The history here, is that Opera introduced tabs, and they were cheaper in terms of resources. Tabs in Windows were cheaper than many windows. Then tabs became a sort of replacement for Bookmarks, because bookmark UIs are so so bad. That's my take on it.

Gnome 3, started out suggesting that it would be a semantic desktop, allowing groupings associations of activities. That fell by the wayside, so the best thing left is to use something like virtual desktops to separate projects/workflows. But then you are pushed into multiple windows likely with multiple tabs.

I use multiple browsers on multiple devices, and bookmarking isn't that nice. I see why people end up using browser syncing and end up in vendor traps. On desktop, I can easily copy paste urls. Perhaps into my own mini-shared db for read it later style groupings. On mobile copying URLS is hell for me.

Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. It would need to be more than 'recently used/accessed'.

I have tried running Firefox with the bookmark manager open and the history, but it has been really poor performance wise, and it's just not a nice interface.

Looking at my tabs today, I have a small grouping of shopping tabs, of things I might be interested in ordering. From about three weeks back. I know if I throw these into bookmarks, and even tag them, they'll still be lost. I should probably have dealt with that there and then. I tend to build up tabs in Firefox, once I hit the width of the browser with tabs and they scroll it becomes UI hell for me. So I try to confine to about 12, but that's easier said than done. And as said I run multiple browsers, at least four on mobile and four on desktop. Throw tabs into the mix and it gets ugly. But if this was reduced to something like a simple list of URLs, with some grouping shared between machines that I could relaunch easily, probably in the same browser I was using previously they'd feel much more manageable. And less crufty.

Going back to the shopping example, that's task focused. And it might be accompanied by a few notes written in another app, and I might want to share that with my partner via email etc. Associations have to beyond one piece of software.