Live data from Hacker News

The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

metafluff.com

411–420 of 563 posts

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I start doing that, but have made an effort to always start a week with a fresh browser, one tab open. If I haven't read the article before the week was up, clearly it wasn't important enough.

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?

The best part is when you wait so long that the link breaks when you finally open the tab, and then you feel free because it wasn't really your fault that you didn't read it!

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#412

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?

Last time I tried the groups that were opened when quitting firefox would reopen at next launch but you could not "reopen" a closed group. Having more than one window was asking for trouble as in risking losing all your groups and tabs because there another firefox window opened in the background or the downthemall manager window when you closed the main firefox windows.

Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty.

Best bet is to manually save your session at times.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#413

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…

> So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name

Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming.

Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#414
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/

Thanks ! did not know about this one. It lacks the ability to sort tabs by activity and is messy when you have 150+ tabs over 20 activities, also lack the visual preview of tab content but it's still useful.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#415
I love Firefox and never had issues, except at work. For some odd reason it will break, all tabs will look white and all I see is a loading icon on the middle no matter what tab I click on ruining my workflow. No idea what that's about since at home Firefox works fine, Chrome seems to work fine at work on the other hand. I guess I'll be using Chrome at work and Firefox at home till I figure out how whats causing the Firefox issue. I only usually have no more than 20 tabs open at any given time. Very unusual for me to keep 10 tabs open really.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I miss Opera 12 so much :'(

Otter[1] has made much progress in recreating the opera 12 experience.

[1]:https://otter-browser.org/

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope it is locale-sensitive. US is the only country that uses mainly the mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the others use dd/mm/yyyy with some important exceptions (China, Japan, Korea) with yyyy/mm/dd (which happens to be the standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

actually, it’s almost never dd/mm/yyy, but dd.mm.yyy, and yyyy-mm-dd. Japan is one of the few offenders, almost everywhere else the separator can be used to identify the format.

I didn't mean about the separator at all, just the ordering. But good point.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Bookmarks sucks ! link rot makes them useless and it's time consuming and tedious if not impossible to manage when you have a lot of them.

I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#419

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…

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

But you lose the state the tabs were in, which means risk of losing hours of work and tedious work to restore each state.

Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.

Re: The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs

#420

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.

Not ahead of the curve at all, it describes a quite common use of the web for power users. I've had the habits 100+ tabs open in browsers a few years before maxthon released its international version in 2006.
Post reply on HN