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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

#251

And then there's Firefox Focus which has no tabs and no other new instance capability. One single window. "Focus" indeed. It still makes me twitchy, but is so far completely usable. Could do with a "fetch as desktop" mode, though.

How does this work in practice. I frequently have workflows where for example I have the AWS or GCloud console open and in parallel some kind of tutorial, documentation or help page I'm looking at. Would you go back and forth?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

You had all that in the old Opera browser, but people liked slower and more resource-consuming alternatives better.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

Folders of bookmarks?

Requires automatic two-way syncing. Browsers have, for a long time, supported restoring a bookmark folder into a window as tabs. But if you then change the tabs, the bookmarks aren't automatically updated. This is one of the missing pieces.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#254
post #222
post #218

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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.

I vaguely think I had the extension version at some point but it was probably in an awkward stage then.. I never really noticed the integrated version.

From the way you describe it I think it sounds like a great start for at least some of the needs driving this. I suspect in many cases heavy multi-tab use comes from a need to lay out sets of documents for use together in some sort of spatial metaphor. The traditional desktop model often does a pretty good job of covering this for local files and native programs, but I find browsers to be far weaker at supporting it.

As a complement, for the potentially-life-changing(-but-not-right-now-for-goodness-sake) things and other valuable resources I will almost certainly never find my way back to otherwise, I think it might be a nice start if I had a 1-keypress way to drop them, with metadata, into an local, indexed archive. The followup challenge to that would be a really good interface to getting stuff out again. Tools like Zotero could in principle cover the first part of this niche automatically already, but I wouldn't want the backlog archive (sluggishly) dropped together with my references without any shadow of compartmentalization, so I don't really view that as a ready solution.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while. I feel…

Firefox used to have this feature, but it was removed. You need to install this extension now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

Are the "groups" persistent and tied to the window? So if you change the tabs around, close the window, then "open" the group again, you will get exactly what you had?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#256

I'm torn between thinking it's time to switch back to Firefox, and thinking I need to avoid Firefox at all costs, because the slowdown when Chrome gets over 100+ tabs is the only thing keeping my browser windows remotely navigable. You know what I really want? A way to attach titles to browser windows. This window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work" task, this one is "Research" on t…

Check out the Firefox extension "Simplified Tab Groups" to create named groups of tabs: [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/

Holy shit. Don't have time to try it right now, but if it does what I want I probably will go back to Firefox. Thanks!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#257
post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old Opera simply used to load cache. So if you opened a tab, it was there.. for days, weeks, months, through restarts and all. I loved that. Now everything I open to "check out later" is getting lost.

This really was one of the things that Opera got better. I don't understand what the reasoning is to do this any other way.

There is no reasoning, it's only cargo-cult mentality and fashion choices. Old Opera got almost everything better, but it lost to inferior alternatives because users aren't rational when it comes to their choices. Chrome and Firefox are the OOP of browsers.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#258

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It's time to deprecate bookmarks in browsers, and add workspaces.

Don't touch my bookmarks! I have all my tabs in my headspace at all times, I need bookmarks to mentally organize my stuff in the short-term/long-term category. If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly. Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!

I get paid over $90 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing, ------------>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#259

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…

I frequently play a little game with Chrome: 1. Open up Window->Task Manager 2. Sort by CPU 3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list 4. Try not to kill extensions 5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage 6. Kill everything over 99mb 7. Continue enjoying Chrome Every time I do this little dance,…

I have a bash script called `kill-chrome-helpers` that kills all Chrome processes without terminating any Chrome windows. It kills extensions too, but whenever that happens Chrome pops up a bubble saying "click here to restore the extension", so usually I just run the script and then click a few times. The script is dead simple:

   killall "Google Chrome Helper"
This has the annoying effect of turning every page into a crash symbol, but it's pretty easy to just refresh a whole row of tabs.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 viewi…

As usual, there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/609/ From 2009, so rather ahead of the curve.

I wish that were still true of Cracked.
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