Genuinely curious, why do you find it maddening? Is it just the feeling that it’s somehow messy? Wouldn’t bookmarking every page be a lot worse?

I find others' distaste for my personal workflows amusing, until it becomes annoying.

At which point the proper response becomes, "go work through your issues in some way that does not involve me."

I find it maddening too, but hey, it’s her phone. It’s only maddening in a “I wouldn’t personally do it that way” sense, so I don’t sweat it.

My wife even does it more extremely: when she opens a web site, she opens it in another tab, even if she already has that web site in an existing tab. So she ends up with hundreds of Facebook tabs, hundreds of shopping tabs at the same store, thousands overall. I don’t think she has ever deliberately closed a tab, and might not even know how. Safari’s UI makes it totally non-obvious how to do it, like how Apple makes it non-obvious how to kill apps.

This is essentially what I do as well (modulus Facebook). Sure, if I happen to see the open tab I need, I’ll switch to it. But you only see about a handful of tabs at the same time so it’s easier to just open a new one. I don’t see the value of going through and tending to my old tabs at all.

I guess I’m just an old school C guy. I pair my malloc()s with free()s and get grumpy in environments where you don’t really have to.

It’s like people who store EVERYTHING on their desktop in a huge unorganised pile.

Yes, it works.

It’s also maddening, like they’ve never even grasped the basic file operations.

I'm like that, and I really do believe I have "grasped the basic file operations"; maybe I just have a better grasp of the basic concepts of search, but I guess that's not the case, either; I have it like this because it fits my needs and preferences and works better, quicker, smoother for me, and in my case it's the result of decades of refining the way I use computers. Other people have different needs and preferences and that's absolutely fine as well, as far as I'm concerned. My "messy desktop" approach seems to be almost unbearable to some few people, though, and some very few seem to find it so unbearable that they have been outright aggressive about this in the past, and I really don't get that at all. But in case someone who feels like that reads this, here's my rationale:

I pretty much never ever see my desktop. I see my screensaver all the time, desktop never. I use spaces to separate tasks I'm working on and arrange windows to fill the screen, and they pretty much always do. I use the desktop mostly as a drop-off area for whatever it is I momentarily need; I drag and drop stuff there all the time, like images from Firefox. There are some directories, but at most two layers deep I think. I do archive stuff from time to time, but there are pretty much always multiple desktop grids worth of stuff on there.

That works really well because I only ever interact with the desktop via Finder (where I can just type the beginning of a name or use the datetime column or Spotlight set to search current directory per default), CLI (which has fd, ag etc.) or file pickers, though I tend to drag-and-drop more than I use "open file" dialogs. Relying on those is much faster and more intuitive for me than thinking up some kind of organisation scheme for dozens of unrelated activities that don't seem to fit into a single scheme very well, and organising everything accordingly, when I'm in the "zone" and would rather not have to think about where to place this particular file. I find it hard to remember such schemes, but I pretty much always know when and how I created something, so a chronological view of everything at once is very helpful. Software work is somewhat more organised (~/workspace and a lot of git repos in there), and data sets are very neatly organised (it doesn't work any other way), but most other things live somewhere on the desktop (or in some kind of searchable cloud).

As I see it, as long as I find whatever I need quickly, which I do, why would I "tidy up" those imaginary "folder" things? It's not like they have much in common with physical ordering aids (like folders), where you have to structure things rigidly or else never find a thing, and even there, you often don't structure things very deeply – who puts physical folders inside folders inside folders? My hand tools are organized pretty neatly, but if I could just say "8mm wrench" in the direction of my toolbox and magically hold it in my hand, or magically have all my tools neatly arranged by name, date-of-purchase, type, or just say "wrench for that nut" and find it ... I daresay my toolbox would be a lot messier. Can't do that, so I must put in the work. Where I don't have to, and can keep the chaos out of sight, I won't.

My wife does the same. The other day she wanted to open a new tab and the button was disabled. She had reached the limit of 500 tabs.

Maybe this should be formalized, like automatically get open tabs into easily searchable persistent storage, whether they are called Bookmarks or not. Then they can be closed by prompting to "clean up".

Maybe even skip that manual step entirely. People use browser histories like emails now -- by searching, not by active organizing.

I was about to say, you just described browser history!

It's completely, totally and utterly different from browser history!

If I visit HN, browse a bunch of comment threads, and find something I want to come back to later, that's 1 tab but 20 history entries.

Same if I searched for something on Google and eventually found something I want to come back to later. Except that's 1 tab and 50 history entries.

To recover that state via history is practically impossible. It's a needle in a haystack. I've occasionally needed to do it, and it takes a long time.

(Compared with a tab, a bookmark doesn't work well either for something to come back to. Anything where there is a context, such as scroll position. Perhaps if bookmarks were better, keeping track of scroll position and allowing text to be highlighted or a note to be attached, and showing a thumbnail (scrolled to the right place), and retaining some temporal relationships between different pages. But I find bookmarks consisting of just a title and URL to be completely useless.)

I would propose that the issue is that browser history navigation is generally poorly designed, at least if you want to do something more sophisticated than hit “back” or search it as a set of URLs. It should be richer and store much more details about each entry.

I'm not sure how to improve history navigation to help with this, as the browser doesn't know which 1 in 20 history entries are worth finding again, and which are junk traversed on the way to something worth finding.

It can't figure it out from content search, because the junk is often the stuff that resulted from useful searches and was assessed by the user as not worth keeping. Keeping tabs is a signal from the user about which entries were useful. A form of curation. Without that signal, what is there?

However, I think bookmarks would be profoundly transformed from nearly useless to better than tabs by improvements to bookmark navigation, UX and a little extra context.

So I have to give credit to you for the idea - history navigation improvements might be transformative in a similar way.

It shouldn't even be a "hard" problem any more. Search and relevance are mature technologies. You do need to provide some features, but there are many: time spent interacting with tabs, was it a "terminus" in a navigation session, active user marking/tagging, signals from other users, other products, etc. It would be an excellent use of ML. The rest is capturing these in a user friendly product, though if it makes Megacorp no more ad money, I doubt anyone will work on it however useful it may be.

Something like this, evolved, perhaps?

https://getmemex.com/

But browser history has way more stuff in it than matters. For example, I'll often have tabs open with documentation that was relevant to a project I'm working on. I want that, I don't want the 20 other search results I clicked on that were useless and I don't want to have other pages O had to navigate through to get to the right doc page.

For the use case of a loosely organized queue, bookmarks are even worse than tabs.