I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end.
For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique.
I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.
The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link.
So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.
It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway.
And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised.
@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use.
Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)
@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.