I guess I'm making two claims here: (1) you should only open tabs for the task you're currently working on and (2) that very few tasks require large numbers of tabs. Fine, maybe it's more then a dozen, but the graph of "number of tabs used by a task" versus "frequency of that number occurring" is an inverse exponential (e.g. most tasks require 1 tab, fewer require 2, even fewer require 3, etc.), and I've never noticed myself actually needing more than...probably 20 tabs to complete a single task before.

> In the case of reading Hacker News...

This isn't a "task" - you're reading a bunch of completely separate articles, one at a time. You're consuming, not producing/processing/working on a task/problem - and each element of consumption is separate than all of the others.

> If I am researching how to do a task...

I understand and agree with this definition and workflow! This is how tabs were designed to be used. However, I haven't ever seen a common task (for programmers - who have even more demanding requirements than the general populace) that requires a "large" number of tabs. I guess that's kind of vague and I can always change the number, but really, think about it - how often does a task require more than a dozen tabs? More than two dozen tabs?

Just for fun, I opened every frontpage article (as of the time I accessed it - whoops, should have used Wayback HN or something) in Chrome. All 30 articles took 3.9 GB RAM, and adding all 30 pages of comments consumed another 300 MB, so 4.2 GB. total.