I'm certainly guilty of keeping too many tabs open I'll never read, and about once a month I declare "tab bankrupty" and close most of them.
When I'm doing research, I save papers in Zotero instead of just keeping a tab open. That way I can organize them how I wanted and keep notes associated with them.
when i search for something, i easily open more than a dozen tabs at once. if i do that multiple times a day, then i get into the hundreds quickly. each collection of tabs is an issue i work on. at some point i have to decide if i want to keep those tabs or if i want to restart the search when i get back to that issue.
The HN equivalent of "I don't even own a TV".
edit: Though not so much tabs, just the NO-JS default...
I am working down on my Tabs, finally got to 53 right now from 500+ last week.
Keeps a certain level of focus, and prevents attempts at multitasking and keeps tab titles and icons visible in the tab bar.
It's not considered generally idiomatic as an error handling strategy, but it does exist if it's needed.
Here's the trick I think:
I and many others use tabs to offload the brain. For those who have read "Getting Things Done" I think this is similar.
We don't think about them, just look them up if and when we need them.
Kind of the same way as a journal or notebook: it doesn't stress me that I have hundreds of pages I might never get back to; it eases my mind that if I need to get back it is still there.
I use Tree Style Tabs and a couple of extensions on top of that so sometimes I'll copy a subtree as a nested markdown list and store it in Joplin, then close it.
But no: 600 tabs like I've had more than once was totally feasible years ago and should be no match for a moderns system.
That said as long as people don't try to force me to change the way I work they are free to do it their way.
That is all gone, FF has been dumbed down, and Chrome(ium) even more so.
After that I usually bookmark them all and nuke them.
Realistically, part of the idea is that if there's something of vague interest, I middle-click figuring I might revisit it at some point in the future. Usually this isn't the case, but as I know it'll wind up in my bookmarks at some point, there's still that possibility. Sometimes it even happens!
I do something similar to one of the siblings' replies with work though. One window per project/task with all associated tabs (e.g. documentation). Usually these don't get abused as much.
"Suspend Tab" for not loading inactive tabs is also important. I typically run about 50/50 in my active sessions in terms of active vs suspended tabs. "Search Tabs" and "Tab Mix Plus" are also very helpful. "Decentraleyes" also helps (mostly latency and privacy) by providing most not-bleeding-edge JS libs, fonts, etc locally only once.
Generally the first 1/3 of my tabs are long term tab groups I keep going back to for reference. These are almost all suspended most of the time they rarely change over the course of a single year. The second third is medium term tabs from projects I worked on but moved on from. I go through every month or two and bookmark projects I won't continue while closing the tabs. The last third is active tabs and changes day to day and week to week. I generally know the positions and relative groupings of all the tabs in the first 2/3 by heart. http://erewhon.superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2017.png http://erewhon.superkuh.com/whathappenedin2016accordingtotab...
Featurewise, UI-wise?
I regularly operate with 1000+ tabs on less than 3 GB of ram. This works because I disable javascript and look at web sites instead of run applications. I have extensions to full text search and switch between them and each tab stores it's path on the web, unlike bookmarks. And I've been saving my sessions every month since Opera 5 introduced tabs (I use a FF fork now). That covers 2003-2021.
Tabs are great. Modern browsers are bad.