I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs opened in Firefox on 8GB RAM and it works well, while ~30-50 is an upper limit of what Chrome can do without bringing the whole system to swapping hell. Plus, Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable, while vanilla Firefox works well and can also offer massive improvements like vertical tabs.
> I typically have hundreds, sometimes low thousands of tabs
They should probably ditch all in-memory stuff, and just use the drive, so they can support those cases when you really want to have a "low millions of tabs open."
Okay. Hands down here. Never could get this kind of use case, never had such an experience either, so may be by the time you have 1000+ tubs Chrome does kill itself.
>Chrome's tab UI makes more tabs completely unusable
True, thankfully we have extensions that deal with this (I've been using Keepin' Tabs for this, until I started using cVim)
I have 9 virtual desktops; I typically have browsers in 6-7 of them for various in-progress tasks. That's somewhere between 6 and 14 browser windows (I can fit two side by side on my screen), with multiple tabs in each.
Finding things is easy. Even ignoring the per-task categorization by desktop, Firefox lets you search all your tab titles/urls: just type "% " in the URL bar followed by your search string. If I'm looking for something specific, this is the simplest way to find it.
I easily reach a hundred tabs with Tree Style Tabs when researching a topic. The tree structure makes it easy to understand how you've navigated the web and to traceback where you came from. When I found what I've what I was looking for I start closing tabs. The ones that remain is my catch and I save the URLs and/or contents.