Serious example: learning a new subfield. You start with the general article in wikipedia, trying to get a gist of the field. Cue 20 or more wiki pages for new terms and ideas. As you learn the terms, you get ideas and have to see if they have been done before. Cue up another 20~30 tabs of searches. Eventually start looking at articles. Each one has 10 figures which can be opened in new tabs for high-resolution viewing, and about half of them have supplementary information which is best viewed concurrently. Add transient personal tasks, email, any other searches (online shopping), and it is not uncommon to see 150 or more tabs. Then as the project winds down the tabs get whittled down, too. Then start looking at the detailed references. After just a week of reading, you can easily end up with 100 tabs of "things to read later.the course of a week long re 10 tabs of other references and things that I searched for, but won't s

Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.