Why do people keep 100s of tabs open at a time? I get irritated if I have more than 8 open.
It's also the best way to browse image galleries: middle click everything into new tabs, navigate them with the keyboard, and close them as you go. Beats clunky JavaScript lightboxes.
I routinely research several related topics for a project, and I will need 10-30 tabs per topic open at once. Surprisingly, chrome manages to handle 100+ tabs on my system with out issue.
You should see my desktop
I've been using large tab sessions ever since Opera 5 in the early 2000s. Back then I'd have 20-50 tabs or so. These days I have sessions of 500 active tabs and 500 suspended. It's great. I have full text tab search, and since my sessions last years, I know the general location of all important tabs. ALso, since I use a single process brower and NoScript, all those 500+ tabs take under <3 GB of ram.
It's matter of taste, but it's no new trend. Tabs, and tab users, have been around for 20 years now.
For example, last week I was shopping for a very specific, very expensive ceramic thrust bearing. I had 20+ pages open from 10+ suppliers and documentation sources. I needed those open all week while we decided on which one to buy. This was a minor background task, so I also had 60 other tabs open for my normal work flow.
Just because people use a tool differently than you doesn't make them wrong.
Back in the days of social bookmarks (like del.icio.us) pretty much everyone had a "toread" folder. The main problem is that you have to remember to delete them after reading them. That's not really a problem for good articles you remember reading, but the crap articles you don't remember, or quit reading are easy to forget to delete from the bookmarks. So, you end up reading the same crap articles several times. With a tab, you close the window and you're done. With bookmarks, you have to close the window, go through your bookmarks, find the one that was crap that you have already forgotten and delete it.
There's several other advantages to tabs too:
Like the fact that they're naturally organized by window based on the task you're doing.
You'll see them more often, and thus be reminded more often.
They save context, like forwards and back history, and information you may have typed in, or a UI you may have manipulated.