Best Way to Handle on Unknown Number of Tabs

Question

I'm currently on a project where a user can add "tabs" to their page. Something like:

Home | About | Blog | Cats | Music I Like

They are allowed to enter as many tabs as they want (well, in theory. Business side may put a limit of 50 or so).

What is a good way to handle an unknown number of tabs?

Management is leaning toward a drop down to handle them when there are too many:

Home | About | Blog | Cats | Music I Like | More v
                                            Vegetables
                                            Friends
                                            Places I've been
                                            Projects
                                            TV Shows

But this presents problems like how to show the user what tab they're on.

I also see a lot of places using horizontal scroll:

< Home | About | Blog | Cats | Music I Like >

While my browser does this with its tabs and I like it, I personally don't like this solution for pure-text tabs. But I'm open to arguments about it.

Has anyone ever worked with a similar situation? What did you ultimately settle on? How did your users like your solution?

Requirements:

• Having horizontal "tabs" is a requirement; a vertical list is not acceptable.
• No paging allowed
• There is no concept of grouping, so the concept of organizing tabs and clicking on one to reveal related tabs does not exist.
• There is no concept or "relevance". Tabs will not be organized by date or popularity, they will be organized arbitrarily by the user.

Answer 1

The goal of a tab in this instance appears to be similar to the purpose of the bookmark bar at the top of most browsers:

Since the purpose is close to identical, I would recommend emulating the functionality and terminology as well. Don't call it tabs, don't visually emulate tabs; instead, call it a 'saved shortcuts' bar, and treat it like a list of saved shortcuts.

This simplifies implementation, as well as providing some obvious UI suggestions, such as supporting users dragging and dropping shortcuts onto the list, display favicons (if they can have different icons; if they are all internal and will always be identical then there is no purpose), highlight/buttonize on hover, etc.

By emulating an existing UI that serves the same purpose, you can build upon both the research done by these other designers, as well as the user expectations that have been built up about how this functionality should work.