> Those that have dozens of tabs open - I do think you need to ask yourself why?
Spatial memory. If my tabs are not exactly where I left them last week, I utterly forget what I was doing. (I'm one of those people whose room looks like a mess but I can tell you where anything is -- so long as no-one's moved it.)
If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc.
Don't get me wrong, I have got a bit of a bad tab habit that I'm trying to break. It's all too easy to open loads of them, never to read the content. In the meantime they just use resources.
I think having lots of tabs open isn't good for focus, but that's another topic.
What I was getting at, is that I believe we use tabs as bookmark replacements. Which is stupid because bookmarks are cheap. This shows a flaw in the browser.
To me it's the browser UI that let's you down. If bookmark management were better, you might not use the tabs.
Back to the spatial memory, I have a better grasp of tabs when they bunch - ala Opera and Chrome than when they scroll. I get lost in Firefox pretty quickly, the newer tab management features just don't work for me.
I don't see why you can't have a mix of live tabs, and frozen tabs.
After using Gmail for years - I'm going back to a desktop client rather reluctantly, just because it doesn't use much in the way of system resources while idling.
I was a fan of tabs initially, but in some ways I've gone off them. I'd like the window manager to look after multiple windows better, rather than use tabs.
I'd love to see some radical development in the browser UI.
"If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc."
This would massively break the web. Even throttling setTimeout() calls for tabs in the background caused breakage.
Spatial memory. If my tabs are not exactly where I left them last week, I utterly forget what I was doing. (I'm one of those people whose room looks like a mess but I can tell you where anything is -- so long as no-one's moved it.)
If tabs are slowing things down, then the browser should "background" tabs that haven't been used in a while. (I'd say swap them to disk but the OS does this already!) Pause Javascript, Flash, etc.