How to best handle many breadcrumbs

Question

I have a site that allows users to dig arbitrarily deep into a graph, and the user can always use breadcrumbs to navigate back to where s/he first began.

Here's the ideal state:

However this quickly gets unwieldily. See below for when the user navigates very deep into the graph:

How should I best handle this case? Some approaches that I'm thinking about:

• Only show last 3 crumbs
• Allow horizontal scroll (seems painful)
• Show first crumb, ..., then the last two crumbs

Answer 1

I had the same problem and with some research find out that the way windows handles the problem is best practice and many users are used to it.

windows shows as many last crumbs as it fits and puts a button '<<' at the beginning that clicking on it opens a drop down with all hidden crumbs.