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The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

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Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#191

Wow. I've been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh. Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it. I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the severa…

Firefox already does this - that's why it's the awesome bar. You can see it in action here https://youtu.be/pKE0Oc3yIBs?t=53

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I start doing that, but have made an effort to always start a week with a fresh browser, one tab open. If I haven't read the article before the week was up, clearly it wasn't important enough.

In principle I agree, but in practice... I can't let go of my hoarding ways. What if there's a nugget of information hiding in all those tabs that could ︎ change my life?

I call it "information hoarding". The struggle is real.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#193
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.

For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs. This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was l…

Is there an extension that can display tab history as an actual tree?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#194
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant" Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?

I'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.

Or that you don't know which tabs will be useful until you open them, and your qualification process is multi-pass.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#195
post #39

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

Serious example: learning a new subfield. You start with the general article in wikipedia, trying to get a gist of the field. Cue 20 or more wiki pages for new terms and ideas. As you learn the terms, you get ideas and have to see if they have been done before. Cue up another 20~30 tabs of searches. Eventually start looking at articles. Each one has 10 figures which can be opened in new tabs for high-resolution viewing, and about half of them have supplementary information which is best viewed concurrently. Add transient personal tasks, email, any other searches (online shopping), and it is not uncommon to see 150 or more tabs. Then as the project winds down the tabs get whittled down, too. Then start looking at the detailed references. After just a week of reading, you can easily end up with 100 tabs of "things to read later.the course of a week long re 10 tabs of other references and things that I searched for, but won't s

Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#196
post #39

I'm really glad that people at Mozilla use ridiculous numbers of tabs too. Lazy-loading of tabs is the reason I switched to firefox. I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup. So even if you only had 100 tabs, you were looking at 5+ minute startup time. God-forbid that any of them were Youtube, or you'd have to go through and pause them all. I've just updated to Firefox 55 to t…

So even if you only had 100 tabs This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?

Serious example: learning a new subfield. You start with the general article in wikipedia, trying to get a gist of the field. Cue 20 or more wiki pages for new terms and ideas. As you learn the terms, you get ideas and have to see if they have been done before. Cue up another 20~30 tabs of searches. Eventually start looking at articles. Each one has 10 figures which can be opened in new tabs for high-resolution viewing, and about half of them have supplementary information which is best viewed concurrently. Add transient personal tasks, email, any other searches (online shopping), and it is not uncommon to see 150 or more tabs. Then as the project winds down the tabs get whittled down, too. Then start looking at the detailed references. After just a week of reading, you can easily end up with 100 tabs of "things to read later.the course of a week long re 10 tabs of other references and things that I searched for, but won't s

Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of ways, my open tabs are my to-do list. Some of them are things that I need to do, some are "I want to read this article when I have time", some are long term research. I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever. So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consi…

Also, 150 isn't really that many, resource-wise. A modern computer should be able to handle that trivially . So even if my use case was unreasonable (I obviously don't think it is, obviously), there's no good reason a browser shouldn't still be able to support it well.

Modern webpages aren't just electric paper though. Often they are very dynamic and interactive applications. (Regardless of whether or not the content warrants it)

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the Web is as much to blame as Chrome. Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.

Damn, I should have waited to comment. I even phrased it the same way. /me smh

Ha! Echo chamber indeed.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#199
post #98
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same feeling. Seems like they are using tabs as a history. A better history may solve their problem.

Sure a better history along with bookmarks and a pile of things could indeed fix my problem. But using tabs also fixes my problem perfectly well.

That is delusional.

So “perfectly well” that it was slow, broken, and had to be specifically optimized for? So instead of advancing browsing for everyone, Mozilla made it so a few idiots wouldn’t complain that “Firefox is slow when I do stupid things”

There are many ways to do something, many of them are dumb

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Should be in 56: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/06/12/datetime-inputs-...

I hope it is locale-sensitive. US is the only country that uses mainly the mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the others use dd/mm/yyyy with some important exceptions (China, Japan, Korea) with yyyy/mm/dd (which happens to be the standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

actually, it’s almost never dd/mm/yyy, but dd.mm.yyy, and yyyy-mm-dd. Japan is one of the few offenders, almost everywhere else the separator can be used to identify the format.
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