Data point:

I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open.

I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly.

For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later.

Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc.

Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.

I am a data point. I frequently have up to 100 tabs open, which are often interesting articles, music or gadgets i stumbled across and want to keep for reference. I use a tiling WM so i only ever have 1 browser window. But with the extremely efficient Pentadactyl buffer (== tab) search i could type something like "hack chrome" and this comment thread would be one RET, or a TAB (== next completion) RET away.

Part of the problem is that once you reach a certain level (20-25 tabs) mental state breaks down with flat horizontal tabs. The management's so bad you end up with a mess and can't spare the cycles to clean it up.

With tree-style tabs (Fireox), it's possible to see the relationships between tabs, with parents and stuff, so you can close an entire subtree trivially. For Chrome, that's not possible.

Even with Tab Outliner (which I've got), the disconnect between the T.O. window and the current window is utterly lost.

Also, for memory management, I cannot simply "unload" the current tab from within Chrome (though apparently with extensions that's possible). I do browse with the Task Manager open and routinely kill off windows to free memory. But that's also less than optimal.

Lots of make-work for shit my computer should be able to keep track of and handle for me.

I've had projects get so "packed" with tabs that i have about 50 in there, but it's generally just used as a stack at that point.

Every "tangent" i need to explore, or every other level i need to dive into opens another tab, and by hitting CTRL+W i can pop them off when i'm done and go back to where i split.

So i have had times where there are 50+ tabs in a window, but generally that's the exception not the rule for me, but i can easily understand how people get there normally.

One of my friends uses "google searches" as a form of note taking. It's "backed up" to his history, 90% of them end up as a search at one point anyway, and it's easy to open one and type it in without any extra steps or much thought at all.