Just hazarding a guess, but I've noticed that people who have $TEXAS tabs open tend to use tabs the way I use Instapaper -- as a means of tracking interesting content they want to remember to read at some point.

I realize this is OT, but speaking as a tab hoarder, there's no justifiable reason for the behavior. And I'm not exaggerating when I use the term hoarder -- it's the same principle as hoarding physical goods, since the personal justification is always "they're important and I might need them someday". At any given moment I have 2 windows with about 30-40 tabs each. I even downloaded a chrome plugin called session buddy that lets me restore previous windows in the event of an accidental computer restart.

The unfinished reading weighs me down every day, but I keep them open anyway. Some days I get productive and read a half dozen tabs, but never anything substantial. It's an embarrassing "problem."

Awesome / useless plugin idea: an artificial time bomb that removes the tab and all traces of the website from your history after being open longer than some period of time (e.g. one week). Obviously a bookmark circumvents this dilemma, but the problem itself isn't rational to begin with.

I use them as a replacement for bookmarks. My browser chrome is ridiculously small, just tabs, so no bookmark bar, and if I did bookmark everything into the bookmark system (which is hidden under several mouse clicks), I'd have to keep it organised, whereas tabs are at least in chronological order (approximately), which is more useful than alphabetic order when I'm looking for something without knowing what it is called.

Pretty much this. I keep tabs as temporary bookmarks, usually related to projects I am busy with at the time. I have regular cleanups where I bookmark any tabs that are long term keepers and delete the rest.