IE cannot handle this, menu items disappear as memory runs low, FireFox used to just up and die losing my sessions, and Chrome simply handles it but has become slow and bloated over the past year or three.
I can use Sessionbuddy to find things of interest from past sessions if I close them to recover memory, I can hover over a minimized window to get a list of the windows and find a "project" and in general I find this works pretty well for me. This session is 24 windows and 114 tabs and I'm finding that it's not really too responsive right now 16gig memory and sadly cannot use more due to the OS version I'm running - grr! Oh my sessions are synched across hardware so my browsers all have the same plug-ins and I can pull window history too as needed. My current largest saved session contains 517 tabs across 161 windows. Sessionbuddy allows me to keep these across sessions. I tend to use a google search as an anchor and multiple tabs after as I dig in deeply. Then there's my various web forums for car interests, parts searches, research into various electronic projects, Youtube videos and well you get the idea. Ditto' kitchen cabinets and other things. Do a google search on electrical wiring? Each result of interest is a new tab.
If I begin researching say wood flooring for my home that's a separate page or two filled with tabs. Then there's the other pages that vary wildly. Sadly Chrome sux for ESX so I have some damned IE windows open for consoles and monitoring.
A second page full of tabs reaches to internal pages for various software setup for my home and HTPC type stuff - Plex, PlexPy, Webmin, my NAS, SAB, and a bunch of others to handle a few VMs. This set includes pages to each of my web email accounts too. I have a main set of tabs for news sites - Slashdot is one of them, CNN, BBC, Drudge, whatever I feel like monitoring - stocks for instance. In the result, the person found that Firefox startup time has gotten worse over time. Test scenario: I took my 1691 tab browser profile, and did a wall-clock measurement of start-up time and memory use for Firefox versions 20, 30, 40, and 50 through 56. While the major work has landed, the work continues in Bug 906076. A lot of the improvement in this particular scenario is from Kevin Jones' work on bringing the overall cost of unloaded tabs as close to zero as possible. Part of this effort is a project called Quantum Flow - a bunch of engineers making changes that directly impact Firefox responsiveness. And I've been at Mozilla for more than a decade. well, since I've been working on Firefox. Right now, more effort is being put into making Firefox fast than I've seen since. And then, quite recently, everything changed. I got used to multi-minute startup time, waiting 15-30 seconds for tabs from external apps to show up, and all manner of non-responsive behavior.
As you would expect, Firefox handled this profile quite poorly for a long time. An anonymous reader shares a blog post: I've got a Firefox profile with 1691 tabs.