It's odd that so many people confuse the roles of tabs and bookmarks.

Perhaps it's a sign that the bookmark UX isn't good (or prevalent) enough.

I generally have four pinned tabs open for email, Slack and Trello, plus another five related to what I'm working on.

People does not confuse roles.

It's just that:

1) What goes to bookmarks rarely goes out.

2) usually I and many other people have a few dozens at least of 'related to what I'm working on'. Like a few documentation pages for this, a few documentation pages for that, ten SO pages, ten blog articles on the same topic linked from SO etc. Plus some tabs unrelated to work, but the ones you absolutetly want to visit later and finish reading or something and don't have the time to put them into something like Things or Bear.

I disagree. It’s the poor history UX that’s the problem. Get rid of tabs altogether and show the history on the left side. Or if you like fuzzy searching, look them up in the extension store.

My history is too messy, I often flit to sites for a couple of seconds and backtrack.

Tabs make lots of sense, windows let me organise them into groups of things I'm currently working on. That's all sensible. Anything I come across that I think might be useful to my future self, I bookmark it. Again, working with the provided functionality. Sensible.

When people have 200 tabs open and can't remember what's where, that's what puzzles me. I've seen people flick through dozens of tabs looking for a piece of documentation they saw yesterday afternoon.

We already have the tools that make browsing and researching efficient. People just need to learn to use them.

I’ve been using an extension that orders tabs by MRU and it has my history baked in. I don’t even use tabs anymore on my text editors as I found that it’s unnecessary if you have fuzzy searching that lists the files in MRU order as suggestions.

The problem with bookmarks for most of us is that users don’t typically manage their bookmarks and delete the links they don’t need.

I'm not confusing anything. Tabs let me switch to different projects incredibly quickly. Bookmarks just don't work.

There were some nice Firefox extensions that supported bookmarking and reloading tab trees. Bookmarking a tree would result in folders, so the whole structure was preserved.

Bookmarks can definitely work, but yeah, a flat list can't. I think a better approach would be something like a mind-map.

Bookmarks have a great ux for it: save all open tabs to a bookmark folder, open all bookmarks in a folder

And then what happens to the trajectory of clicks that I followed to land on the page that was open in the tab ?

Rhetorical question of course. With an open tab I have that information and can go back and forth up the path. Its very useful context to have when I revisit the tab. In my line of work I research many things every day. Firefox open tabs have been a godsend. I literally have 900 to 1200 open at any given time

The browser ought to remember the history of a tab when saving that tab into a bookmark folder (think VM save state).

Photoshop has work flow like this - you can split the undo history into a tree like structure (to a degree, it's not infinite).

+1 indeed

The UX of bookmarks is far less ephemeral than the UX of tabs. I rarely go above 30 or 40 tabs in TST, and those tabs almost never live longer than a day, with one or two exceptions that I use several times a day every day.

Adding and deleting bookmarks at this frequency would be a massive hassle.

I use TST to supplement my working memory. I'm usually working within a particular subtree of all my (way too many) tabs. I probably still have more tabs in such a subtree than most people, but the same idea applies: the subtree keeps my focus on a single topic, and when I finish I can either collapse the subtree (my default) or close it entirely.

What I find invaluable is the super quick ramp-up after context switching, especially if whatever pulled me away turned out to be more work/time than expected.