EDIT: and even Vinnl shared it first here , sorry for dup, but maybe you haven't seen it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27351289
Not trying to be snide, but having that many tabs open and expecting to ever come back to the same one twice is 100% incomprehensible to me. But, I freely admit, I start trying to pare down when my tabs get narrower than the default width. I've gathered that I'm an anomaly
The issue that I'm thinking about here is finding active UI elements that already contain what I am looking for. I have been able to do this to a certain extent in Emacs by writing commands to go to a specific buffer that is already open, except that even that doesn't quite for a variety of reasons including the fact that sometimes you want some exact state and sometimes you want a clean slate and in Emacs in particular doing that can completely mangle buffer ordering. At some point I will get fed up with the current state of things and fix whatever brain dead heuristic destroys the buffer ordering but for now I find workarounds.
Essentially the issue is that yes, it would be great to be able to put a pin in the high dimensional state space that is a computer + network and just ... go back to that point, but even ignoring the engineering challenges my experience is that the dominate UI paradigms haven't really even considered the issue (though the research community surely has).
A somewhat real-world example: I have 5 tabs open for reference on an Elixir project I plan to return to over the weekend and 12 tabs open for a Python project I’m currently working on. When I’m done with today’s Python work, I expect to have no more than seven of those Python tabs remaining.
I just press T, fuzzy match any tab title across all my windows, then switch to it instantly.
For desktop windows, I use XMonad + Rofi to summon windows via fuzzy search.
I wrote my own bash summon/banish script to pull existing windows whose titles match a pattern and send them away. It is better at dealing with 20+ browser windows and 500+ tabs than anything that the UI teams at billion dollar companies seem to have come up with in literally my entire lifetime. This tells me that whatever the UI teams are doing it is a joke, because I have no idea what I am doing and it is working better. I still can't summon windows based on a search of their contents, but I'm sure I can solve that for at least some Emacs buffers.
The thing that is stupid is that opening a new window and typing in a url is usually faster than finding the already open version of that same window (which has the old state). Browsers can sort of do this with tabs, but why the heck isn't there a single box that will take you to the information that you were already viewing locally? The user interaction workflows for managing large amounts of information are fundamentally broken.
The UX for funnelling users into parting with their dollars and data are flawless, but somehow it is impossible to take me to the window I already had opened on the subject faster than it is for me to open it again from scratch? That is a sad, sad commentary on the dystopian nightmare that we are trapped in.