[entropicdrifter]

I was thinking more about people who use Tree Style Tabs and have nested Tab folders and such when I wrote that part. It's simple enough to save an entire session as a bookmark folder, to open an entire folder of bookmarks as new tabs (rather than needing to hibernate tabs to save ram while still keeping them "open"), and to search through bookmarks ad-hoc. Bookmark folders can be infinitely nested, categorized, ordered by when you were looking (though searching through your browser history also works for that), combined, copied, pasted, moved, put into or removed from the bookmark toolbar.

It's an incredibly flexible system that allows for a massive variety of workflows and it feels like people just keep finding ways to recreate it, but worse: less platform-independent, eating more system resources, dependent on third-party plugins, or (in the case of using an app for everything) eating up orders of magnitude more storage space at rest.

[TeMPOraL]

It's simple. Tabs keep state[0], bookmarks don't.

The web went to shit a long time ago; you can't rely on being able to bookmark a site and then go back to where you were. Half the sites are infinite scroll, or dynamically generated pages, or SPAs[1], or some other ephemeral invention du jour. Keeping a tab open gives you some chance to return to where you were for some time; bookmarks are just giving up.

--

[0] - At least until the browser decides to screw with you and unloads the tabs you needed. Firefox on Android is particularly aggressive at that, which incidentally makes PWAs unusable, too.

[1] - You're lucky when those let you make a bookmark that won't drop you back to index page when loaded.

[entropicdrifter]

Now that's an interesting perspective I hadn't considered.

I suppose I actively avoid most infinite scroll webpages because to me they feel like they're meant for "consumption" and visual appeal rather than actual usefulness and I tend to think of webpages as tools, either for information or socializing. As a dev I'm certainly biased towards sites like Github or news sites, which are both meticulous at sending you to the page you were linked to specifically rather than redirecting you elsewhere.

I do tend to keep a few tabs open at any given time, but only when I'm in the middle of reading something like an article or blog post. I try to close down my tabs to something like 5-8 max weekly, if not daily. Something about closing out the mental context and making a conscious decision about whether I really want to finish reading something or if it was boring me feels very freeing once I've decided to close the tab is deeply satisfying to me.