There's an old joke about four-wheel drive on cars: instead of getting stuck right when you go off road, it ensures that you'll get pretty far into the woods before getting stuck. IHMO that metaphor applies here. Like the Web, Google, and even the WIMP interface before them, tabs were invented to manage information overload but "succeeded" only in pushing the problem out a layer:

"The most sophisticated and efficient users of Google today find that “trying to navigate the growing deluge of data [just within their scientific field] has become a second job.” The United States’ library of scientific papers for health and medicine adds new ones at a rate of two a minute, year round. Like Memex and the Web, Google has solved the problem of published work burying itself unread by pushing it out to a vastly wider layer, one we will perhaps never manage to tame. We have not escaped [Vannevar] Bush’s quandary:

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought [find that] truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. … publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."

http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/