There is an extension for chrome (and I think Firefox) called "The Great Suspender". It gives user control of individual tabs, allowing you to manually or automatically suspend processes/tabs. That save a lot of real memory, making overall faster experience AND allowing many more open tabs without slowing your system to a crawl. Even a bunch of video tabs, which are the most ram intensive.
I use a lot of tabs, but use very few resources at one time. I just counted, 3 windows, each on a separate screen, with 81 tabs.
Sounds crazy, and probably would be impossible without the extension. But I go and clean up when I have time, which can be a dozen or more for a particular subject i am researching, website I am programming etc.
Related to this, another extension called "One Tab", allows one to groups a series of tabs into one tab. It can expand/contract a groups of tabs and also free up their memory.
Hope that helps, whichever browser you decide to use. 
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