The article explains that she likes to look at tabs in the past as a reminder of something she was interested in.

It’s sort of a snapshot in time. I get it. But hell no I’m closing tabs.

There's a tool I use at work for administrating Apple devices and it opens about four tabs for every profile you look at. You can quickly stack up to about 50 tabs. Utterly stupid programming.

But I'm not using it I have maybe 12 tabs open at a time.

I have a practical but niche answer to this. This is actually a bit of a wall of text but tldr: Not quite a power-user. Got 1.5k tabs, Bookmarks and Browser history lack proper system and contextual integration, are a poor experience to review, navigate, categorize for me, and many integrations make tabs effortless to work with, group up, and accumulate. Looking a bit into other systems and I can definitely see benefits but what I have works pretty well for me.

I'm not as much of a poweruser but I generally will have between 800 and 1,500 tabs open on my desktop with Floorp which is a Firefox fork with native web app support and a bunch of neat customization features. This is mainly because I find history and bookmarking features to be rather inconvenient to maintain especially for deep internet rabbitholes and complex projects that can have multiple topics or differing levels of priority to reference. Firefox and Floorp allow users to instantly search through their tabs using the search bar and this tends to be very helpful although I also will like to have older versions of websites cached or loaded locally so I can make comparisons, review through collections of tasks and their related segments which I have previously worked on, or see how homepages and different segments of the web have adapted as a whole or personalized for me over time. I can basically have my own pocket of the Internet curated for me which I don't need to go out of my way to find or maintain.

Now something to note is that it's a surprisingly efficient process, Most of the tabs themselves don't need to actually be active in memory with the browser in total generally using less than 8 gigabytes of ram and under 10% of my cpu when active. I have plenty of tab management extensions, Floorp provides a scroll bar at the top for multi-row tabs, Flow Launcher (ridiculously powerful search tool which can be run as a system-wide programmable hotkey.) within Windows has integration both for checking existing tabs and instantly opening new ones. It's pretty slick except when my browser is first rebuilding after a full reboot as that can take around two minutes to complete from disk.

I think the main thing at least for me is just that other resources and tools (Been looking into the raindrop bookmark manager.) might be more efficient for me to learn in the long run but I tend to be working on dozens of projects at once anyways and actively going out of my way to adapt to a new system like that would be counterproductive in the moment where it counts.

Hope this has been a helpful and insightful look into my process. I could probably attach screenshots or video later although I feel like this is sufficient as-is.

Yeah I don't really get it but it seems like it's not that uncommon to have heaps of tabs open. More than 7,000 is obviously exceptional but it checks out - there's a few users like this in mozilla's telemetry.

I think it's basically just concern that you might not be able to find your way back to something you were looking at before. To me that seems irrational but everyone needs to sail their own ship I guess.