It might depend on your system resources, but I have +300 tabs open right now and I don't experience any problems. The only thing that's a bit slow is if I restart the browser, it takes a bit long to start up.
Some reasons:
- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.
- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found
- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.
> Is this really a common way to use a browser?
Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.