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Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

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Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#81

Post by fafner »

peterjmag wrote: post #52
srean wrote: post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

You hit on a huge key point: context . For me, that can include: - Selected text - Current scroll position - Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway) - Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups - The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently ret…

If you use TreeStyleTab (or Tab Groups) then the hierarchy is a major context as well.

Not to mention that creating a bookmark feels like a big decision. Something you want to keep for ages. While a Tab might be simply some a page in a reference manual.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#82

Post by fafner »

srean wrote: post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

Another reason why I like FF for large tab workloads are TreeStyle Tabs. That way I can easily hierarchically manage my tabs. On Chrome there is simply the tab bar that quickly overflows. E.g., on my laptop the tab bar gets too crowded for my taste with more than 15-20 tabs open.

I'm currently using chrome for Hacker News, reddit, and similar websites. For casual browsing. And FF is for serious browsing where keeping Tabs and large amounts of Tabs are more important.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#83

Post by RobAley »

h2s wrote: post #25

Reasons why I bookmark pages: 1. I meant to type Ctrl+W and missed slightly 2. I meant to type Ctrl+F and missed slightly 3. I meant to type Ctrl+C and missed slightly My bookmarks are a mish-mash of random pages on which I accidentally pressed Ctrl+D, nothing more. I think I'm a particularly anomalous edge case on this particular issue because as a web developer I tend to flit around between browsers constantly so n…

I likewise use different browsers often during development, mainly for testing and exploring browser specific options, but use Firefox for my main browser and bookmarking etc. When I want to access a bookmark in, say, Chrome, if the page is open in firefox I simply drag globe icon next to the URL from Firefox and drop it onto chrome. If it isn't already open, I show all bookmarks and drag and drop the bookmark from there.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#84

Post by coffeeaddicted »

HyprMusic wrote: post #20

I personally find there are different levels of bookmarks. Some are "I'll read that later" bookmarks, some are "I'm going to be using this a lot" bookmarks, and some are just "well this might be useful one day" bookmarks. Personally I'd like a ranking system where I can rank these bookmarks in terms of priority. I could then set up filters to automatically prune some bookmarks after x days or after I've already visit…

I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast.

One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#85

Post by sabret00the »

I have three uses of saved pages. - The open tab: return to it later - Panorama: want to return to it at some point but don't want it off my radar - Bookmarks: pages I read and close a lot. i.e. a folder full of android news sites

Admittedly I also use bookmarks for pages I visit once in a blue moon too or for very specific functions.

The bookmark experience can be improved, with things like opening all bookmarks featuring a specific tag from the address bar. But I feel that where Mozilla drops the ball the most is with Panorama.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#86

Post by sire404 »

Bjartr wrote: post #29
kanzure wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. There's a Firefox extension called "toomanytabs" that tries to improve the "volatile bookmark" experience. Frankly, I think it should be called "notenoughtabs". Btw, I have found that Opera can reliably handle 400+ open tabs simultaneously. The downside is that it's not Firefox. And Chrome took out vertical tabs…

FYI, Chrome now has stacked tabs and tab grouping.

Thanks, I've been waiting for this. It's still experimental (under "about:flags"). Stacked tabs are great, but unfortunately "tab grouping" is not that, it's just a feature that makes it possible to select several tabs at once?!

With real tab grouping in Chrome, including a feature to only load tabs when selected, I could finally make the switch from Firefox and the great "TabGroupsManager" addon.

Unfortunately, Chrome dev team decided that opening all tabs on startup is a good thing and marked intelligent lazy loading of tabs as "won't fix". I cannot find one good argument against this feature, unless it's extremely difficult technically (which is unlikely).

Source: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105666

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#87

Post by lucian1900 »

cpeterso wrote: post #77
nnethercote wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and Chrome fails miserably. As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by ad…

What is Chrome's bottleneck with hundreds of tabs? The resource load from hundreds of processes? IPC overhead for the browser process to managing the content processes?

Memory usage for that many processes. Even with all the sharing it tries to do, its per-origin (there's usually at most one process for each origin, not for each tab) overhead is much higher than Firefox's.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#88

Post by mercurial »

fafner wrote: post #82
srean wrote: post #12

I am one of the worst offenders of the "keep the tabs open variety". I have several hundreds of them open for months on end. For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique. I have been asked to defend my habit many…

Another reason why I like FF for large tab workloads are TreeStyle Tabs. That way I can easily hierarchically manage my tabs. On Chrome there is simply the tab bar that quickly overflows. E.g., on my laptop the tab bar gets too crowded for my taste with more than 15-20 tabs open. I'm currently using chrome for Hacker News, reddit, and similar websites. For casual browsing. And FF is for serious browsing where keeping…

If you are a vim person, you might want to try Pentadactyl/Vimperator. You can use the ":b $searchterm" to search your open tabs, and ":buffers" to display the list of open tabs. Very handy.

Re: Mozilla UX: Save For Later (why bookmarks are broken and how to fix it)

#90

Post by morsch »

fafner wrote: post #81
peterjmag wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You hit on a huge key point: context . For me, that can include: - Selected text - Current scroll position - Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway) - Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups - The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently ret…

If you use TreeStyleTab (or Tab Groups) then the hierarchy is a major context as well. Not to mention that creating a bookmark feels like a big decision. Something you want to keep for ages. While a Tab might be simply some a page in a reference manual.

You can bookmark entire trees, though, preserving the hierarchy.
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