It's extremely navigable in every single browser with vertical side tabs. It's only impossible to manage in the one browser that tore the functionality out, Chrome. They know, and admit, that their browser makes navigation of many tabs difficult. And they claim to be toying with different ideas of setting up the navigation, but at a very low priority.

In the bug tracking thread, I asked the developers what their 'recommended' means of browsing was, because I honestly can't figure out how Chrome is meant to be used, aside from the trite 'Facebook in one tab, email in the other' use scenario it seems to be optimized for. If I open up Reddit, and I see 8 stories that interest me... clearly opening them in 8 separate tabs would be unusable, I'd never be able to tell which tab I was switching to next as the width of the tabs would be tiny. So... what options are there? Some people mentioned opening multiple windows, which is just inane. Then you have to remember which window you opened a given page in, and you only buy yourself another 10 usable tabs or so. So, click on the first story that interests me, leaving Reddit, and after finishing reading that one, I should go back and hope the other stories are still there? And if I happened across a few interesting links on the first story, I just need to ignore them or maybe come back to them later, assuming I can ever find that story again, or remember what links were where?

Especially with something like the TabTree extension in Firefox, tabs opened from one page simply expand down from the page they are opened from. Pages stay grouped easily. You click on the Reddit tabgroup and all the pages you opened from Reddit (and their subpages) are right there in the tree. You can easily switch back and forth between topics, not having to remember or backtrack or anything. But Google has so much scorn for this browsing style that they actually risked introducing bugs in their application by having a developer go in and tear their basic vertical tabs functionality out.

They got 200+ comments on the bug thread begging for vertical tabs to be restored (they were never even a visible feature - you had to find out how to enable them by setting instance variables in the advanced settings page) and just closed down the comments thread to try to get people to go away. People still keep re-creating the thread though, amazed that Chrome would get rid of this extremely basic and entirely necessary functionality. They say they don't like the solution of vertical tabs, so out they go.

Right now I have 5 tabs open in this window (one of 3) at work. They're on a horizontal tab bar. And already their functionality is crap. I have Newegg tab open and I get to see "Newegg.com - Computer ...". Oh how helpful. What the fuck is in that tab? I can't tell from the user interface because I have the audacity to have 4 other pages open. God help me if I had 10. If those tabs were on the left hand side of my nice wide-ass screen (which is wasting about 4 solid inches of screen real estate over to the right of my messages page) I'd know if that were the hard drives category or maybe system fans or something like that. And I'd have room for 50 more tabs or so before I ever even had to THINK about not being able to see everything I have open at a single glance.