My open tabs constitute a much smaller percentage of my total browsing than the history, even though there's useful stuff in both.

Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.

It's almost useful to think of creating two "close tab" buttons -- one that sends the tab to the searchable service, and one that just ditches it.

> Speculating (extrapolating?) for someone who keeps a lot of tabs open: tabs represent desired history, closed tabs represent stuff they might specifically want to ignore.

Yes, it's basically an effortless replacement for bookmarks. Especially if you have Tree Style Tabs or equivalent, opening a link in a new tab creates a child tab that treats the parent as a folder. For example, the way I use it, all HN posts are children of the homepage, and the homepage can be opened/closed like a folder in the sidebar. These go arbitrarily deep, so interesting links from that thread become children of the thread, etc etc.

I also wonder this. I feel burdened if I have more than 9 tabs open.

W.r.t. the difference to browser history though: I literally never find stuff when looking through my browser history. I either forgot on which website I found something, or what the name of the tab was. I sometimes wish that searching the browser history also searches through some additional metadata, like the sites description meta tag or something like that.

The browser history also contains all the pages that shouldn’t be searched / aren’t interesting, making searching more difficult