I would _love_ if firefox handled lots of background tabs better, my biggest complaint is how the browser UI lags with lots of background tabs open. This seems like its a scheduling issue, operations in background tabs should be lower priority than foreground tabs and should be pre-emptable so the user interface never lags. I'd be ok with manually pinning tabs I needed to run javascript in the background.
This is on a high spec dual 8 core xeon workstation with 164gb of ram and a radeon rx480 running latest kubuntu. Less than 100 tabs open, most of them basic references. If there was a bit of hardware I could buy that would fix browser lag I would.
I use uBlock with fairly aggressive settings (so lots of scripts probably don't run), but Firefox handles 100+ tabs on a fairly average Thinkpad fine for me. Worth checking if it's running in multi-process mode as it should.
Back then I had regularly around 150 open tabs in my old Opera on a notebook with 4GB RAM without any problem. But those were the times without big js-heavy webapps/sites like these days...
Tabs will likely be grouped by task as they are opened either around the same time or often as as a new tab from one of those windows. Another key advantage of open tabs is they save the state of the page you were on when compared to bookmarks.
There's obviously benefits to a more robust way to manage your work state. I'd view it in a similar vein as the advantages of a tidy desk: Some people lack the discipline to keep that state and can somewhat compensate for some of the disadvantages i.e. by application of spatial memory and the advantage of having everything to hand.
If people are going to do things the wrong way regardless providing them tools to improve their situation can still make sense.
Its not unreasonable, people frequently talk about hundreds or even thousands of tabs open here on HN.
I have 8 virtual desktops with different projects open, R studio and Jupyter notebook windows plus reference reading material. The work I do typically involves long running tasks and checking back on projects or doing some add on analysis. It takes way too long to get everything aligned right and started up on different monitors so this machine is always on.
I'd expect web browsers to be able to handle this without ui lag if the hardware is good enough. At this rate, I might run firefox in separate docker containers per virtual desktop just to keep it smooth. Would benefit security too...
As to the tab management, older version of Opera had tab stacking, which I've found pretty good for tab management. You could stack tabs into themselves to create a cluster of tabs that could then be rolled, so that just one of the tabs was visible, and later unrolled for using those tabs. I think Vivaldi copied the feature as well.
This is on a high spec dual 8 core xeon workstation with 164gb of ram and a radeon rx480 running latest kubuntu. Less than 100 tabs open, most of them basic references. If there was a bit of hardware I could buy that would fix browser lag I would.