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Overcoming Tab Overload

scs.cmu.edu

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Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#81

Post by harshalizee »

jzoch wrote: post #18

Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination to save my tabs across restarts to track everything. Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs…

Yup, grouping in tree style tabs is a godsend. I largely ended up sticking to Firefox over chrome mainly due to this extension.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#82

Post by crazygringo »

I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar.

Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow.

But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my position in a video, etc etc etc.

And all of that gets lost if I close a tab or even restart my browser to upgrade.

I just want to serialize the current DOM/source files and JavaScript/window state to unserialize it later. Sure, network connections will break but websites can usually handle that.

Because while the organization/usage of tabs/bookmarks is one thing, a HUGE roadblock to closing tabs is losing state.

I'm sure it wouldn't be even close to trivial for browsers to build, but it still would just be so helpful.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#84

Post by andrewla »

The real problem here is that the "back" button doesn't really make anyone happy. If it were instantaneous (like the page was kept alive in an invisible tab, essentially) and preserved state, then 75% of the use cases for tabs would go away.

The remaining use cases are more around opening a bunch of links from the same page, so we'd keep tabs around for that, but maybe auto-group them with the page of origin for some contextualization.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#85

Post by crazygringo »

jlokier wrote: post #65
jzoch wrote: post #18

Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination to save my tabs across restarts to track everything. Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs…

I agree, I'm the same. People who sneer at large tab collections don't seem to realise that when they can be put to sleep, tidied away (various extensions allow groups to be folded), they are more like advanced bookmarks and working context. Or, they think there is no justification for having such collections. For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 month…

Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the window?

That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something.

Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc.

Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been burned before by my browser "forgetting" my tabs before on restart, as well as browser sync bugs, so I don't put a ton of faith in the longevity of tabs.

Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#86

Post by eivarv »

I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave.

https://cleave.app

Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.

I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.

I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#87

Post by diego898 »

crazygringo wrote: post #82

I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow. But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my…

This is a huge problem for me as well. If you find something please report back! It would be a huge benefit to me as well!

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#88

Post by skipants »

aidos wrote: post #15

I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality. When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.

Same. I tend to use my tabs as a stack. On the left side I have the tabs I never close; like my Jira dashboard. Going towards the right I have my tabs that are todo -> in-progress. As I get through each thing, I close the tab. This tends to keep it pretty lean.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#89

Post by jerf »

aidos wrote: post #15

I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality. When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.

It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between how many tabs you like open and when you started using the web. I used it for a long time before tabs were even a feature, and I find it easy to keep my tab count down. Compared to having to keep things down to "preferably 1, but maybe 3 or 4 if you're in a real pinch", keeping the tab count under 100 is no big deal.

(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#90

Post by mlac »

lyall wrote: post #70

I've found doing something that sounds crazy very helpful in overcoming my own personal tab overload: automatically closing tabs after they go ignored for a certain amount of time (~12 hours for me). It's garbage collection for tabs! I use the Tab Wrangler Chrome extension[0] for the job, but there are others too. Turns out that I don't actually care about the vast majority of tabs that I leave open—but can't seem to…

Same here. You can do this on iOS with tabs that are open longer than a day, but I don’t think this is a built in feature for safari on MacOS. I find it useful on the phone where I’ll often open multiple tabs (navigate through to the new tab and leaving the old one open in case I need to go back) and completely forget about them.

https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-automatically-close-t...

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