Browser tabs I have open right now ...

I don't like tabs, I run multiple windows.

100 is more than 20.

I'm boycotting these ridiculous polls.

Where are the cowboyneal options?

Say, 'One tab for every heart CowboyNeal has broken'

That's just an idea. In the end, it is up to the editors. But by gawd, CowboyNeal options used to bring a little light into my day and helped, maybe just a little, to bring together this diffuse group of sysadmins and other assorted computer folk.

I do not think the web browser is to blame here. You are using tabs in a way they weren't designed for.

Obligatory car analogy: Don't blame the car if the engine uses a lot of gas and makes a lot of noise if you normally keep it revved just below redline, just in case you need it. Yes, the car will do that, but it's not the manufacturer who's responsible when the engine breaks, and you'll have to put up with a lot of rolled eyes.

Try using the history instead of most of your tabs. If set to "View by last visited", you have your breadcrumbs, without having to keep a copy of every page parsed and rendered and all the javascript, style sheets and flash loaded in case you ever want to flip to it (and chances are low that you will, if you "normally" have more than 240 of them. You can even search the history. Or get it auto-grouped by site if you want to. Or you can right-click an entry and bookmark it.

For the last few (default 50 for each tab) pages, you don't even have to open the history - just pressing and holding the back button will show them, and let you go to any one of them.

I am the "Over 1000" AC above (I know, no proof, but meh). You are using my browser technique: open a new tab for each link and close it when you have followed all interesting links from that page. This means you have a working set of 10 to 20 pages on small problems and 100 or more on larger problems. If you are working on multiple problems simultaneously, it's easy to crack 1000.

I like your description of the way that multi-tab usage records the way you explored a problem. I find that frequently I remember one tab and on finding it see that the adjacent tab has stuff I now understand. It's brilliant (when Firefox isn't so bogged down it's unusable.)

My main problem is my weeding is infrequent and ineffective. The browser fights against you here. It is slow and cumbersome and does not provide useful tools. Clearly browser authors are not like us. There's not much to like about browsers these days.

You are only partly right though about my truthfulness. Even though I have a 16GB machine largely dedicated to running the browser (curse you Firefox and your obscene memory wastage!) Firefox wedges or crashes periodically and when I restart, I select "Restore Previous Session" from the "History" menu. Firefox doesn't really open these pages until you click on them and thus while I have over 1000 pages open right now, most of them are dormant from the last crash recovery.

Firefox indeed can only handle a few hundred open-and-active pages before it chokes on its own inefficiency. It burns multiple cpu cores on idle loops. It's pathetic really. It seems so much less than I was promised back when browsers first turned up.