Entering pages from a common but changing context is in fact the main way to get more open tabs. I often scan the main page of HN or my newspaper and right-click the titles that look interesting to open them in the background, then go through those tabs at my leisure, while those pages may drop off those main pages in the meantime (it's a kind of FOMO really). Some of those will then stay open while I get sidetracked doing actually important things. Those pages are usually ephemeric and not meant as a reference, so not good bookmark candidates.

> I go to the same set of pages all the time

Maybe this could be a clue as to what's happening: What if other people have different use cases and needs?

Even between work and personal browsing I use my browsers quite differently. At work, tabs are more of a to-do list (things I need to review/sign off etc.); for personal, tabs are a largely a reading list.

I'd never just remember all things people want me to take a look at and type them in the search history, so tabs solve that nicely for me.

Way too much overhead for many of the things I use tabs for.

Frequently, the time it takes me to action whatever I have a tab open for takes as long as adding it to, reloading it from, and marking it off of a to-do list.

Not everyone's memory works the same way, and not everyone's organizational skills are the same. Whereas (it sounds like) you remember a task you're trying to do, and then go do it, and make a new tab and go do the task, for others, coming across the tab itself serves as the reminder about the task, and a call to action to do it. I'll open a tab that I need to do X, forget about X/procrastinate about X, open a tab for Y, and then Z, and then through going to a random tab, get to the tab about X, get reminded about doing X, and then go do it.

Sure It can. For example, If I'm looking for a certain stackoverflow post about a project I'm working on, I know it's be on the window with the other resources for that project, and I can remember that it's roughly on the middle right portion of that group of tabs. That narrows it down to <10 tabs to quickly check.

If I use my browser history, I'm going to have to re-filter out all of the webpages I deemed inadequate. If the tab was left open, I know it was at least somewhat useful.

Firefox switch to tab, my friend. You open a new tab, start typing the title of the page or the address of the site and it shows up in autocomplete with a switch to tab indicator and when selected it moves you to that tab instead of opening a copy.

An activity log and a to-do list are two very different things. Most of the things in my history I don't want to come back to.

Just quit firefox and restore tabs on restart, all of the tabs are now unloaded but still present in the tab bar.

about:processes can kill processes, which will unload their tabs.

At 7400, that backlog of articles is clearly aspirational, but there's some place where I do want to read about a topic, but only when I'm in the right mood, and I'm not in the mood to read about that topic right now, usually at the start of the day I'm in a more productive mood and by the end I'm not, and so there are different topics to read about at different times of day.

It's not, to me.

My bookmark list is huge and basically acts as (part of) a knowledge base. Conversely, open tabs are something of a hybrid between a "read this later" and to-do list.

I'm sure there are many other styles of organizing tasks/knowledge, and I would be a bit careful about discrediting what apparently works for other people.

There's borderline cases of working against UI paradigms like using the trash as a folder to store important documents, but I'd argue that this one isn't one of them.

I’ve tried tab groups in safari, which seemed like the perfect feature for me, but I always forget to switch before opening new, unrelated tabs.

Bookmark-all-and-close works pretty well since I’ve literally never gone back and looked at the bookmarks in the 15ish years I’ve been using the approach. Groups would solve a different problem (task-specific tabs get mixed together) but add enough friction that I simply don’t use them.

He doesn't care, and he won't change his ways. And that's perfectly okay!

I'm assuming you are someone who closes tabs sometimes. I am too. What you have to accept is that we are the weird ones. A browser is a tool and just opening new tabs for everything is the easiest way to use it. There is very little downside, because there is no need to ever touch an old tab if you can just open a new one. There is no limit on how many you can have open other than what your machine can handle, and even if the browser crashes, nothing is really lost, because you just... open a new tab.

Just accept it. It's hard, seeing a million tabs open really bugs me too, but you're not going to change anyone's mind on the subject.

Some tabs I just want to keep open indefinitely, so I'd like an option for that (maybe automatically, based on a self-defined list of domain names). But with some kind of archiving or reading list and a fully user-configurable deadline, that might work. (I'd put it the time limit at two weeks initially since I really don't mind having a few hundred tabs open, it's only after that that it starts to trouble me a bit and I lose oversight.)

And the saying used to be that Chrome was the chief RAM gobbler of most users' PCs. :)

It happens on Macs I’m sure, but the picture in my head of someone doing this to the extreme is definitely a Windows user.

[edit] for my part, as a Mac user, I couldn’t tell you whether my desktop’s full of icons (probably not?) nor what my background image is (… the default? Which I’m guessing is probably a mountain or a wave or something?) because I see my desktop so rarely, and never pay any attention to it.

> This is a strange generalization to make.

I get it, but 100% of Mac users I've helped in my 25 years of professional computing had messy desktops. That's dozens (maybe close to 100) of Mac users. Not scientific, not conclusive, but it's exactly 100% with no exceptions. This includes fellow IT professionals and college acquaintances. The most recent experience being two days ago, where I assisted a Mac user in changing email settings. It's also very common for these Mac users to not understand file/folder structure. I often guide them to download a file/app, and once downloaded they generally have no idea where it went unless its... on their desktop! Same for "open" applications. For PC user's I'd say it's in the 10-20% range, low enough to be unremarkable.

> suspend

Right, but the article says nothing about suspending and seems to strongly suggest that tabs take "no ram at all" by default, which is just plain false, unless I'm misunderstanding something. I don't even see a way to suspend tabs without a separate extension.

Look into the Panels feature, it has auto-move by URL regex.

right, most tabs are suspended. i also use an extension that automatically suspends inactive tabs, so i don't have more than 20 or 30 tabs that are not suspended.