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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

#221

Post by jamesrcole »

fletchowns wrote: post #154
awalton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about. Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch o…

Ok let's say you remember seeing something on a tab but couldn't remember which one it was on. How do you even begin to find that tab? With 1000 files on my file system I have any number of ways of searching not only the filenames, but also the contents of the files, visualizations based on size of the files, etc etc. I don't think it's a good comparison.

So what do you suggest is a better way to find the information, that would end up being less total work for the user?

I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#222

Post by hobs »

etiam wrote: post #218
archagon wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Frequent occurrence, in my experience. And I'm very happy about better support for this kludge, but I do wish that someone would get to the roots of the needs that cause this use of tabs, and design the correct interface for it instead.

They kind of did with Firefox, it was tab groups, started as a plugin, they integrated it, and then they dropped the feature (I assume) because almost no one (except me) used it.

You could create visual groups and lay out sets of tabs and even name the sets, and switch between them at will. It was awesome.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#223

Post by cpeterso »

glogla wrote: post #97
hammock wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice. I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.

Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?

Firefox has the same feature, though it is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel. You can use the `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground` about:config pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#224

Post by Manishearth »

elfchief wrote: post #13

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…

I use Tab Center (now Tab Center Redux), which shows you the tabs on the sidebar (great for >20 tabs). The sidebar also has a search bar to search open tabs!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#225

Post by tormeh »

fletchowns wrote: post #50
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs. Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been fro…

There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.

A breadth-first search of the web is likely to do that kind of thing. Nothing wrong with it.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#226

Post by cpeterso »

pfranz wrote: post #140
JoshTriplett wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.

Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior. But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.

Firefox has the same feature, though it is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel. You can use the `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground` about:config pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#227

Post by Manishearth »

kbrosnan wrote: post #21
elfchief wrote: post #13

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…

"% foo" will search your open tabs for foo. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... for other characters that will filter the search results for other data such as bookmarks, history, tags, etc.

And even if you don't use %, the awesomebar will include open tabs in results if it thinks them relevant!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#228

Post by syrrim »

zzalpha wrote: post #25
elfchief wrote: post #13

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…

Not to at all dispute your use case/requirements or anything, but as a depth-first browser user, I can't even fathom a world in which 150 tabs qualifies as "moderately" large, and not "how many tabs???" large. And 1000+ (as cited by a sibling poster)? Wow! I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...

I'm under the impression that no one (or at least very few people) who have 150+ tabs open at once actually use the tab metaphor, at least by itself. I've seen several people in this thread who discuss a tool for searching tabs. Such a person would seldom click on, or even look at the tabs themselves. They would only interact with tabs through the search system. They have already found a new metaphor. Another common system for dealing with large numbers of tabs is building heirarchies. For example, some people have several browser windows open, each wih several tabs in it. One could limit each window to 15 tabs, and only have 10 browser windows open. Roughly equivalent methods include firefox's tab groups and tab tree. Tab tree in particular stands out as a separate metaphor from tabs. While it maintains the ordered list of favicons & titles used by tabs, it adds a new piece of information to each tab, allowing you to more easily determine the correct tab to switch to.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#229

Post by Manishearth »

forevercrashing wrote: post #181

Surprised to see no mention of Tab Center ( https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center ) in the comments. I've gotten so used to it that now I find it hard to use a browser with tabs on top. Being able to see more of the page title when tabs are displayed horizontally is extremely useful. There's a search field too. This combined with the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" set to true in about:config (enables MRU t…

Note that Tab Center will stop working by the end of this year, but I have found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re... to be an adequate replacement!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#230

Post by [deleted] »

zdkl wrote: post #82
awalton wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare." It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about. Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch o…

> 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"?

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