> Do you keep one book on your shelf too?

I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.

> Do you just not have any interests?

Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.

I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.

An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.

There is absolutely no technical reason why bookmarks and tabs are separate concepts: if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs, and the idea that a tab has to be some kind of constantly-open running program burning RAM and CPU is essentially a mistake made only by Google (and we can probably guess why they like that), as the only permanent state of a tab is the history of URLs it represented (which can be easily verified by rebooting: if the browser doesn't save it to disk it isn't part of the semantic state).

> if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs

That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.

It's a completely different view of what the tab bar is.

To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.

When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.

> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?

You don't. There's google for that :-)

The problem is that some people don't have just one thing they are doing at a time: they have long-term projects that overlap in scope. I am a teacher at a University, where I am teaching multiple classes and helping multiple students. I am also an elected government official, where I am sitting on multiple committees and making decisions on multiple topics. I am also a software developer working on multiple projects and doing research into multiple algorithms. I am also a human being having fun in multiple ways and talking to multiple other people. Do you really insist that I finish, shut down, and serialize the state of every single task I am working on in order to work on some other task? That is probably the least efficient process I think you could come up with; every single sub-task I have has its own working area, and each of those involves maybe 12 tabs... so the result is many hundreds of tabs. If you only own one table, which you have to share between work as diverse as soldering and cooking, I highly recommend trying out a life with two tables for a while, as you might be shocked at how much more efficient life becomes when you don't have to pack up everything you are doing every time you get hungry. What makes a computer interesting is when you then realize you have an effectively infinite number of tables.

Hence, multiple windows (and because windows UX is broken, multiple browsers)

And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)

And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.

The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect

You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)

> And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task?

No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.

> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)

The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.

> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect

Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.

Exactly true. I use chrome as my secondary browser. I have max 5 tabs open. But my primary workhorse(firefox) has close to 30-40 tabs.

I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.