One user research task is often to give names to ideas that we don't otherwise know how to describe. Like in bookmark research they distinguish between bookmarks that represent something you saved, vs. bookmarks that represent some navigational shortcut you are creating for yourself.

For tabs, I can imagine different ways of thinking about them:

1. An activity you have to complete. Or start. 2. A piece of information you think you may need to be aware of. 3. Something that interests you, but you are leaving for when you are in some particular state of mind (e.g., ready to read something long and involved). 4. Something shared with you, that you feel obliged to respond to. 5. One of a set of things that represents some pending task. 6. Something information you may need to revisit. Or you may have finished it, but it's yet to be "garbage collected". MDN pages usually fall in this category for me – I'll quickly come back a couple times to the page, but I only know I'm "finished" because I don't come back. So it sits there.

And for each of these there's the state of "maybe". Maybe I'll need this. Maybe I'll need to be aware of this. Maybe I should reply to my friend about this.

I use tree style tabs with auto tab discard and use suspended tabs as ephemeral bookmarks. Since Firefox opens all of my previously open tabs whenever I restart the browser they can survive reboots. If a tab sticks around long enough and I don't end up reading it I'll throw it away. I've always felt like browsers were missing something in between a tab and bookmark; kind of like a scratch pad for internet rabbit holes.

Most of the time, my tabs are holding information that I'm using to complete a task. Once I complete the task I close any tabs related to it. Sometimes I leave a URI in my code as a reference to find the ideas again.

In this case the tabs act as both a reference, and a "task" waiting to be finished. If I finish the task I can close the tabs. Gives me the incentive to finish what I'm working on.

Also thank you for Python's Virtualenv, paste, and webtest. I know your not much into the Python scene anymore but your contributes still effect my day-to-day activities.

>more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.

Same reason my physical desk is full of papers. That's exactly what all my open tabs are, all the various papers and pamphlets etc sitting on my desk.

Doesn't mean I really will look at any of them any time soon though, it's not exactly a _succesful_ information organization method in either case. Which means, yeah, it might be ripe for some clever UX. It's not at all clear what this should be.

> It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

Maybe they're not more important but they're more urgent? Since they're ephemeral whereas your bookmarks are still going to be there when you reboot.

Well, my tabs are also still going to be there when I reboot; For any modern browser that currently works and I'd consider "just losing" the tabs as a serious bug.

Yeah, but we still think of them as ephemeral. I mean if a colleague lost work from open tabs I'd put a larger portion of the blame on them than if their hard drive dies and they lose bookmarks.