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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

#261

Post by white-flame »

vocatus_gate wrote: post #163
Macha wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just tabs as bookmarks. I can build up a stack of 100 tabs in a day easily.

How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.

I open almost every link in new tabs. It's faster to close a tab and return to the prior tab than it is to go Back, and the back button often doesn't work with dynamic pages. Plus, when replying in various forums, it's much easier to flip between tabs to refer to stuff that was said upthread, especially when you have to go back a page or two.

Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#262

Post by surement »

sleepychu wrote: post #157
surement wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bigger problem with Chrome is that it doesn't support multiple rows of tabs. The usual reasoning is "close some tabs!" For someone who uses a monitor in portrait mode, this is painfully ridiculous.

Conform to widescreen! I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.

Vimium! I use it too, very useful. The command is shift+t to search through open tabs.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#263

Post by kenrick95 »

joonoro wrote: post #243
atombender wrote: post #233

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...

Unfortunately, this extension, too will soon die when Firefox no longer supports legacy addons.

I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#264

Post by arvinsim »

joonoro wrote: post #243
atombender wrote: post #233

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...

Yep. I found that feature very useful before. Really sad when it was removed.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#265

Post by jcrben »

atombender wrote: post #233
elorant wrote: post #162

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…

I'm pretty happy with OneTab https://www.one-tab.com/

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#266

Post by Dylan16807 »

revelation wrote: post #102
glandium wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things have been lazy loaded on startup since Firefox 13: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711193 but the feature itself is much older. The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.

Yes, it's "it's just more aggressively lazy loaded". Unless you are trying to say it's now not doing less work because it's 1) lazy loading but because 2) they don't know how to implement a tabbar and should have used some native component like Chrome.

I wouldn't call it "more aggressively". The lazy loading is the same, but they fixed the UI code around it.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#268

Post by faizshah »

elorant wrote: post #162
huntie wrote: 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?

I usually have around 400 tabs open across 10 windows. They build up because I have many things that I intend to read, use or reference but I don't want to stash them and forget to read them like with Pocket or normal bookmarks. So I keep them open in a window so that I can return to whatever I was researching or working on some time soon.

Just an example: I'm working on an ML model, I begin by researching prior work. I get down to 100 or 200 related papers in google scholar. I start going through the papers until I find the ones that are closest to what I'm looking for. I leave the tabs of the 10 or so papers that I have found open. Now I have 12 tabs open: 10 related papers, my specific google scholar search and my general google scholar search. As I go through the related papers I will happen upon different ideas, libraries/tools or referenced papers that I want to return to. These tend to build up and you can easily get to 6 or 7 per paper. By the time I finish 4 related papers I could have 40 tabs open. This whole process happened over the course of 30-40 minutes. I also tend to find new keywords to use in google while I'm reading these papers which I then produce more google scholar searches from and repeat this same process over again. Now imagine having done this many times over with various projects you're working on but not necessarily required to finish. That's how you end up with a few thousand tabs in onetab and 400 tabs open in chrome.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#269

Post by renolc »

fiatjaf wrote: post #267

I have 2 tabs open right now. If the number of open tabs gets over 10 I start to actively look for tabs to close.

I'm the same way. I use bookmarks for places I regularly visit that I will want to have ready access to (things like work related services and what have you).

For just articles or something I'll want to read later, I've started using the Google Inbox extension to save the link as a reminder. From there I can snooze it until I have the time or motivation to actually read it.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#270

Post by zzalpha »

Arelius wrote: post #96
zzalpha wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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... Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed…

We'll, I can think of one obvious problem right off the bat: when you accumulate enough tabs they're no longer discoverable.

Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.

Maybe.

I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.

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