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Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

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Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#311
post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arc is much more than that, though. 1st. Tabs are both tabs and bookmarks. They exist to be more or less persistent (as long as you add them to folders - I get it, it's not everyone's workflow, but for people like me, it's a blessing). 2nd. It has a brilliant tab sync between devices. Something Firefox doesn't do - in fact, only Edge does that. 3rd. Is much lighter on resources on macOS. Some months ago I decided to…

You can open tabs from other devices in Firefox. They don't open automatically though, presumably because some people (i.e. myself) would find that horrible.

Well, I find that seamless. I get to my desktop, and can continue working exactly in what I was doing in my laptop.

That, together with clearly defined workspaces, is fantastic for me.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey fellow tab hoarder! I "only" have 744 tabs open right now (in Edge). Though chrome, firefox, brave, arc, and supermium have a few hundred each... (they've been force closed by task manager so my laptop still technically runs haha). It's funny finding fellow tab hoarders online, people rarely hit the thousands - you're pretty much the first person I've encountered who's got more tabs open than me. Btw what's your…

I've got a recent macbook. I use Firefox which lazily load tabs which makes it fairly efficient. I also use "Auto Tab Discard" so tabs unload quickly to keep memory down long term. My Firefox is currently using 6GB of RAM. For comparison I also have Chrome open with about 15 tabs and it's taking 4GB.

Thank you!

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#313
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add NoScript and Firefox will be much faster than Chrome. It will make you aware of how much untrusted code poorly developed sites expect you to run on their behalf.

Well, turn off JavaScript in Chrome and you back to Chrome being faster. Turning off JS is obviously not a solution when the complaint is that (assuming the same amount of work) Chrome is faster for some JS.

Running uBlock Origin in “Medium mode” [1] also does wonders (= blocking 3p-scripts and frames). It’s interesting to see how many websites work in this mode, and the amount of crap you’re not seeing. Websites load so much faster. And, you can then (permanently, or not) easily whitelist some specific domains like content providers, etc. while browsing.

[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#314
post #86

I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need. I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particula…

I recommend Tree Tabs over Tree Style Tabs as it let's you make tab groups. I will basically have one group per ticket or project, coloring the group depending on the state of that ticket (eventually going green when I've completed it but want to keep it around for a short while in case questions arise). Once the ticket has been done for a sprint I'll close the entire tab group.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly. But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.

They're working on a profile switcher: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...

The most important part of profiles is being able to right-click on a link and open it in a different profile. I don't see that mentioned. I typically have multiple profiles open at once.

Edge has the best implementation where you can define sites opening in certain profiles. Pity ms ruined that browser - it is completely untrustworthy with it auto turning on options such as syncing.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#316
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, else it would be unmanageable. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... I tell it to never discard certain tabs, like gmail or snack or calendar. Also in some situations it's very convenient to ask it to discard tabs in all other windows, or all tabs but the current one. Otherwise it just discards tabs after some time of inactivity. It integrates with TST and can operate in terms of…

Crazy that I haven't heard of this one before. Just installed it and after forcibly putting all the tabs in all my windows to sleep my machine's memory usage dropped from 60% to 30%.

Sidebary has this functionality as well. On top of that it has a setting that allows you to have it auto-unload the parent and its child tabs whenever you collapse the group. I l have a few resource hog sites I use frequently that I keep grouped so I can just collapse the group and get back my ram.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#317
post #86

I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need. I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particula…

treestyle tabs cured my tabs 'saving' syndrome, I now just close the ones I don't need

it probably helped that I supplanted it with a better way to access history with vimium

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_). People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12 tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close attention…

I'm on 1018 right now, I think you're the first person I've ever seen with more open tabs than me )) I've actually been working hard to have less open tabs every evening than what I had when I started work. Maybe in 1018 day I'll close that last tab. And yes, there is a reason that every single one of them is open.

Genuinely curious, what are some of the reasons you keep them around?

Every time I read about someone with that kind of tab count I immediately wonder:

1) if they have that many persistent tabs and actually need (probably the wrong word here) them, how many tabs do they actually close?

2) Does closing a long standing tab invoke a physiological/emotional response?

I'm only poking a little fun with #2. I have to actively overrule my subconscious when it comes to a few categories of physical things. Small electronics and computer parts/peripherals are a couple of things that if I don't verbally tell myself "you won't ever need this random old PC case panel thumb screw" I could very easily end up in hoarder territory.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#319
I tried it out and it seems clear that vertical tabs without titles create too much friction for daily driving a browser where you have many tabs open, hover thumbnails or not.

For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.

Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.

I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.

Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.

But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#320
post #126
post #86

I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need. I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particula…

I love using Sidebery, because I can define a container profile for each group of tabs, which is then applied automatically for new tabs.

That's the next feature on my list of things to use in sidebary!

$Work is actively merging teams from different companies so I'm going to be juggling having to use different accounts on some SaaS platforms until we've gotten everything combined.

Sidebary has so many very useful and powerful features but I'm trying to be disciplined and mixing them in with my typical workflow 1 at a time and actually using it for a while before moving on to the next. (Ok, I might have gone full ham when I first installed it but it was so different from my normal flow that I quickly realized it was counter productive).

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