As your approach is "Browser as IDE", have you thought of.. actually putting tabs next to tabs, inside of the main window?
Like Jupyter Notebook, but for websites?
After all, we all mostly do research and there is an action that springs out of our browsing activity. If that action is 'writing stuff down', why not do it directly in the browser?
While I update it to newer Chromium versions regularly and use it as my main browser with great success, the lack of community interest in the project limits my desire to put much work in to new features unless I really want them.
This article and the idea of tab history solidify an approach that I have always taken to browsing that I've dubbed "immutable browsing". I ctrl+click every link to make a child and only purge the roots of the tree to roll up the children when the roots habe no value to me anymore. On a Wikipedia or Github project spelunking expedition, I can get many levels deep, sometimes ctrl+clicking dozens of pages as background child pages from a single page.
0 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/guide/page-tree#workspaces 1 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/guide/bubble