Tabs and I just can't be together

We need to talk. It's not me, it's you. You're just really busy at the moment. I'm just moving too fast. You need some space.

Tabbed user interfaces are really meant for grouping collections of user-interactables into logically categorised, more manageable arrangements. More than 5 tabs and you should be thinking "This isn't great," more than 10 tabs and you should already be thinking about making changes.

Enter Firefox, where I seldom have fewer than 30 tabs open at any given time. Anyone, who has tried to use Firefox once the tab bar starts getting wider than the window, knows that this UI is a square peg in a hole that doesn't exist. Tab widths are almost always greater than tab heights, so who thought it was a good idea to have tab bars run horizontally?

Fortunately some people have realised that disaster is afoot. I like Aza's suggestion that web apps are treated more like OS X dock items than plain old tabs.

My current approach to tab management is a rudimentary grouping mechanism, based around the awesome Tree Style Tab Firefox extension: Once I have a bunch of tabs open on a particular topic, I create a blank tab, set its address to data:text/html,<title>Sci-fi</title> (or whatever the relevant category is) and dump the relevant tabs in there. A recent addition to my management policies is "shelving" a tab group that I haven't interacted with for a while, meaning I bookmark a tab group and close all the tabs. Being able to reduce the number of active tabs (usually in the region of 10 to 20) really helps with Firefox startup times. I just wish I could navigate my tabs without the mouse (filtering, selecting, etc.)

Alexander Limi has a great post about approaching redesigning tabs. However, one sentence troubles me greatly:

The first thing people say when we indicate that we are looking into alternative approaches is usually “But I like my tabs. Please don’t take away my tabs!”

People really say this? Who are they? They can have all my confounded tabs! I want something better than tabs.