I find how people use tabs a lot like how people use Excel. Excel is super flexible with thousands of features, but people only use a few of them. The rub is each person uses a different few. Tabs are similar. They are a flexible tool and people design personal workflows around them.

How I use tabs is probably nothing like how you use tabs or another random person uses them. I’m actually fascinated how people design their own workflows in this way. Anytime I see someone’s screen I end up with a ton of questions asking ‘why’.

I definitely wish that I could group tabs when I am working. I keep groups of tabs together, and these tab groups have long lifetimes. I also open various differently size windows depending on the content of each page. All of this is to work around the mess of "good enough" user interfaces that I deal with everyday. If I see myself opening more "ad hoc" tabs, I closed them as soon as I can. I don't need any more chaos.

Right now I am not at work, and I have three browser windows open and there are no scroll bars. I have managed to turn off tabs for the most part using Firefox userChrome.css and about:config. If I need another browser page, I'll open another browser window. When I have more than 4 or 5 browser windows I start stacking/offsetting the windows.

Unfortunately, "Tabs" are modes. http://www.nomodes.com/

I’m on chrome, but I’m using them through a simple development extension I wrote which examines the url of ungrouped tabs and adds matching tabs to a few predetermined groups that I’ve hard-coded into the JavaScript. It was a quick and dirty hack that took me about 30 min to setup, but it’s made the tab grouping functionality so much more useful.

I’m toying with the idea of adding an options page so that I could release it to the chrome store, but I hate UI work, so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.

I keep 2 browser windows, each with 10+ tabs. One is those with short lifetimes, as you mention. The other is a "reminder list" of things I want to defer for a few hours.

I maintain separate windows, but they still end up with 30+ tabs each.