What exactly is the thought process behind having so many tabs open? For example, I close tabs when I am done with a site and / or when I can't read the site title on the tabs any more.

What’s the thought process behind closing them? Using tree style tabs I have a forest of tabs. I am working with lots of ‘web apps’ (currently mainly the AWS console) and closing tabs would mean having to go and find the particular resources every time I want to work with them. I probably hit each of around 50 tabs - across two or three windows - an average of 20 times today. Then there were dozens of ephemeral tabs too.

> What’s the thought process behind closing them?

- Why keep a site open when you are done with it?

- Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.

- Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.

Not the person you're replying to, but may as well answer since I also use tree-style tabs similarly.

> - Why keep a site open when you are done with it?

Why assume you're done with it? I have a number of tabs just for Grafana dashboards I'm monitoring. Re-finding the particular configuration from the home page every time would be annoying, bookmarks would require reloading the page (and thus re-running the slow queries that happen on load instead of on data update), etc.

> - Too many tabs and it gets difficult and irritating to find and open the site you want.

That's what tree-style tabs solves. Tabs are a hierarchy, just like bookmarks or folders normally are. It's much easier to navigate.

> - Have never needed to keep many, many sites open in the first place.

I've got email, calendar, a bunch of Grafana tabs, plus a few datasheets, a schematic, Jira, Confluence, and Github.

And that's just for work, for news I tend to open articles in tabs with HN comments in child tabs and then go through & read them in sequence, but I keep work & non-work in different windows.

Another Tree Style Tabs user here, I'm not really satisfied with the other explanations, so: With TST and Auto Tab Discard, tabs have become self-organized bookmarks for me. I simply don't use actual bookmarks anymore, and have open tabs for each site I regularly visit, with subtrees for any stray thought.

I'm up to around 500 tabs across 3 windows. Maybe a dozen root trees. Youtube, Android docs, HN, Reddit, etc, for example. Because opening links in a new tab creates a child tab in the tree, they're automatically well-organized in a way that follows my thoughts, collapsible when I'm done with one for the moment, and rearrangeable if I don't like where they were put in the tree.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

> For example, I close tabs when I am done with a site

I also do this, but my definition of done is very flexible and blurry.

I meant, close it immediately or just bookmark, tag and close it for later.

I don't do any bookmarking or tagging, so either it's an open tab or something I can dig up in the history. So I tend to keep tabs open if I think there's a chance I might need to refer to it soonish. Or I just forget them after my focus moves on to something else.

"Bookmark, tag, and close" loses active state and requires a full page refresh. It also loses the history (where it was opened from). Bookmarks are useful, but they're not the same thing as tabs.

My wife leaves all of her tabs open, but it's not for any specific reason. If she opens a new tab and goes to a website, the browser will just switch to the tab that's already on that website instead of fetching the website again.

> ... the browser will just switch to the tab that's already on that website ...

Which browser?

Firefox has that feature (configurable).

Safari does this

For some they're something that I check daily so I just focus then refresh, and for some I keep them open thinking it's something I am going to revisit and read some day.