the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), an

the change I'd like to see is one in which a small handful of tabs (I may easily run over 100) are considered "current and active" (foreground, pinned apps), and the rest function more as a stateful bookmark. Which, given that on crash recovery I tend to leave tabs unrefreshed until I actually open them, they largely are. That's exactly how I use tabs: I've got 77 tabs open right now, grouped into 9 different topic groups in Firefox's "Panorama" mode. Most of them are collections of information about some particular topic or other that I don't need most of the time, but when I next switch back to working on that topic I'd hate to have to find them all again. Almost none of those tabs are currently loaded into memory. In Firefox's preferences, I have "Tabs" → "Don't load tabs until selected" ticked, which means that, well, open background tabs don't load the page in question until I switch to them the first time. I think in an upcoming version of Firefox, that option is ticked by default.