[vundercind]

Open-new-tab is faster than finding your old tab (… is there one still open?) for enough things that they stack up fast. Add a dose of “I’ll come back to this after the current distraction…” (you don’t) and “I’m not sure the current distraction is actually over, better leave those open” and it quickly becomes a self-reinforcing problem. Eventually you just mass-bookmark all few hundred of ‘em and close them all (that’s what I do anyway)

[terribleperson]

If you regularly do the 'bookmark them all in a folder and close them' behavior, you should try Simple Tab Groups.

[vundercind]

I’ve tried tab groups in safari, which seemed like the perfect feature for me, but I always forget to switch before opening new, unrelated tabs.

Bookmark-all-and-close works pretty well since I’ve literally never gone back and looked at the bookmarks in the 15ish years I’ve been using the approach. Groups would solve a different problem (task-specific tabs get mixed together) but add enough friction that I simply don’t use them.

[terribleperson]

It takes a while to build the habit, but I personally have a 'general' group that serves for my regular browsing. If I find I've got a whole bunch of tabs for a topic I'm working on, I create a new group from them. I clear out the general group regularly.