Yea, I think this depends on when you grew up learning your browsing habits. Back in my day lol when tabs came around, the computers could only handle a small handful before bringing the computer to its knees. Now the browsers don’t actively load the other tabs but I still can’t stand to have more than maybe 10 tabs when I’m researching something before I get an eye twitch.
Shit, I never thought about it that way, but you may be onto something here. Not only tabs were heavy, they weren’t isolated into processes in most early implementations (IIRC that was the big Chrome selling point early on) and could crash your whole browser, so it made me extremely nervous opening too many tabs as I could lose it all with one error.
Can only speak for myself, but bookmarks are not at all the thing I want.
There's more cognitive effort needed when creating a bookmark (not to mention several clicks and key presses) - I need to classify, organize, assign a folder, think about relevant tags.
More importantly: while I expect to need the tab again in the near future, it is likely to be completely useless in a few days. Creating a bookmark for that is going to be wasteful clutter that I need to spend more mental energy cleaning up.
The parent comment expressed incredulity at being able to manage that many tabs. I'm not sure how converting them to bookmarks instead helps. It just seems like I'll need more clicks to get to my site.
Also, I care about the state saved in my open tabs and don't want to reload the page every time I visit it. Many websites are built in such a way that loading the URL again doesn't even restore the same state, and sometimes it doesn't work at all.
Bookmarks are useful, and I do use them, but they are not a workable replacement for tabs, at least to me.
At some point the buttons don't get smaller and you can scroll them if they exceed the width of your screen. At least some browsers also give you tab groups so it stays a bit more organized.