Live data from Hacker News

The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

metafluff.com

291–300 of 563 posts

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#291

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…

This functionality exists with bookmarks.

FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.

It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"

This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#292
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 do that myself too, so even for a small numbers of users, it still is a valid use case. Firefox has a bug report here about this with interesting info https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=855930

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs. But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.

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.

na the usual reasoning is "use vertical tab bar and tab groups and dont put your monitor n portrait mode"

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#294
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?

This is Me. The guy with a lot of tabs open. Sorry.

Whenever I find something interesting, i open it in a new tab, read it little bit and leave it there thinking - I will get back to it later which never happens. Later on when it is getting enough that I can't open a new tab then using tab-snap extension I copy list of all the tabs open and email it to myself. This email list is like my own mini knowledge dump which have helped me retrieving things later on when required.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#295
post #43

There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff. I think the main lesson is that bookmar…

That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing, you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser war.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#296
post #265

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…

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

yes, OneTab is the thing! No need to have a million tabs open. It also lets you export the links as text

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#297

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…

In Chrome you can "Bookmark all tabs" by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D or right clicking any tab and choosing that option. Then just close the window and when you want to bring them back later, in the bookmark tree you can right click a folder and say "open all tabs in a new window".

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#298

The OneTab extension has been really good for helping me handle my tab hoarding tendency. https://www.one-tab.com/ It lets you hit a button and send all open tabs to a single page that persists between browser sessions. You can remove a link by opening up that list and clicking on it. Has a bunch of other handy features too ... like publishing the list of links to a share-able URL.

I'm pretty happy with this extension too. The other one I use is 'The Great Suspender' which basically suspends unused tabs to free up resources.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#299
(shameless plug) For those of you keeping many many tabs open because you worry you might forget it again, or working on related topics, I am building https://www.pagedash.com to save your page exactly as you saw it, and everything from the original page (HTML and assets) are saved to PageDash so that you can load it again without worrying that the original page went bonkers/down.

v1 will be quite basic, just a list of saved pages. Expect more organization tools (folders, tags, etc.) in the further releases.

Please do sign up to be informed of impending release! :) (estimated end August)

Also, do leave a reply if you are keen on using ML (link classification) to help organize your pages for you. Unfortunately, because computers can't read our minds, this can't be perfect so folders are probably still relevant for your mini-projects.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They are persistent, but I don't think they are tied to a window (I mainly just use one). But your groups are kept as you left them after restarting.

I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups.

I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs.

I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother.

Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.

Post reply on HN