TL;DR version: Modern browsers need to learn a lesson from Emacs and keyboard launchers and provide an interface for tab-switching that is keyboard search-as-you-type based.  Firefox is the best browser to implement this on, since it is very extensible.
The Extensibility of Firefox
Mozilla recently hosted a Summer Design Challenge for 2009 that focused on “Reinventing Tabs [...]

Introduction
When I program, I sometimes am fortunate enough to see beauty emerge from what I do. I love programming because of this, but, enthusiastic as I am about it, I find that it is very hard to convey the essence of what I see to others, which often means that they cannot understand what I [...]

Though perputually on the verge of total disorganization in the physical realm, I try to keep my digital world very organized.  Because of this, I habitually try to move more and more of my life into a digital representation, which allows easy backup, searching and reorganization.  Although I have tried many free and proprietary software [...]

So after it became painfully apparent that:

Twitter was an attractive idea
Twitter didn’t really fit with the distributed nature of the web
Twitter didn’t scale all that well

an obvious opportunity emerged: build a better mousetrap, err, Twitter. And that is exactly what the Laconica software does. Built by Control Yourself, and hosted on their site [...]