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Firefox tab groups are here

blog.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#101

Post by iaaan »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I only have 10-20 tabs open at a time, generally, but I still use tab groups to reduce the cognitive load of remembering which tabs relate to which projects/tasks. Previously, I would separate groups of tabs using a blank "New Tab" tab, so this update effectively just gave me a good way to name the groups and organize them more compactly.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#102

Post by felbane »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #5

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

I wish there were better coupling between TST and STG (Simple Tab Groups). Automatic nesting of TST is great, but sometimes I'd like to just move a whole tree into a named group. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#103

Post by noisy_boy »

I open a new window for each "topic" to keep the tabs grouped while keeping unrelated things separate.

I also use an extension (on my phone so can't lookup the name) to give names to each of these groups of tabs. Only the "main" window with it's tabs automatically starts up upon browser launch. For the rest of the named groups, the extension provides a button on the toolbar to "resume" any named group which launches its tabs in a new window. This workflow reduces startup time and only keeps those things open that I'm actively looking at.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#105

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I use the simple tab groups plugin and I normally have quite a few tabs open (but only a few visible at a time).

I group my tabs by project/topic so I can just send them to the background when I'm not working on that project and bring them back up when I context switch back to that project. So I'll have like 20 different groups, each dedicated to a specific personal project, some upstream project I'm contributing to, to an academic topic I'm studying (ex: PL theory, abstract algebra, topology, cryptography, etc), a group dedicated to looking into job opportunities, and then also some entertainment groups that have the youtube playlists I'm currently working through (some just fun, some niche topics, some tech) as well as other "third monitor content".

Each group acts less like bookmarks and more like a workspace you can quickly send to the background, pull back up to the foreground, or rotate between windows/monitors (without also moving pinned tabs which stay fixed to the window they are in).

It makes multitasking easier and you don't really get much memory overhead since the tabs generally all suspend automatically after a certain amount of inactivity anyways (might be due to the tab group plugin or another autosuspend plugin I have).

To give a TLDR: I use it to context switch quickly between projects without having to manually reopen stuff in the order it was in and at the spots on the pages where I was when I left off. So when I tab over on tmux to the workspace for a project that I haven't touched in a while, I can pull up the firefox tab group on my documentation window/monitor and immediately see where I left off and I can pick right back up again.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#106

Post by ARandumGuy »

apocalyptic0n3 wrote: post #64
Kim_Bruning wrote: post #5

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

Personally, it's easy for me. If I get above 10 tabs, I just close them all. I don't see any value in having more than that and they just become a distraction for me. Tree style, sidebar tabs, tab groups, etc. are just overkill for me.

I'm in this boat as well. From my perspective, I'd only bother keeping a tab open for a long period of time if it meets the following criteria:

1) It's something I'd actually want to go and view later (most stuff fails this criteria)

2) It's not something I can easily find again

3) It's something that I only anticipate going back to a couple of times, and thus isn't worth making into a bookmark

And over all my years browsing the web, almost nothing satisfies all that criteria. I'm pretty aggressive with closing tabs, and I almost never regret closing a tab.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#107

Post by _Algernon_ »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

I don't use an excessive tab count I don't think, but still find it useful to simply organize tabs by "topic". Eg. research question, what github issue I'm working on and so on. Since they can be temporarily hidden it allows a less cluttered tab bar and improves focus when context switching.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#108

Post by CamperBob2 »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open

Doing some EE work last week, I hit my personal worst-case scenario for tab usage. A certain chip manufacturer whose name will not be cited here except by the initials T and I has a particularly nice part that outperforms its peers from other manufacturers. Its data sheet is unfortunately among the worst I've ever seen. Lots of missing and wrong information that is absolutely required to write and debug firmware for the chip.

The only way to succeed with this particular chip if you don't have an FAE on speed-dial is to comb through their customer forum and read every post related to the chip, where one or two hapless employees are actually doing a great job filling in where the data sheet falls short. And the quickest way to do that is to go through the list of search results and middle-click the link to every message thread that looks like it might be important.

I didn't count the number of tabs I had open, but it was easily over 50 and probably close to 100. Rookie numbers compared to some, as has been pointed out, but it's certainly necessary to be able to juggle more than a dozen tabs or so.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#109

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #78
radicality wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?

The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox. So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.

Well not exactly. Tab suspenders (at least the ones I use) dump the current DOM state, etc to disk so when you reload the tab, it reloads it in mostly the same state it was in when you left it. Of course some pages don't like that and force a full refresh but generally I find when I get a tab reload on a documentation page when it loads back up I end up at roughly the same part of the page I was on when I left off.

Re: Firefox tab groups are here

#110

Post by zackmorris »

canadianwriter wrote: post #3

I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…

Like garbage collection, closing tabs isn't a job that should have to be performed by humans.

Browsers are basically designed wrong. Sort of like how after you learn about the write ahead log (WAL), you wonder how databases could have ever worked before. Or reducers, or Firebase, or anything like that.

Browsers should record everything, including a cache of all data received or sent, so that the user can rewind to any time in history, a bit like Apple's Time Machine. Then pruning history should be a task for heuristics.

I've given up hope that browsers will ever improve now. Although I've dreamed of taking something like WebKit and building a real browser where every tab is truly an isolated process, then attacking it like a video game and getting rendering performance up to multiple thousands of frames per second. With something like Russian doll caching or a hash tree to cache renderings for gigabyte per second throughput. So that page loads are measured in milliseconds and restoring 1000 tabs could happen in 1 second or be skipped entirely since they aren't visible.

I grew up in the 80s with 1 MHz computers, so consider computers today as running thousands of times slower than they should. The web runs millions of times slower. That collective waste puts the onus on the user to be self-sufficient. A bit like how capitalism can only reach low single digits of efficiency because it forces every consumer to own a copy of everything. Alternatives like socialism are little better, because the real problem is that artificial scarcity isn't being addressed through automation, so we can't see beyond economic systems and think they're fundamental.

"Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?" is asking the wrong question. The question should be: what's wrong with browsers that causes people to have so many tabs open?

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