This isn’t true. Chrome on macOS will literally stop showing you new tabs altogether once you have too many which is the worst solution I can think of.

One of the best trade-offs is to stop shrinking tabs at some point and let you scroll them.

> Chrome solved this a decade ago... just keep shrinking the tabs down to Favicon size or smaller. Safari just added Favicon images last year, and I don't even think they're visible by default.

Don't give them too much credit. For a very long time, the minimum size for chrome tabs resulted in them hiding the favicon, becoming a completely useless row of triangles. And to add insult to injury, the tabs were still big enough to show favicons if they wanted to.

Even when you have a lot of Chrome tabs open, you still mostly always see the favicon.

When it stop showing the favicons, that's when you really know you have too many tabs open.

It's a bit of a feature, really. The tabs are still completely usable, but not seeing the favicons was just annoying enough that it changed my behavior and would cause me to finally close a bunch of my open tabs.

If you had a small window it could happen with a pretty small number of tabs. It was bad.

My current tab bar on 10.15.7 with Safari 14, you don't even need to upgrade to Big Sur. Cmd + hover lets you preview a page or close it.

https://i.imgur.com/NS6Zjd6.png

Cmd doesn't do anything. The preview shows up on hover after a second.

Cmd allows you to close the tab without activating it.

You should be able to do that too without holding down command.