[reitanqild]

> Why would you want so many tabs open in the first place?

Some reasons:

- Ctrl-clicking to open tabs since I can then load them in the background (because I'm impatient, and because I don't want to get distracted by clicking into all the references in the main tab while reading.

- using tab tree extension I can then easily see what path lead to some interesting page I found

- by default, if you type ab address you already have open in another tab, Firefox will jump to that tab.

> Is this really a common way to use a browser?

Yep. Bot extremely common but I do it and a number of other HN-ers as well. Mozilla seems to be aware of it and seems to have it in their performance tests or something.