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You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

berjon.com

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Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#61

Post by clouddrover »

mostlylurks wrote: post #52
clouddrover wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.

As someone that opens up hundreds (or thousands) of tabs regularly, I close each tab after I'm done with that specific tab, and it would make no sense to close it before that. But because I open most of my tabs from pages which contain a lot of links, like search results or link aggregators, and because each of those tabs may in turn generate even more tabs because they contain several relevant links or may raise que…

Okay, so it's through lack of focus.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#62

Post by keepamovin »

eduction wrote: post #8

What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms? This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.

> This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee.

This reading seems too dismissive and simplistic, and not respectful of the people involved. At the base of the article:

Many thanks to the following excellent people (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable feedback: Amy Guy, Benjamin Goering, Ben Harnett, Blaine Cook, Boris Mann, Brian Kardell, Brooklyn Zelenka, Dave Justice, Dietrich Ayala, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Fabrice Desré, Ian Preston, Juan Caballero, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Marcin Rataj, Margaux Vitre, Maria Farrell, and Tess O'Connor. Needless to say, anything dumb and stupid in this article is entirely mine.

Is there a specific point you found circular or hand-wavy?

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#63

Post by tony-allan »

I have lots of tabs open in a dozen windows in 8 MacOS desktops. Each window is current project focussed + Mail, News and Entertainment. I work my 16GB of RAM very hard with many bloated web pages.

I don't like the environment much but I care about the time to context switch between projects (with text, email, and phone interrupts).

I also find the sign-in process to be very broken and an attempt to reduce the sign-in time is my major issue. It is a lot worse with many 2FA authorisation schemes — TOTP, email, text message, open this or that app on my phone.

If the time to open a new tab (including the sign-in process) was 50ms then I would have one window and use some mechanism to open a set of tags.

Perhaps a tab group suspend function that frees up resources and securely saves authentication state and context information?

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#64

Post by cobertos »

fassssst wrote: post #54
Dalewyn wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I use them instead of bookmarks. This. The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.

But why?

Tabs also store an implicit chronology and don't require organization other than the order/vague time they were "saved" and the related tree they were in (tree-style tabs).

I also find the tab scrolling UI of a long list easier than manually waypointing stuff into folders and then trying to remember what, where, and other context of the saved items

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#66

Post by cobertos »

Tabs wouldn't be so bad if there was a unified tabular interface for all windows/tab-likes. And I'm not taking about a "your Chrome tabs are just apps in your quick switch menu" like on Android. I'm talking like every program has deep linkable content, and one set of vertical tabs (left side of screen?) for the whole OS that each point to that deep linked content. Sublime text tabs, Krita tabs, those few apps that refuse to tab, those few apps that refuse to open multiple instances, all your OS "windows" in one place.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#67

Post by theamk »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

I’m not sure exactly what the proposal is, but a server in ever web browser so you could host, like, a little tiny social media and file sharing site could be nice.

Opera tried this in 2009 (as article briefly mentions), it was called Opera Unite: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands...

Almost no one used it back then, and it would be even fewer people now. After all, the time of always-on machine which can act as a server "for free" are gone. Even desktops sleep nowdays when not used, and no one would be crazy enough to kill their cellphone/tablet battery to run something that can be served by cloud faster, more reliably and often for free.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#68

Post by btilly »

keepamovin wrote: post #62
eduction wrote: post #8

What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms? This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.

> This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee. This reading seems too dismissive and simplistic, and not respectful of the people involved. At the base of the article: Many thanks to the following excellent people (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable feedback: Amy Guy, Benjamin Goering, Ben Harnett, Blaine Cook, Boris Mann, Brian Kardell, Brooklyn…

The point that nobody wants tabs was handwavy and extremely dismissive of the fact that I actually do like tabs.

Based on my past experiences with other UX people who want me to live without a UI element that I'm attached to, I'd be willing to bet money that he's failed to understand something about how my brain actually works. And mocking people who might have my preference goes a long way to convincing me that he won't want to listen to why people like me don't want to use his version. Whatever it is. (He didn't make that clear.)

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#69

Post by charlie0 »

mostlylurks wrote: post #52
clouddrover wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.

As someone that opens up hundreds (or thousands) of tabs regularly, I close each tab after I'm done with that specific tab, and it would make no sense to close it before that. But because I open most of my tabs from pages which contain a lot of links, like search results or link aggregators, and because each of those tabs may in turn generate even more tabs because they contain several relevant links or may raise que…

What is it exactly that you're looking for that you can't just close that page and go back to Google with better terms to get you to the page you're actually looking for?

I've noticed that when looking through deep documentation, it's often much better to go back to Google and refine the query than it is to go through whatever crap software the doc site is hosted on to find stuff. Not all docs sites are like this, but I encounter crappy doc sites quite often.

Re: You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser

#70

Post by cobertos »

The author defers a lot to their "fixing search" article[0] for arguments and numbers. That article wrongly assumes that search (and the other problems mentioned, like social) is simple to rebuild to avoid misaligned incentives by relegating it to "just" an API. A search company would still have to implement crawling, recrawling (efficiently, timely for topical events), spam filtering, ranking without being game-able, and a ton of other subtleties (robots.txt, many ways of tagging, stale content for certain categories). It also doesn't solve the underlying non-UI misaligned incentives of not injecting ads directly into the API results or however.

Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely.

[0]: https://berjon.com/fixing-search/

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