I agree there needs to be some reboot. Browsers could really help the user more. Regarding the apps breaking out, if we did away with tabs this could help, improve or rethink window management.
I was trying to think what's the difference between a 'frozen' web page / state and a bookmark. There is a difference, but for some pages, a bookmark is enough. I've always thought that tabs are really just perhaps a more convenient bookmark, but they are prone to abuse. Restarting Firefox with howevever many tabs, doesn't now reload all tabs like in the past. You loose state, but they are lighter in weight.
I like tabs. They needn't be to specific pages, however. And I hugely dislike horizontal tabs -- tree-style tabs (available as an extension on Firefox) give you additional cues of position and nesting, and can show far more context even in a busy browser session (and all my browser sessions are busy).
A bookmark doesn't retain where you are on a page. Only the page's location.
Bookmarks also don't relate to your current browser session. I usually organize mine by topic. For current task work what I want is a stack or other less-organized list that I can skip back and forth on.
Firefox's session restore was configurable. I'm a few revs back on Debian (24.4.0), so I'm not sure what all's changed recently.
Yes state as in where you are in a page isn't stored in the bookmark. I get that. I've tried loads of tab extensions. That one was broken for me when I tried it. I still think this is window manager / desktop manager territory, grouping: tasks, pages, apps, sessions.
Perhaps listening to a passage of text and typing some notes and reading a web page belong to a given task, and I might want to stash that away and pick it up later. Although I'm probably kidding myself thinking I can multi-task, and manage multiple tasks, sessions. Freezing one or two though might be useful.
I was trying to think what's the difference between a 'frozen' web page / state and a bookmark. There is a difference, but for some pages, a bookmark is enough. I've always thought that tabs are really just perhaps a more convenient bookmark, but they are prone to abuse. Restarting Firefox with howevever many tabs, doesn't now reload all tabs like in the past. You loose state, but they are lighter in weight.