 2004, we switched screens every 2.5 minutes.
By 2016, it was every 47 seconds.
UC Irvine's Gloria Mark measured both. Her lab also found that interrupted people finish their work faster, and pay for it in stress.
What helped in the research: finish the small thing first (Leroy saw less residue when people finished under time pressure), and write down the next step for the rest. A specific plan quiets an unfinished goal (Masicampo and Baumeister, 2011).
I built a free Chrome new tab for the second part: one click saves every open tab into a named stack, so you can close them and pick up later. All normal Chrome bookmarks.
chromewebstore.google.com/de…
