Completely agree. I am actually currently developing a tree-style-tab browser that has Chrome embedded for this reason [0]. I feel most people that tell people not to have a ton of tabs open haven't experienced the increased productivity with tree style tabs. I can ctrl+click 15 source files on a github page, opened as background tabs, then (with multiple tab handler) I can click+drag across the 10 close buttons and close 10 tabs with one gesture. I almost want to take a video of me "power-using" the web with tree style tabs and multiple-tab gestures to help others understand.

I see it as vim:intellij::fewer-tab-argument:more-tab-argument. To each his own.

0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie

When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.

I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.

We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism".

As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it.

Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched.

I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.

Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.

Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.

Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with.

It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.

This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox

The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.

But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank.

I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.

I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.)

But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.

Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.

On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.

i disagree of course, because that's a pretty judgemental slippery slope argument (i.e., that a single behavior implies a whole host of other negative behaviors & attributes).