I used to be happy around "tabs" while using Nyxt browser in a linux machine (even though Nyxt works with buffers, closer to the Emacs definition, not conventional browser tabs). Now, I am using macOS and Brave/Chrome for professional reasons most of the time. Holy cow, I really miss Nyxt's UX.
Every day I use 4-10 tabs at max. For things that I'm working on or reading currently. I lever leave tab "for later". Instead I use bookmarks extensively. Most recent export showed that I have 672 bookmarks at this moment. I use it for everything from personal sites, to programming resource link storage, homelab ideas, shopping and especially "To read later". I often go to this bookmark folder and pick something from there, and delete if after reading or working through article. Works like a charm.
When I do my 'daily reading', I open all the tabs, could be as many as ten, in a browser section named something like 'daily'. I then go through those sites, tab by tab. If I find something interesting I will open that other page in a separate tab, if I don't find anything I will close the top-level tab for the site.
Having gone through the 'daily' group's tabs, I now have a bunch of new unread tabs and have got rid of those tabs that didn't have anything interesting to read. This might leave me with, say, six tabs.
As I read those tabs, I close the tabs. Eventually I might end up with no tabs and close the browser, or I might leave that last tab open so that the browser itself remains open.
Depending on time available, or my own inclination, I might open another section called (say) 'Tech News' which has about half a dozen sites and repeat the above procedure.
Tabs only remain open if there is something not yet read in them, or if I using that page for reference. As soon as the tab is 'used up' it is closed.
I started writing snss-re to read the Chrome session store file, to extract out all my browsing history.
This comes a bit over 10 years after writing an extension that capture tab activity into an rss feed, which i wrote for a Mozilla Design Challenge for 2009. I've wanted to do a lot more, but haven't returned to the problem space until recently. https://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2009/05/introducing-the-design...
Ideally I create a separate webapp that lets me browse old windows, & figure out out to ex-post save/file/tag pages.
After each workday I close all my tabs. If there's some valuable stuff that I'll be missing I can dig it from the browse history but that happens very seldom.
Tab groups, work group, daily use group, and I keep my video watching in a different browser. For python notebooks I use a dedicated browser.
But normally, browsers just resume my tabs, so been rocking the same'ish tabs groups forever.
I usually do not open many tabs at once (sometimes only one, and often none at all) so it is not much of a problem. I usually have more xterms open than browser tabs.
xTab extension automatically closes all but the most recent n (mine is set to 20) tabs. If I pin a tab it won't close it.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xtab/amddgdnlkmoha...
If I have more open tabs than that, I likely won't be able to find them anyway.
Yes, I close all of my browser tabs once I'm done for the day.
The only time I have multiple tabs open is if I'm researching a subject. Typically Wikipedia binges. I'm a minimalist, so I keep open tabs to a minimum. Then you have types who treat their tabs like their browsing history which is neurotic IMHO.