For me, the problem tabs solve isn’t finding the thing, but remembering the thing to find. Bookmarks solve the former, but tabs act as a collection of topics that I care about at a given point in time.

While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.

All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.