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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

#381

Post by djhworld »

Houshalter wrote: post #285
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 am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it. Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I fe…

I'm a hoarder in recovery, I try to consciously limit the number of tabs I open these days.

If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.

You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#382

Post by daef »

My usual day looks something like this:

open FF (it it's not already running) and wait for a hand full app-tabs to load:

  * slack (there's no dark theme in the native app)
  * skype (there's no dark theme in the native app)
  * toggl (timetracking)
  * email (office365, I stopped worrying about outlook/thunderbird)
  * jira (gotta know what to work on next)
  * social (fb&twitter - could probably also do w/o - I rarely open those)
since they exist I'm also use a hand full tab groups - at least those 3:

  * work
  * private
  * to read
the work tab group usually starts empty (at least when I finished up the day before), might grow to a hundred or two during the day - but usually ends up empty at the end of the day when I'm done again.

I hardly ever left-click a link, I only wheelclick. but my ^w is at least as fast as my wheel click - since the awesomebar searches through history, pagetitles and already openend tabs it's really easy to navigate even between tab groups just by ^t, type 3 letters, press return to 'switch to tab' (really convenient icon there so you know you're going to close the new tab and switch to an existing tab at this moment)

if I want to restore a tab i killed prematurely I fire up the history - where I only use the 'by last visited view' - does anyone srsly use the 'by date and site' view?

tabs are something very different than bookmarks to me, a bookmark is something I return to on a regular basis - a tab is an open 'todo'. I don't use the usual bookmarks thou, only the bookmark-toolbar below the url - and my bookmarks there have no text - they get renamed to "" so I only see their favicon. entries there are e.g.

  * HN
  * blog.fefe
  * oglaf
  * xkcd
  ...
one thing that I really disliked that mozilla sometimes decided to drop the dedicated keyboardshortcut to hide/show the bookmark-toolbar (I tend to hide it for screenshots where I want the URL to be on the screenshot https://xkcd.com/1863/ )

I have no idea what I'm going to do after the death of the tab groups extension.

one thing that really bugs me is that every time a show tab groups to 'normal users' (tm) they insta love them. I really wonder if no one used to use them bcs hardly anyone ever knew about them.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#383

Post by raesene2 »

vit05 wrote: post #295
ilaksh wrote: 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.

Have you tried pocket? I used to keep a load of bookmarks but the problem was that after a while many of the source urls would die off. So something like pocket is very handy as it takes a copy of the page you're interested in.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#384

Post by davchana »

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?

Just one data sample,

On desktop I have 4 pinned tabs, Gmail, workflowy, trello, google Calendar. Plus anywhere between 2-30+ tabs, depending upon the google term i am searching, or reading something. And none of these is Facebook Youtube Medium and such, as all these are blocked.

On my two Android phones,on main one, this one, this is tab number 98. Many of these are HN search pages, and links there on. Others include github, google, stackoverflow, jekyll, javascript related. Also, occassionally i go through, and prune tabs. Also the times I have nothing to read, I go back to these tabs, read, and then close.

The secondary work phone has 52 tabs.

Terrified of loosing all these, occassionally I use desktop google chrome option of open all tabs on other (mobile) device, and then export all those tabs to a html file.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#385

Post by TekMol »

Great that you can open over a thousand tabs now. Next blog post will be when it's over a million I guess?

Personally, I usually have something like 3 or 4 tabs open. But what I would really need is this:

https://xkcd.com/619/

Yup, hardware accelerated video on Linux. Chromium has it. Firefox doesn't.

It's 2017 and for me Firefox is still missing the basic feature of seeing smooth Youtube videos.

Anybody working on that? Can't you just take it from Chromium? I mean it's open source, isn't it?

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#386

Post by davchana »

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 use the one called Session Buddy. It allows to save all tabs in one chrome window as one session, and allows you to open all those anytime, as well as to export as html. Also, autosave session just like Microsoft office autosave function. I will post link from pc in few hours.

Not related anyway except as happy user

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#387

Post by ianamartin »

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…

This is not just for power users. My mother is about the most opposite of power user that there is. But she constantly has hundreds of tabs open when I go to visit her and do my obligatory tech support duties. She uses tabs like bookmarks, even though she bookmarks everything.

I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her.

You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager.

First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans.

Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad.

But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#388

Post by frostymarvelous »

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 have more than 100 tabs on mobile. FYI, the indicator changes to a smiley.

It's easy to cross that threshold when you're doing research.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#389

Post by piyush_soni »

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 don't know. I have 100+ tabs almost all the times. Recently, the tab groups add on really helped me manage them, but that's going to end too with Firefox 57. I thought Panorama was one of the most useful and differentiating feature of Firefox, unfortunately they never thought of fixing its shortcomings, and since people didn't use it much due to those, they decided to end it. :-(

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#390

Post by gkya »

vit05 wrote: post #295
ilaksh wrote: 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.

How do you organise tabs then? I've god knows how many bookmarks and I've been blindly Ctrl-D-ing since time immemorial, only tagging very distinct stuff and modifying titles if too stupid. When I need to get at sth. bookmarked, typing stuff into the url field in firefox just works.
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