While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
That reads like "while <more than I use> is ridiculous, <as many as I use> isn't that unreasonable".
I never have more than about ten tabs open, and a hundred strikes me as ridiculous too. To each his own, though, I guess.
That would indeed be a much better use of space.
Also Chrome might be faster but FF has some unique advantages that makes it really great for serious work.
Also the speed advantage that Chrome currently has might be about to disappear : )
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
I never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.