When I feel I have too many tabs Open, I simply close the entire window. I don't understand tab hoarders. I've watched them use browsers and they almost never revisit those hoarded tabs. They actually start from a new tab and search or type in a URL when they want to go back to previous tabs.
Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and keep a max number of tabs visible.
The problem with history is it loses spacial relativity. How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs.
Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls, by understanding their distance from each other and the rules of how they open.
Another thing tabs do, is allow you to designate what NOT to return. If you use something like GoToTab [1], it will specifically NOT return results that have been closed. Merging everything to history doesnt give you that separation between "not relevant in the future" and "maybe relevant in the future."
> How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs.
> Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls,
I recommend Tree Style Tab [0], which fully preserves this relationship. When one tab opens another, the child tab automatically becomes a child in the tree, making the whole thing very self-organizing. Also being a tree, the parents can be expanded/collapsed, if there's a group you're putting aside for the moment.
That's for Firefox, at least. It looks like there's a few that other people have made for Chrome [1][2], but I can't speak to how well they perform.
But how does that preserve the relationship after I want them to no longer be tabs? The convert tabs to history or tabs to bookmarks destroys that relationship data.
Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and keep a max number of tabs visible.