You can of course search open tabs from the address bar. But at least my workflow is to browse through the old tabs and read / close one by one.

Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.

I use Tree Style Tab for this, although I hate the actual tree functionality - it just happens to be the only reasonable vertical tab solution I've found. Unfortunately, it seems to get a little bit laggy with more than a couple hundred tabs.

Unless you specifically tweak the UI to enable really small tabs, which is among the first things I do on a fresh install. Favicon + a small number of pixels for padding, way way less than Google allows me to get away with! Slap on a bunch of tab groups and I'm set.

I'm quite comfortable with a tab group filled to the point where the tab bar only displays favicons, but hasn't gotten to the point where it lets me scroll yet. That way I can rely on spatial memory to get to the right tab, without necessarily seeing the title!

Of course, searching for the right tab is an option, just like you said. I love the fact that Firefox also activates the correct tab group automatically.

In all honesty chrome is by far and away the worst at handeling large numbers of tabs of all the browsers (bar perhaps version of IE).

Chrome is pretty special. "Oh, you have too many tabs to fit, time to hide the favicons."

Ironically, Chrome on Android handles this better than Chrome on the desktop. I have 15 tabs open on desktop Chrome right now, and it's getting a bit cramped. My Note 4? 33.

I said tab but I don't actually use the UI concept of a "tab", though I could by M-x tab-bar-mode, because you're right it doesn't scale very well to large numbers, in my experience

I use buffers (in Conkeror). Buffers are just tabs without the actual tab UI. So unless I'm switching buffers, the only visible UI difference between having one buffer and 2000 buffers is the string "[2011/2011]" in my status-line showing my current buffer number and total number of buffers.

I can press C-x b (switch-to-buffer, I bind to M-a) to show a filterable list of my current buffers (favicon, url, title). I can type part of the url or page title (even when tab is unloaded) to filter my buffer list before switching to one. I can also navigate tabs "spatially" (from tab #2 to either tab #1 or #3) or by recently used (bury/unbury-buffer or switch-to-recent-buffer which shows buffer list in most recently used order) or by domain (next-buffer-same-host) or by whether the buffer is playing audio (switch-to-audio-buffer).

Also, in the vast majority of cases I only access recent tabs near the end of the list. I can press 9 or 0 to go to my second-to-last or last buffer.

I don't quite have that many tabs open but I find that grouping tabs into separate browser windows and taking advantage of your window manager goes a long way.

If you are interested in grouping the tabs, have a look at this addon:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

It allows you to use your tab-list in a hierarchical way, sort of like a filesystem. I group things under obvious roots, and then collapse it till needed.

ctrl-shift-e should open a canvas like area where you can group tabs. Similar to a file folder, I prefer it to bookmarks

Interesting, but seems to be very basic. I still prefer using a wm. I can use different layouts, group windows into hierarchies, display them side by side, take advantage of tiling, use workspaces and have configurable keys for each of these actions. You know, functions that a wm is built for.

And I can always switch to a different wm altogether if I'm not comfortable.

Once you get used to the tab groups they can be very powerful. I use them for contexts myself; one for casual browsing, one for development for client x, one for client y etc, one for research, and the list goes on.

Obviously you can easily achieve the same thing in separate windows as well, so ultimately I suppose it doesn't make a huge difference, but it's the way I find makes for the biggest difference in separating workspaces.

I use the "Tree Style Tab" add-on

The favicon is ok. I close them when there is no space to display the favicon.