Tab Candy
It’s hard to keep everything straight with dozens of tabs all crammed into a little strip along the top of your browser. Your tab with a search to find a pizza parlor gets mixed up with your tabs on your favorite band. Often, it’s easier to open a new tab than to try to find the open tab you already have.
Aza Raskin
Tabs are weird. I don’t use them. Ostensibly they keep your desktop uncluttered and free of too many windows. I think Tab Candy is proof positive that some people have migrated one level deeper, and they’ve come to believe the browser is the operating system. Certainly the browser makers like it that way. I just wish Aza Raskin were doing this work for an OS vendor instead.
Tabs became popular largely because the window management on Windows XP was so horrific that browsers needed their own mini-manager to keep from clogging up the task bar. Years later, Microsoft has unfucked the task bar and now browser makers are scrambling to keep people from clogging up their tab bars. So we have tab groups and groups of tab groups: virtual desktops and a whole pseudo-ZUI built into a browser.
You want to know how I keep from having too many windows open? I close windows. And if I want to come back to read something later I use a quaint technology called a bookmark.