I somehow forgot about the true need to close a tab sometimes. This problem is much harder than I thought. But, one thing that I don't think will ever work is a

I somehow forgot about the true need to close a tab sometimes. This problem is much harder than I thought. But, one thing that I don't think will ever work is a large intermediate screen (as the mockup) as the primary method of switching tabs/pages. Most users (especially those on Windows) don't expect to see large intermediate screens (things like alt-tab are tiny). And I'm wary of two or more methods of switching, such as regular tabs plus the full-screen approach. It would kind of bring the full-screen method into an "analytics" category that most users would never use to their advantage. Is a full-screen tab switcher intended to be the primary method of switching? The problem is especially tricky because users have already adapted their mental models of browsing to non-ideal tabs. This might require a very slow transition into an ideal navigation method. The "find a tab using location bar" approach is heading in the right direction. I'm much more interested in improving the usability of existing horizontal (and vertical) tabs, since that's what users are used to. I don't have a compromise yet (if ever) but I would base it on these assumptions, which may not apply to everyone: 1) Just because a page has a tab, doesn't mean it needs to stay in memory (for most pages) 2) Keeping tabs, in-tab page history, and global history fragmented is awful 3) Firefox's history pane is unusable, which partly accounts for tab proliferation (for many users - how many?) As a side note, one of the reasons I like Tree Style Tabs is that it brings the webpage text closer to the center of the screen. As long as the screen is at least 1280 pixels wide, it's usually better for me. edit: but, it is kind of useless if the visual noise bothers you. It doesn't bug me; I like to see a lot of information on multiple monitors, as long as nothing changes in the background.