Safari 4 Beta: Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs
Firefox 3.x/3.1-3.5 Beta: Scrolling Carousel Tab Bar + Menu of All Tabs
Chrome 1/2: Compact as Many Tabs in View As Possible (a.k.a. No Solution)
Opera 9/10 Alpha: Compact as Many Tabs in View As Possible (a.k.a. No Solution)
Internet Explorer 7: Scrolling Carousel Tab Bar + Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs
Camino 1.x: Menu of Visible and Hidden Tabs
Surprisingly, Internet Explorer, the last of the current big browsers to implement tabs and generally seen as playing catchup with the rest, has shown the most complete system today for managing tabs in version 7, which naturally carries over to the recently released version 8. It allows both scrolling of tabs left and right, while distinguishing the visible and hidden portions of the tab bar in the tab list menu. Although it strikes me as odd that they decided to place the menu on the left, when tabs are created and spilled over on the right.
On top of that, it also offers a grid of thumbnails of the open pages, all out of the box. I'm not accounting for extensions or plugins for any of these browser comparisons because I'm concerned with what comes out of the box, which is generally what most users will use, and what you and I will use on a computer with restricted privileges, or a computer we're using as a guest.
Organizing Groups of Tabs in Windows
In the past few years, we saw browsers answer our micromanagement desires by finally giving us the option to drag tabs to rearrange their order. Some browsers took it a step further and allowed us to tear tabs off a window and onto another. Most mainstream browsers seem to have taken cues from each other and implemented this functionality more or less the same way.
Safari (3 and) 4 Beta: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview
* The difference was that with Safari 4 Beta, the tabs could now only be dragged from the edges because of their new location at the top as both tabs and titlebar, contrary to Chrome.
Opera 9 (and 10 Alpha): Draggable, Tearable Tabs
* The behavior in version 10 Alpha is still the same. It remains to be seen whether the future beta and release versions will add previews.
Firefox 3.1/3.5 Beta: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview
* Tabs could only be dragged within the same window in and before version 3.0.x.
Chrome 1 and 2: Draggable, Tearable Tabs with Preview
Internet Explorer 7: Draggable Tabs
Camino 1.x: Nothing
We'll see whether this will change with Camino 2.x Alpha.
Chrome and Firefox have the best approaches, as they allow tabs to be dragged or torn off from the full area of the tab. Safari 4 Beta introduced an oddball by doubling the tabs as a titlebar and draggable, tearable tabs. That meant that from 3 to 4 Beta, the draggable area shrunk to the right corner, leaving the us to awkwardly drag the window by the "titlebar" area in the tiny center of the tab, avoiding the drag area to the right and the [x] close button to the left. Firefox and Chrome provide distinct draggable areas to move the window alone, and to place it in and out of focus. Opera and Internet Explorer 7 are missing previews of tabs as they're being dragged, and IE 7 doesn't provide tab tearing. Camino 1.x offers nothing.
Conclusion
By now, most of the modern browsers (and probably many of the unmentioned browsers) have addressed the problem of what to do with tabs when heavily multitasking. To recap, there seems to be two major approaches - provide a contextual menu listing active tabs from left to the right, with grayed out items above or below for hidden items to the left or right respectively; or allow a carousel-like horizontal scrolling of the tabs in the bar to access the hidden tabs on either side. For moving tabs between windows, tearing off tabs (with previews) from one window to another is the most comprehensive form of a common approach.
What ever happens, the fact that we are in the middle of a second golden age of browsers with healthy competition means a lot of good for all of us users and developers.
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