This is what I was wondering also, and it makes me think other people look at a much larger range of sites with different icons than I do.

I use Chrome at work because I have to. I often get into the situation with icon-width tabs, and to me it's bad because a lot of my tabs are the same few sites. So the icon doesn't always help me, and I end up using the 'close all tabs to the right' feature a lot.

In addition, a lot of the sites I use at work have time-limited sessions, so going back to a tab from even a couple of hours ago isn't useful because I have to reauth anyway. I guess I could find an old tab and refresh, but I usually just 't' (with vimium) to open a new one and retype the address instead. Maybe for me this is more a preference for the keyboard vs. having to move a pointer around?

This is a great question, and I think the trouble here is that there is a temptation to answer with one off anecdotes from the idiosyncratic example of a single use case. The more peculiar, individualized, unique, and unrepresentative, the more likely it is that we're going to hear that.

This temptation is very strong on HN. I honestly would be fascinated by a blog that gathered together all the extremely specialized use cases that people use as examples of why product XYZ wasn't good enough. That way of thinking leads to interesting to discussion but needs to be tempered by stepping back and looking at how representative those examples are, and I think that step is the point in the process where these conversations always break down.