Stress Test

How to unlock Stress Test in Cheevos. Keep 200 browser tabs open at once, a supporter-tier feat of nerve. Worth 50 XP.

The story

Partner. Two hundred tabs. The browser is still here. So are you.

There is a number where "busy" stops being the right word and "committed" takes over. Two hundred is that number. Nobody drifts into two hundred tabs by accident. You get there one open link at a time, refusing, over and over, to let something go before you were ready.

Cache has watched people hit this number maybe a dozen times in his entire existence. He built a special shelf for it. Not the regular tab shelf. The one marked LANDMARK EVENTS, next to the hardware that survived being dropped and the floppy disks that somehow still read.

The turn is this: Cache expected the browser to buckle first. Browsers are supposed to have limits. Instead the tabs held, the memory held, and you kept going. Cache has revised his estimate of what a browser, and a partner, can carry.

Two hundred tabs is not a warning sign to Cache. It is a data point about endurance, and he is filing it exactly where it belongs.

The catalog entry

TWO HUNDRED OPEN TABS Acquired: Maintained 200 concurrent open tabs. Condition: Extraordinary. This is a lot. Rarity: EXTREMELY RARE. This requires dedication. Cache's Notes: Two hundred tabs. Cache has added this to the special section of the Stash labeled LANDMARK EVENTS. The browser held. Your RAM held. You are still here. This is a primary source for what a committed collector looks like. Into the bag. Obviously. Where else would this go.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

This one is a supporter-tier achievement, and it takes real hardware and nerve. Here is the path:

  1. Open tabs the way you normally do, without a closing habit slowing you down.
  2. Keep going past the point where the tab bar stops showing titles or favicons.
  3. Reach 200 tabs open at the same time in one browser window. Cheevos counts the total.

Modern browsers survive this better than you'd expect. Firefox and Chrome both automatically discard, or "sleep," tabs that have been inactive for a while, freeing their memory while keeping a placeholder in the tab strip, so a resting tab costs far less than an active one. Clicking a slept tab silently reloads it in the background. This is the mechanism that lets a browser carry 200 tabs without your machine grinding to a halt.

Where it fits in the Stash

Two hundred tabs earns its own shelf in the LANDMARK EVENTS section, next to the other feats Cache didn't think were possible until someone did them. To meet the raccoon who keeps score, read the story.