The forty tabs sitting behind your video call

For about a month I was convinced my internet was broken. Calls started fine and then, somewhere around the ten-minute mark, the other person would turn into a slideshow — audio still running, face frozen mid-word, catching up in bursts. I ran speed tests, which were fine. I moved the router. I had got as far as drafting a complaint to my provider when I noticed the problem had followed me to a friend’s flat, on his connection, on his network. It was not the internet. It was the forty-one tabs I keep open the way some people keep newspapers.

The honest answer is more specific than too many tabs makes it slow, and the specifics are the part that actually helps. A tab sitting there with an article on it costs you close to nothing; modern browsers throttle and eventually suspend background tabs precisely because so many of us hoard them. The tabs that hurt are a small and identifiable minority, and you can usually name them without looking.

The expensive ones are anything with moving pictures or sound, anything that refreshes itself, and anything that is really an application wearing a tab. A video paused halfway through still holds a decoder open. A music tab is decoding continuously. A live scoreboard, a trading chart, a monitoring dashboard and a messaging app all hold a connection open and repaint on a timer. A document editor, a design tool or a browser-based development environment is a full program that happens to live at a web address. Four of those together can do more damage than fifty tabs of text.

It helps to know they are competing for two different things. One is memory: when the browser runs out, the operating system starts shuffling data to disk and everything on the machine develops a stutter at once. The other, and the one that matters more here, is processing. A video call is encoding your camera and decoding theirs continuously, in real time, against a deadline measured in milliseconds. Almost nothing else on your computer has a deadline like that. A spreadsheet that recalculates two hundred milliseconds late is a spreadsheet that recalculated. A video frame that arrives two hundred milliseconds late is a frame that gets thrown away — which is why the call is always the first thing to visibly break, even when it is not the thing eating the most.

Bandwidth is the third resource, and oddly, tabs are rarely the culprit there. What eats your upload is a cloud folder syncing a batch of photos, a game patching itself in the background, a phone backing up over the same connection, or somebody else in the flat streaming in high definition. If the picture degrades in visible steps and the audio starts sounding underwater, suspect one of those before you suspect your tab count.

The fix takes about two minutes and is worth doing in order. Close anything playing video or audio, including the ones you paused. Quit the other applications running for no particular reason, especially any other program that can see your camera. Plug the laptop in, because on battery most machines quietly throttle themselves and a video call is exactly the workload that notices. And if you are on wireless and can move nearer the router or run a cable, that one change does more for the call than all the tab-closing put together.

There is one failure that looks like lag and is not. If your preview is black, or the browser tells you the camera is in use, or the camera light was already on before you started, something else has claimed the device: another tab with a call still in it, a conferencing app that never truly quit, a recording or streaming tool holding on. Close the offender, and if the camera still refuses, restart the browser completely — releasing a camera is one of the few things a page reload does not reliably do.

Extensions deserve a mention because they are invisible in a way tabs are not. Ad blockers, virtual private network clients, screen recorders and the various meeting-assistant tools inject themselves into pages and can sit directly in the path of a call. The two-minute test is to open a private window with extensions disabled and make one call from there. If it is suddenly smooth, you have found it, and you can switch them back on one at a time until it breaks again.

What is not the problem is the number by itself. Forty tabs of text will not cost you a call. Three tabs holding a livestream, a video editor and a synced spreadsheet very well might. And if it stutters just as badly with nothing else open, on more than one site and in more than one browser, then it really is the network or the room, and no amount of tab-closing will rescue it — that is the point where moving closer to the router or plugging in a cable stops being optional.

None of this is glamorous, but it is the difference between a conversation and a slideshow. If the call runs fine and the problem is what to say during it, openers that get a reply is the better read, the hour you show up changes the kind of conversation you land in more than any setting does, and if there is no shared language at all, your hands can carry it. The rest of these notes are in the blog, and the pricing page covers what is free to start and where coins begin.