No Stupid Questions

For me, it more boils down to keeping my place within a web page or ever-updating feed.

For instance... If I'm going down a rabbit hole, I could have 4 root tabs open. Those tabs may have lengthy articles and would reference secondary sites throughout the page. Rather then having a good chance of the browser losing my place down the page by clicking on a link normally, I open it in a new tab. This allows me to switch to it, skim down to where it was referenced to understand that part of it, then switch back to the root tab while leaving the secondary tab open to fully read through when I finish with the root one. As the rabbit hole deepens, those secondary tabs may eventually become root tabs which may also reference their own secondary sites or even each other. The number of tabs just keeps growing until I either run out of those secondary tabs or I am just satisfied with the amount of info I gained. This can also happen over several days or weeks and have other rabbit holes open at the same time.

Idk it's crazy to see the browser windows of some teammates during screen share.

Read the thing, write down the relevant stuff / copy it to reference notes, bookmark it with raindrop or something that allows you to tag for context, close the whole browser.

I suspect they lack whatever visceral reaction makes me start to panic if I have more tabs open than fit neatly across the top of the browser.

on desktop, hell no. On mobile, I just wanted to see what would happen if I stopped closing them once in a while. it lags my phone so bad every time I scroll through them. It look about 1 minute to get through the entire list lol
my estimate is about 800, but I am not gonna spend time counting them

People have that many tabs open for the same reason people have full piss bottles next to their computers.

porn? some people watch some embarrasing content that they dont want people seeing.

At work? Every shit is a browser app now. Hard to organize.

Most of my projects require like 2-4 web apps so i constantly have two browser windows open side by side, with a bunch tabs on each

... because I can't find the tab I opened 2 days ago, so it's faster open it again... which just creates a negative feedback loop of having too many tabs and not able to find anything.

Case and point: I'm in IT and we use github. Some code requires reviews (which needs "more time" to complete), then often I'm looking at other 3rd party repos' for documentation/examples/etc. Some might be useful, some are related to my current problem. Oh, I get a ping - I need to finish that PR review: "which tab is it? They ALL say github!" ... and I'm too impatient to hover over them. So, it's faster to just type the URL in and go.

I loved browser plugin, Vimperator. It was fantastic, I could (at anytime) type ":b " and it would search through my open tabs. But I've tried a bunch of the "successor", but universally they seem to get "stuck" when it comes to inputting text - either into text fields (like on a normal email form) or as input into the browser extension.

Recently, I found an extension that would group tabs based on your rules (so, I could separate the company github tabs from the OSS). It's far from perfect... but it's endurable.

... but what I really wish for is a Firefox plugin that'll allow me to type parts of the tabs domain or title and it'll filter the results.

I used to use bookmarks (at home). Now I just keep tabs open.

I often have 2-3 windows open of ~30 tabs each.

It’s the floordrobe of internet management, small piles of shit when and where I need them scattered around.

They can't organise bookmarks

Because they hadn't heard of this feature called bookmarks

I can easily hit 30 tabs split roughly 5-10 tabs about the same topic and 3-5 topics going at the same time.

There is about a weeks lag time from moving on from one topic to closing the tabs.

I am never close to 100. I don't even think there are 100 interesting pages on the Internet.