http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png
Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using.
Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows.
Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap).
It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day.
I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.
I think that's probably what mscrivo was curious about.
I often end up with many (read, ~100? Varies widely.) tabs open.
I work like a priority queue. When I'm reading something, and see something interesting as a link, I open it in a new background tab and keep reading the current thing. Then go to the most interesting/relevant/time-sensitive tab I have open and read that. Repeat. ( while not que.isEmpty(): que.pushAll(que.popBest().getChildren()) ) This adds up quickly.
For example, with HN I tend to browse the entire front pages (active / standard) / my user threads before I actually start reading links / comment pages. And when I'm reading a comment page I tend to open comments to reply to in a new tab to get back to them later.
Ditto, if I'm coding something unfamiliar I often find myself looking up things recursively. Oh, here's two options to do thing A I need to do. Oh look, option A requires things B and C. Oh look, B requires D. This is sounding too complex, close tabs for things A/B/C and try option 2 instead. Etc.
Realistically, I only need at max two or three tabs actually loaded at once most of the time - but at the same time I want things to be loaded before I get to them, and I do not want to lose data from unloading pages. Lazarus helps, but there are pages that still lose data on reloads.
With tree-style tabs (Fireox), it's possible to see the relationships between tabs, with parents and stuff, so you can close an entire subtree trivially. For Chrome, that's not possible.
Even with Tab Outliner (which I've got), the disconnect between the T.O. window and the current window is utterly lost.
Also, for memory management, I cannot simply "unload" the current tab from within Chrome (though apparently with extensions that's possible). I do browse with the Task Manager open and routinely kill off windows to free memory. But that's also less than optimal.
Lots of make-work for shit my computer should be able to keep track of and handle for me.
Every "tangent" i need to explore, or every other level i need to dive into opens another tab, and by hitting CTRL+W i can pop them off when i'm done and go back to where i split.
So i have had times where there are 50+ tabs in a window, but generally that's the exception not the rule for me, but i can easily understand how people get there normally.
One of my friends uses "google searches" as a form of note taking. It's "backed up" to his history, 90% of them end up as a search at one point anyway, and it's easy to open one and type it in without any extra steps or much thought at all.
There's a huge gaping hole between tabs and bookmarks which needs filling. Essentially a "stuff to be read" queue, though with relations back to the parent document / page.
That backlink is where tree-style tab managers win. Firefox also delays page load to when you actually navigate to the fucking page, which Chrome utterly fucks up.