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I'm going to say the reason is more simple. Opening tabs is a nicer user experience than opening up one app after another.

• mbrubeck 14y ago
  Yes, yes, yes! Browsers, even mobile browsers which are still fairly rudimentary[1], have evolved a whole host of useful interactions like loading new tabs in the background to "fork" your session, using bookmarks and history to return to a previous state, back/forward/reload buttons, links that you can copy into email or other web pages, etc. These might not seem very interesting because we take them for granted these days, but it's really powerful that they work across every site and can be further customized on the client side by browsers or add-ons. People complain that web apps don't behave "natively" and need to reinvent things that native apps get for free. This is true. But native apps also need to reinvent things like bookmarking and tabs that web apps get for free -- or in most cases they simply live without these things and people miss them without realizing it. I like that some of the web's UI language like the back button is finding its way into operating systems like Android, at the same time that native app capabilities are finding their way into browsers. But browsers still have the edge in "advanced" navigation. [1] disclosure: I'm a mobile Firefox developer.