Live data from Hacker News

Tree Style Tabs

addons.mozilla.org

91–100 of 197 posts

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.

Certainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place. My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data w…

What vertical tabs allow you to do is forgo tab management all together. With vertical tabs, you never really close a tab, but instead, you keep working on the small subset of tabs you opened most recently. Because they are in a vertical space, even though you have a hundred tabs open, the titles of the 5 or so tabs you are working on are as easily visible as they would be if they were the only open tabs.

OTOH, with horizontal tabs, once you’ve reached a certain number of tabs, they all condense into indistinguishable icons, and even before they have, you can easily only see a couple of the tabs entire titles at a time (on a laptop screen).

So even if you don’t manage tens or hundreds of tabs (although many others do), vertical tabs are still useful because they allow you to never have to think about closing a tab, and still have a great experience with the 5-10 tabs you are interested in at any one point of time.

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.

Certainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place. My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data w…

I found OneTab [1] and Pocket (or similar read-it-later services) to be an efficient way to cope with too many tabs.

OneTab works similar to bookmarks but preserves the date & time they were added. It’s even possible to add a title, i.e. context, to a group of links along with the timestamp. Links can be moved around with drag and drop.

A great improvement to OneTab would be to be TST aware and maintain the tree structure.

Pocket makes reading bookmarks a lot more pleasant and the tagging system helps to preserve some context.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/onetab/ (also available for Chrome)

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.

Certainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place. My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data w…

Re: forgotten context

I use Firefox's tag feature for this, helps you give a one or two or three word context like: linux, firewall, iptables or devops, cicd

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#94
post #83
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and I don't understand how people have more than about 10 tabs and stay sane. Do you people like... not use bookmarks at all? Heck, most of the sites I visit on anything like a regular basis I only need to type in the first letter or two and they auto-complete.

Bookmarks are not a good UX. They're slow to load, unreliable (link rot), and a chore to keep organized. Bookmarks are an improvement over writing addresses down on paper or copying and pasting into a text file. That's about it.

General purpose universally available tools like Google Docs, which makes it easy to copy and paste links as well as rich text, graphics or anything else you want to describe them, and share and collaborate in real time, are an enormous improvement over bookmarks! There's really no point to using bookmarks any more.

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#95
post #10

I don’t understand how people browse the web without this extension. That’s the number one reason chrome is not usable for power users. I’m also wondering why this is not natively supported by both firefox and chrome.

Tomato/tomato. I don’t understand how people browse the web with more than 4 or 5 tabs open at the same time.

I have about 400-500 open tabs spread between three browsers on three systems which I'm using simultaneously.

At least on my phone, Firefox Focus has helped immensely.

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#96
post #56
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's part of their new philosophy not to make anything configurable or anything "advanced" easy, unless you're jumping through some hoops. I still can't get over the fact that they removed the ability to view individual cookies and their values from the browser.

No, it's part of the philosophy that this particular feature led to users suddenly being without tab bar and basically having a broken browser. Although I do believe they're still weighing that against the benefits of being able to use TST without needing to go through extra hoops. You can still view individual cookies and their values: open the dev tools, then the Storage tab.

> feature led to users suddenly being without tab bar and basically having a broken browser

That's a stupid reason if thats what they care about. Just make it part of the about:config at least if you are so worried about "dumb users".

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#97
post #14

I use a similar tab layout in Vivaldi and it's amazing. Page titles are wide, stacking them vertically along the side makes a lot more sense.

Last time I tried Vivaldi, it only had one dimension for the vertical tabs - middle click on a link and it just gets added to the list of tabs.

With TST, I get a second dimension - child tabs are indented in underneath their parent, so that it is clear where they come from. This is the reason that it is called a Tree.

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#98

I don’t understand how people browse the web without this extension. That’s the number one reason chrome is not usable for power users. I’m also wondering why this is not natively supported by both firefox and chrome.

I don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.

Reminds me of desktops cluttered with icons

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#99

I always feel this should be included in Firefox default settings. Vertical space is an asset on modern monitors especially on laptop, this extension is the reason Firefox is the default browser on my machines

Maybe there's a need for "distros" for web browser and editors (like VScode or Sublime).

With both of these at least I'm having the same kind of problem. There are lots of killer extensions and tweaks that make them really good but finding and implementing those takes effort.

I believe there might be a market for opinionated distributions which would ship with good extensions and sensible default settings for specific use cases. Maybe this could be even something that generates some subscription money. From the Eclipse/Java side one example is MyEclipse [1]. IIRC they started with selling the Eclipse IDE with a pre-selected bundle of open source plugins. Value proposal was that this would save you the trouble of looking for the best in plugins and checking compatible versions.

[1] https://www.genuitec.com/products/myeclipse/

Re: Tree Style Tabs

#100
post #96
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's part of the philosophy that this particular feature led to users suddenly being without tab bar and basically having a broken browser. Although I do believe they're still weighing that against the benefits of being able to use TST without needing to go through extra hoops. You can still view individual cookies and their values: open the dev tools, then the Storage tab.

> feature led to users suddenly being without tab bar and basically having a broken browser That's a stupid reason if thats what they care about. Just make it part of the about:config at least if you are so worried about "dumb users".

It's not so much the users they care about but the fact they have to deal with all the support requests, plus the complaining on social media that Firefox is dumb and bad. At some point it's net-negative for the project. So sometimes they open functionality to extensions instead of having it easily available to users, like the option to disable JavaScript on pages.
Post reply on HN