Hoarding browser tabs isn’t novel. But when I try to clean them out every so often, I find myself more attached to them than I should logically be. I’m convinced that by keeping them open, they would remind me of open to-dos, to spark on inspiration, or to finally write that residency application. Closing a great link feels like saying goodbye to something special. I wonder, what if it weighs as heavily on the tabs themselves as it does on me?
How to Break Up with a Tab (2025), Queenie Wu
How to Break Up with a Tab (2025), Queenie Wu
Unfortunately, I don’t have a photo of my priority sliders and I also lost the sheet of paper, but if you were to get one takeaway out of the entire sheet, is that I’m really horrible at prioritizing because I want to do everything. But on the other end of that spectrum, doing too much can feel a bit chaotic. Much like my browser tabs.
Initially, I wanted to create a low-lift piece that would accompany my weekly calendar block of cleaning up my tabs and files. As I socialized this idea, I got some citations to existing work: like Memorial for Laptop, Dump Site, and even my own past work with friends, Internet Stoop.
I became curious about rituals, performances, and video: things that I never thought I would take on (I even critiqued it as a format in my last blog post).
In form and aesthetic, I had two sources of inspiration, Erica Scourti, an artist I wrote about in my blog post, and Chia Amisola, an internet artist who often uses popup windows as mechanics of gameplay.
While exploring a million directions (see Appendix), some of the most helpful feedback I got in this process was about narrative and feeling. When creating a performance, the narrative is completely in your hands. I usually feel most comfortable with defining interactions for an audience of a piece, and letting the behaviours and narratives surface themselves. This was a much bigger exercise in writing and video that I think I still want to iterate on:
Brian told me to just go close some tabs and notice how I feel, identify the largest feeling. I recorded a 20 minute long voice note of me closing tabs, and I noticed the biggest thing was FOMO / not wanting to let go.
The first prototype
So to start it off, instead of closing tabs, I wanted to open more. One curiosity I had was how to use popups as a medium of software art.
Starting out, after a bit of experimentation, it surprised me that it was pretty simple Javascript. I also leaned on Claude for some functionalities: How to animate popups across screens, and how to detect popup closures from the initial tab.
Refining the visuals took the longest, since I wanted to play through the entire experience each time in order to see the flow. I also split it up into scenes to make calling functions a little cleaner and contained.
Scene 1: Everything we’ve been through
Ideally, I would have looped through a list of links from your actual browser history, but instead manually defined the links and the positions.
Scene 2: What if?
This scene was the most narrative heavy. I took the thoughts I said in my voice note and framed it from the point of view of the tab. I animated one tabs to “run away” from the cursor.
