I love the tabbed browsing in Firefox. But if you’re like me, you launch your browser and notice a couple of hours later that you’ve got 17 browser windows open, each of which has somewhere between 3 and 11 tabs. So how do you go back to a particular page you were looking at before? Each window only lists its own tabs; the Window pull-down only names windows by the title of the forefronted tab. Somewhere, buried in a back tab, is the page you’re looking for….
Take the other day when I launched a podcast (a long Jon Udell interview), then did some other stuff, then had to leave for a while. The podcast was still droning on, and I wanted to find the page and stop it. But where is it? Sure, I could have just quit Firefox, but I actually like the are-you-sure question about killing windows with multiple tabs, so I would have had to answer that question a bunch of times, and I thought there was something I wanted in one of those windows anyway, and I was kind of in a _hurry_ and … I turned the sound off and left. 🙂
(Yes, there’s no feature so nice that someone (like me) won’t find something to complain about. 🙂 )
Tim Converse 
Have you tried nightlies of Firefox 2?
If Mozilla freezes or quits you can restore all your previously open tabs. The History menu has a “Recently Closed Tabs” browse. Open tabs can be viewed using a small drop down on the top-right for easier access.
Firefox 3 should have support for Places, allowing you to search your history files for something you know you’ve seen recently.
You do know that you can set up firefox to force all your new pages to open as tabs in one unique window, don’t you?
The Session Manager extension would also help you. It helps eliminate “tab rot.”
If you use TabMixPlus to force all windows into one instance, you’ll be set.
http://www.yald.com/cleaning-out-firefox-tab-rot