Oh, yes, SO's hot network questions is a hardcore distraction for me, too. Even for things I really don't care about! Like all those workplace drama questions (do so many people really think going to HR is going to do them any good at all?). The extension you linked is a very interesting concept, something I hadn't thought about using before. But I like the idea of paying a little bit of thought up front to help keep things from exploding down the line. Thanks!
SO's hot network questions was so bad that I enabled my ad-blocker on SO and added a custom rule to hide that part of the page. At least now when I go to find an answer on SO without falling in a 30-60 min rabbit hole.
The extremist view in this sense is that tabs in general are a bad model for navigation. If all the pages you choose to visit are first-level citizens in your environment (windows) then you think about them more actively. A browser like https://surf.suckless.org simplifies the browser abstraction well in these regards. I have found it is nearly impossible to get common browsers to work without tabs. This kind of endeavour probably begets a correct window manager like https://i3wm.org
I strongly agree. I had to stop using Surf because of its ancient rendering engine which butchers a lot of the sensible parts of the modern web, but I do miss the tabless part of it.
Edit: Also because it does not have Pentadactyl. My dream browser would be tabless and with sensible and powerful Vim bindings. Ideally built on an engine of Common Lisp too...
Have you looked at luakit? It's also based on webkit2gtk but it's extensible with Lua; I love the simplicity of suckless tools but when a functionality that seems good must be patched in it rarely ends well.
Also regarding Vi keybindings check out vimb maybe?
Omg, do you remember the milk boiled in electric kettle incident? That's the only time I've seen something get posted to Workplace and then have follow up questions go to (iirc) Interpersonal Skills and then Physics.