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Overcoming Tab Overload

scs.cmu.edu

231–240 of 240 posts

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#231

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…

There is a browser I use for a lot of this called Sidekick https://www.meetsidekick.com/

I found it's good for organizing tabs and creating different sessions for different tasks. It works on most pages pretty well but every once and a while I still have to go into a standard chrome browser to make sure I'm still seeing the same page as other folks. Still pretty great overall. I save multiple different session types easily and don't have to worry about losing where I'm at.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ to solve this, but I don't really maintain it (I just build it for myself on each new Chromium) and it doesn't work on Mac.

That looks awesome. I'm going to try it out. Do extensions work on it?

No. It's also a bit buggy and you'll want to compile with latest CEF yourself.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot stand this functionality and it's the first thing I disable on new installations. For me, Ctrl+tab is right and Ctrl+shift+tab is left. I much prefer Firefox's awesome bar navigation when jumping around. % app will show all tabs with a title or URL containing app, * yo does the same for bookmarks containing yo, and ^ for history. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... Edit: unfortuna…

Is there a way to get FF to enable the mouse wheel to wrap tabs in a loop once you go past either end of your tab list? It used to do this and now seems like there's no way to get this behavior back

Looks like no.

Here is the one reference to `toolkit.tabbox.switchByScrolling`: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content... You can see here that the second param to advanceSelectedTab is false

This param controls wrapping according to the definition: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content...

To confirm, we can see that the shift+tab/shift+ctrl+tab (which wraps) definition passes that param as true: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content...

Maybe you can file a bug to add another bool pref instead of hardcoding false?

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#234
post #21
post #7

I've opened this in a tab and intend to read it later.

Doing this, and then never ever following up on it, was how I learned that Chrome on Android changes the tab count to ':D' once you go over 100 tabs open.

It's funny how Firefox for Android goes from 99 to 8... And they can't even get the eight the right way around, it's laid on its side.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#235
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you so much for sharing! This is a game changer - I'd been using two separate windows and manually dragging things around like a noob.

Window-based task grouping (where that's possible) is ... somewhat tenable. It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.

> Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.

imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2.

tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Window-based task grouping (where that's possible) is ... somewhat tenable. It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.

> Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this. imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2. tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.

I was probably using that, when it was around.

Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.)

I'd like to be able to:

- Search tabs (by metadata).

- Search tabs (by content).

- Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks.

- A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.)

- Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select.

- Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.)

I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is (bugs withstanding) what Firefox does if you choose to"Restore previous session" int the General/Startup section of about:preferences . This feature is provided by a Gecko component called the the session store ( https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/compone... ).

Thanks, that seems really useful. I sometimes need to restart my computer but don't want to lose all my Firefox windows and tabs, so I would force kill Firefox and have it restore the 'crashed' session after rebooting. That did work very well, but this is a much cleaner solution.

BTW if you have N windows and you want to quit Firefox without closing any of the windows:

File > Exit (ctrl-shift-q)

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#238
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like 1k is well beyond the state of usefulness for most people. Isn't it faster to re-google something than find the tab? And if there is a nice tab search.. is it better than google? Why keep a local cache?

For me, the problem tabs solve isn’t finding the thing, but remembering the thing to find. Bookmarks solve the former, but tabs act as a collection of topics that I care about at a given point in time. While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal catego…

Interesting explanation, thanks!

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#239
post #21
post #7

I've opened this in a tab and intend to read it later.

Doing this, and then never ever following up on it, was how I learned that Chrome on Android changes the tab count to ':D' once you go over 100 tabs open.

Same, later I discovered that Safari on iOS has a 500 tab limit.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#240
post #86

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 lim…

Very interesting idea, look forward to seeing it. I try to work this way, but using different desktop spaces, but it doesn't work quite as well as I'd like. This is interesting if it can just keep one desktop but easily switch in and out of context and "sleep" everything else. Also will be interesting to see how to manage the context itself.
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