This:<p><i>I think tabbed browsing gets out of control when users don’t have good bookmarking systems. I have friends who end up with 50 tabs open at a time. They want to return to a given page at some later date, but don’t have a good method of saving those for later or remembering to return. On mobile, that’s solved reasonably well with apps like Instapaper and Pocket. But on desktop, that problem doesn’t seem to be solved. Bookmarking systems can feel to heavy or permanent. And if you have been around a while, you know bookmarking apps tend to come and go (ie Delicious and Kippt).</i><p>Tabs (and I love them) are a poor solution to the horrible state-management challenge of browsers.<p>What I <i>want</i> is to maintain a list <i>of current references</i>, preferably <i>with some spatial context</i> (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session.<p><i>What I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and/or making noise.</i><p>That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk.<p>Browser history isn't it either: it's <i>too</i> comprehensive, is insufficiently contextualized, doesn't record context (other than, maybe, relative time). On mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page was. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content (though as I glance up at my browser's window title I see that HN is actually pretty good for this).<p>There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with which you're currently working open in front of you.<p>I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration.