Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here)

Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.

Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.

After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.

For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs.

This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.

Typing some part of the tab title or url in the URL bar and then selecting the "switch to tab" option in the dropdown is faster than googling. Prefix with "% " if you want to search _only_ the tabs and not your history or bookmarks.

Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.