Tabbed browsing itself is a band-aid over miserable browser document and state management.

Bookmarks are both too painful to manage or navigate (and despite both limitations, I use them extensively). Tabs address the situation of "I want to read this but not right now". Chrome's implementation makes managing, prioritizing, and relating tabs all but impossible.

The larger problem is that the entire browser paradigm is approaching its end-of-life date, and what is now "the browser" almost certainly wants to be four distinct classes of application:

* Reader: a document-oriented applicaton with commenting, bookmarking, newsfeed, bibliographic management, annotation, and commenting capabilities. A bit lof the love-child of the original Web browser model, eBook reader, RSS/Atom feed, Readability or similar "simplified Web" presentation tool, Usenet newsreader, and tools such as Zotero or Calibre. Actually, Zotero, Calibre, or an eBook reader might well assume this role.

* A generalized application platform. A cross between current "full-featured" browsers and mobile development environments. Likely based on the concept of downloading the App framework only when it updates, containing it within a sandboxed runtime, and interacting with cloud-based services as needed.

* A dedicated commerce platform. Firewalled from other uses, increasing both privacy and security, with purchase, order-fulfillment, and related functions offered securely. Possibly growing out of a dedicated commerce app, e.g., Amazon or iTunes.

* A dedicated media player. Rather than having dozens of videos and audio players scattered among browser tabs, a single application which can enqueue, play, and/or schedule playback. VLC is closest to this, and has many of the features I'd like, though none of the stability. youtube-dl, local filesystem storage, and mplayer are my usual solution these days.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...

Yes, I've heard the "but heavy tab users are a minority case".

Answering that:

1. They're power users. Power users are a minority case. They're also a strong influencer community, and they lead migrations. Google Chrome (as with much else at Google) is no longer attractive, it's simply not sufficiently repulsive. But it's a tool people are using because they perceive either alternatives or siwtching costs as insufficiently better. That can change rapidly.

2. If you make something sufficiently painful, well, NO SHIT. People will tend to avoid it if they can. Power user's can't avoid it, and will find alternatives, eventually.

It's not even a matter of "oh, I'll get around to reading that stuff. It's that the state of tab management, on top of memory issues with Chrome, is so fucking abysmal that I cannot sort out what the fuck is in tabs, or how they're related.

Eventually the session crashes and I start over, but there's always painful state loss involved.

Why do I still use Chrome? Stylebot + Developer Tools. The state of Web design is so fucking abysmal that I've got 1700+ local stylesheets applied to various websites that I'd have to port and load somehow in Stylish on Firefox. And ... as annoying as other bits of Chrome are, the Developer Tools are decent, so fixing fucked-up Web design's a tad easier. And given the option of wanting to stab my eyes out staring at crap pages or dealing with Chrome's utterly fucked up memory and tab management ... tabs win, just barely.

But love Chrome? Who the fuck are you kidding?