This is blowing my mind right now, how do you operate with so many tabs? For me, as soon as I can’t tell which site is in which tab it means I need to close some. And I don’t see the utility of having so many tabs open, since you can obviously only use one at a time. So if you have 100 or 1000 open, most are not being used most of the time, so why not close them?
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.
I don't keep hundereds of tabs open, but tabs do serve two purposes that are not covered by either the browser history or by bookmarks.
One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).
The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
Tabs are the RAM of my TODO list, my README bookmark folder is the disk. Every so many months I purge the README folder, while regretting never really learning Blender, GIMP, SVG, d3, Godot, Rust, Julia, React, Svelte, CSS, shaders, machine learning, wavelets, Ableton, ....
If you can't tell which site is open, that's likely due to Chrome's poor tab UX. Constantly shrinking the click target makes tabs harder to work with. Not being able to read the tab title doesn't help either. Thus, Chrome incentivizes people to close tabs.
With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.
HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.
I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.
Btw, you can bookmark the entire tree, to re-open the entire tree later. I mostly have the same workflow as you, though, except for a few regularly scheduled things (book clubs, DnD sessions, etc), where I have a bookmarked tree ready to open for necessary context.
I never have 1000+ open but I do have many open in a couple different windows for long periods. Firefox does unload tabs when you restart (at least, it can be set that way. And there are extensions that let you unload them manually or after a time period). Unloaded tabs take no resources (or an unnoticeable amount if any) and allow this trick to work. That and vertical tab addons (I use sideberry).
A tab bar is similar to a bookshelf for me: I see the icon and title of open websites in a neat list. Closing tabs and banishing them to some hidden history/bookmark menu is like putting your books into boxes in the basement instead of a shelf. Sure they're still there, but you might forget you have a book because you never see it and you have to dig through boxes to find it.
If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.
> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low
I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.