Look at the top of your browser right now.
How many tabs are open?
Five?
Twelve?
Thirty-seven?
And how many of them do you actually remember opening?
Somewhere in there is probably an email you needed to reply to. A document somebody sent you. A dashboard you were checking. A Google search you haven’t finished. Maybe a spreadsheet you opened because you needed one number from it.
And then there are those three tabs you are afraid to close because you’re fairly certain they are important.
This has become so normal that we barely notice it anymore.
But perhaps we should.
Because all those tabs are telling us something about the way we work.
Tabs were supposed to make browsing easier
And they did.
Before tabs, opening several websites meant opening several browser windows.
Tabs gave us a much cleaner way to move between things.
That made perfect sense when the browser was mainly a place where we read things on the internet.
But that isn’t really what the browser is anymore.
Today, much of our working life happens inside it.
Email is there.
Documents are there.
Spreadsheets are there.
CRM systems are there.
Project management tools are there.
Analytics dashboards are there.
Customer support tools are there.
HR systems are there.
And somewhere between all of them is the thing you were actually trying to get done.
That changes the problem.
The problem isn’t the number of tabs
The problem is why we need them.
Imagine somebody asks you a simple question:
“How did we do last month?”
The answer might not exist in one place.
Revenue could be sitting in one dashboard.
Customer numbers might be somewhere else.
Marketing data could be inside another tool.
A spreadsheet might contain the targets.
And the explanation for why something changed could be buried inside an email or a conversation from three weeks ago.
So you start opening tabs.
One becomes four.
Four becomes eight.
You copy a number.
Switch tabs.
Paste it somewhere.
Go back because you forgot another number.
Search your email.
Open another document.
Check whether the figures match.
Eventually, you have your answer.
The work itself might have been simple.
Getting to the answer wasn’t.
We have become very good at being human APIs
Think about what happens during that process.
You take information from one application.
Remember it.
Move to another application.
Put the information there.
Then take something from that application and move it somewhere else.
Again.
And again.
And again.
The software isn’t really coordinating the work.
You are.
You are the thing connecting the email to the spreadsheet.
You are connecting the spreadsheet to the dashboard.
You are connecting the dashboard to the document.
You are connecting the document to the person who asked the question in the first place.
We have spent years building increasingly sophisticated software.
Yet an enormous amount of modern work still depends on a person sitting in the middle, clicking between it all.
This is why closing tabs doesn’t solve the problem
There is plenty of advice about managing tabs.
Use tab groups.
Bookmark things.
Create separate browser windows.
Install a tab manager.
Close everything at the end of the day.
All of that can help.
But it treats the symptom.
You don’t have seventeen tabs open because you’re bad at organising your browser.
You have seventeen tabs open because your work requires information from seventeen different places.
The browser is simply showing you the fragmentation underneath.
And that raises a more interesting question.
What if you didn’t have to coordinate all of it yourself?
What if you could start with what you wanted?
This is where AI becomes interesting.
Not because it can write another paragraph.
Or summarise another document.
Or give you another chat window to keep open.
But because software is beginning to understand something much more useful:
Intent.
Instead of starting with:
Which application do I need?
Which tab was that in?
Where is that dashboard?
Which menu do I click?
You could start with:
What am I trying to get done?
That is a very different way of interacting with software.
And it’s the idea behind IntentX.
What does that look like for a normal person?
It doesn’t need to involve complicated AI prompts.
You shouldn’t need to understand agents, models, APIs or automation.
You should be able to ask for something in roughly the same way you would ask another person.
“Find the document Sarah sent me last week and tell me what I need to do.”
Or:
“What’s our revenue this month?”
Or:
“Summarize what has changed in this project since Friday.”
Or:
“Find the invoice from that supplier and prepare the details I need.”
Or perhaps you are onboarding somebody new.
Today, that might mean opening your email, company directory, Google Workspace, Slack, Jira and whatever other systems your company uses.
You know the process.
Open.
Click.
Search.
Copy.
Switch.
Paste.
Repeat.
Instead, you should increasingly be able to say:
“Help me onboard our new designer.”
The assistant can help understand the request, gather the information it needs, prepare supported actions and work through the tools you’re already signed into.
And when something sensitive requires your approval, you remain the person making that decision.
The goal isn’t to remove you from your work.
It’s to remove some of the unnecessary work surrounding your work.
Your browser already knows where your work is
This is what makes the browser particularly interesting.
You already spend much of your day there.
You’re already signed into your tools.
Your working context is already spread across the pages you’re using.
As we wrote previously, the browser has quietly become the front door to our working lives.
The next question is what happens when that front door becomes a little more intelligent.
Instead of merely displaying all the places where work happens, the browser can begin helping you work across them.
That is the shift we’re exploring with IntentX.
Not another destination.
Not another dashboard.
And hopefully, not another tab.
Maybe the future has fewer tabs
Tabs aren’t going away.
Nor should they.
Sometimes you want five articles open.
Sometimes you need to compare two documents.
Sometimes you simply want to browse.
But the number of tabs required to complete a task should probably start shrinking.
Because the goal was never to become exceptionally good at operating software.
The goal was to send the proposal.
Understand the numbers.
Find the answer.
Onboard the employee.
Prepare the report.
Book the meeting.
Finish the work.
For decades, we have translated those intentions into dozens of tiny instructions for computers.
Open this.
Click that.
Search here.
Copy this.
Paste there.
Maybe the next generation of software can meet us halfway.
You tell it what you’re trying to accomplish.
It helps with the steps in between.
And perhaps, eventually, you can finally close some of those tabs.
Give the work a place to return to
Fewer tabs are useful. But closing tabs is not the same as preserving the context behind them.
That is the idea behind Spaces in IntentX.
A Space is a working context you create for something that matters: a client, a product launch, a course, a job search or a trip. You can bring the relevant apps and pages into that Space, keep its temporary tabs together and return to the page where you left off when you switch back.
Your launch research no longer has to compete with an invoice, a personal search and three unrelated documents in one undifferentiated strip. You choose which context you are in, and IntentX shows the browser work that belongs there.
Spaces are broader than tab groups. They are designed around the reason those tabs are open in the first place.
If that sounds closer to how you want your browser to work, request an invite to try IntentX.
IntentX is currently available in private beta.