Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list.

They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switch the browser. But Firefox is the last relevant non-Chromium browser and I dislike Chromium and its derivatives for various reasons.

Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.

I just open more browser windows.

tree style tabs or something like that probably

And that you are lucky with the file not being corrupted on crash.

The reason I have thousands of tabs open is that Firefox stopped losing tabs on crash/restart in recent years... a decade or more ago this would not be a "problem".

Not sure which way around you're suggesting, but at my first job out of university I had a colleague at the other end of his career; we each (without either influencing the other) had hundreds of tabs open at a time. I don't think it's generational.

I have four Sidebery 'panels' assigned to FF containers; I try to keep each down to ~30, but one or more of them will frequently go well over 100 when I'm in the middle of looking into something, spanning months.

For example, a few weeks ago I hacked together a WiFi-serial adapter for my Prusa Mini, so that I coule use it with Octoprint et al. remotely. I thought I'd like to write it up into a blog post, on the blog I haven't got around to setting up, so until I do - or until I admit I won't - all the tabs from me stumbling through forum threads, the printer firmware, reminding myself how to do embedded anything, ... are all still open as both a reminder to write it, and an aid when/if I do.

Same here. The only time I have more than 10 open is when I'm mass opening gallery links or reading some forum threads, but I rarely have more than 5-6 going at a time.