You don't use all of the tabs, just the last 20 or so. Based on these you open new tabs, if they contain better information you close the old ones. What gets left over are tabs with the highest quality information (and pages that contain links, like google search results and sometimes some other junk, it's not a perfect process). When you return to a topic you then look though them to jog your memory. You can search though tabs with %.

I find bookmarks cumbersome to use. I do use them to bookmark the tabs periodically, so they don't get lost.

Rotation is a perfectly fine transformation, you should try it sometimes.