tabs combine bookmarks with back and forward buttons. if i open a new tab and want to go "back" I switch tabs. now i have both states saved, which is good for speed and keeping my location on a page. tabs dont do a good job of showing me "how" i got somewhere", especially once I convert them to bookmarks.

to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.

tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.

i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.