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Overcoming Tab Overload

scs.cmu.edu

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Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#71

Post by naggie »

I used to have many dozens of tabs open statically, kind of like a TODO list I never get round to. Some tabs are open all the time for email, chat as well.

I've eliminated those tabs and now have tabs related to what I'm currently doing only. There could still be dozens, but importantly they do get closed.

To prevent the static tabs, I do 2 things:

1) Map tabs I monitor (email, chat etc) to a streamdeck, pressing a physical button every time I want to check

2) Save those static "TODO" tabs to a task manager[1] and treat them as tasks.

[1]: My own task manager: https://github.com/naggie/dstask/ -- saving the URL in note means I can open the tab in a browser again in a command (open)

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#72

Post by jlokier »

aidos wrote: post #49
paulpauper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had hundreds and I use all of them at least once a week

Let’s call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that’s 40 tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour, just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all those different things - you know what they are and you want to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type ‘app.i - enter’. Why would I want it open?

In April 2021 I visited 5036 pages, 167 pages a day average.

In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've spent more time in head-down coding.

5 tabs an hour, hah.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#73

Post by NwtnsMthd »

I don't need a better way to manage the tabs I have open I need to quit the habit of opening dozens of them. Its digital hoarding.

Maybe it's overly dramatic of me to compare it to hoarding, it does legitimately increase productivity. But it also tends to spiral out of control now and then (for me).

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#74

Post by kordlessagain »

arduinomancer wrote: post #68

I don't understand the "having a million tabs open workflow" that seems so common I frequently move 1-2 tabs to the left side and use "close tabs to right". Probably do this 4-5 times per day. If I end up needing something I just look in history or ctrl + shift + t to get it back. Having too many open feels super distracting to me and makes it harder to focus. I also use bookmarks a lot too, so that might be the diff…

How do you feel about full text search and image extraction and classification for those URLs?

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#75

Post by qwertox »

I miss the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension so much. I had 3 rows of tabs with more via the scroll wheel, and they were of fixed width.

I often ended up with 80 open tabs and switching was no issue. It was such a great feeling being able to close all the tabs after the work was done.

With Chrome now I constantly need to drag tabs out in order to create a new window to start a new collection of tabs, so that I normally have about 6 browser windows open, then, when looking for a group of tabs, I first need to find the window. It's the same with Firefox since they moved away from allowing custom XUL code.

Here's an example I just found on Google https://thasulinux.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tab_mix_plus....

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#76

Post by witrak »

aidos wrote: post #49
paulpauper wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had hundreds and I use all of them at least once a week

Let’s call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that’s 40 tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour, just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all those different things - you know what they are and you want to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type ‘app.i - enter’. Why would I want it open?

I keep open 200 and more tabs, especially when I can't finish a job before I start or continue another one. It's a matter of efficiency - closing a group of tabs found after painful and time-consuming research is unreasonable IMO. To find a specific tab after a day or two I use the tabFX Firefox extension. It allows searching for the tab containing keywords in the title/URL or tabs similar to the selected one. Also allows closing tabs directly from the search result list. Extremely useful.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#78

Post by jlokier »

ksec wrote: post #40
chatmasta wrote: post #30

I would love to see a Miro-style, infinite canvas, tiling tab manager. If I zoom out past the page, show me a canvas with thumbnails of all my tabs, that I can click and drag to group or arrange however I want. Then let me zoom into one of the thumbnails to switch to that tab. Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.

Doesn't Tab Overview in Safari on macOS already does that? ( Without the Drag and Drop Part ) The problem is its current implementation completely kills your SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview gesture and icons.

Safari's Tab Overview is unfortunately not like the OP's idea. The lack of dragging, and also because there's no way to zoom out further and make visual groups. And I suppose being horribly slow with many tabs makes it very different from the OP's idea too.

I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state, just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work.

I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself).

But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast while using a huge amount of memory that slows down everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and being the reason other things I use for work were getting slow.

I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#79

Post by leephillips »

paulpauper wrote: post #41

>Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand. how about multiple layer tabs I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloadi…

It sounds like you would enjoy this new browser:

https://lee-phillips.org/permatab/

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#80

Post by MatthewBF »

chatmasta wrote: post #30

I would love to see a Miro-style, infinite canvas, tiling tab manager. If I zoom out past the page, show me a canvas with thumbnails of all my tabs, that I can click and drag to group or arrange however I want. Then let me zoom into one of the thumbnails to switch to that tab. Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.

No zoom out, but has tile like views (grids, lists, kanban, etc.) https://www.partizion.io/
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