Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs • Hacker News Board

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#151

Post by solarkraft » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:29 AM UTC

colordrops wrote: post #77

akersten wrote: post #23

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15…

I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top o…

Yes! All of these things are fundamentally just references to web pages (URLs, perhaps, with a little bit of exta state).

A properly designed framework would make it really easy to just save a "session" (tab sub-tree for one purpose) for later, sync it, or archive it.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#152

Post by bad_user » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:32 AM UTC

I use Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but I have mixed feelings about it.

It should help me visually find tabs, but truth of the matter is that it doesn't. Horizontal tabs become useless after 10 tabs opened, indeed, but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.

Opened tabs also consume a lot of memory. It's why I now use Auto Tab Discard, which works, but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.

What does help me in finding tabs is tab search via the address bar. In Firefox it works great, you can also prefix your query with a `%` to limit your search only to opened tabs.

Chrome also provides a way to search open tabs. It's not as good as Firefox's and you have to enable it yourself, but it's fine [2].

[1] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html

[2] chrome://flags/#omnibox-tab-switch-suggestions

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#153

Post by solarkraft » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:33 AM UTC

akersten wrote: post #23

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15…

There are lots of tree style tab fans in here, I am one of them. Hey, guys!

I am curious how you organize other things. Do you think in trees in other places (like using Dynalist or Workflowy for notes)? I think many more concepts are fundamentally hierarchical and should be exposed to the user as such (trees everywhere!). What do you think?

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#154

Post by jeroenhd » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:36 AM UTC

barryvan wrote: post #6

This seems to be a mixture of the "collections" feature from Firefox Mobile (Beta/Preview) and Firefox's container tabs, but without the security / isolation benefits. From what I can tell, the main benefit seems to be in relation to identifying similar-looking tabs. It's unfortunate that they didn't bake in the same security and isolation benefits of Firefox's container tabs, or the "put aside and come back to it la…

It looks like what Opera was doing over a decade ago. IE8 also introduced coloured tabs based on tabs opened by others.

Firefox tried something similar to collections for those "tab collectors" with their Panorama (which is not available anymore these days), which was basically a visual 2d layout of tabs within groups. That's what got me the popup "are you sure you want to close 200 tabs" whenever I accidentally hit the close button.

All earlier attempts by non-Opera browsers seem to have failed so I wonder how long it'll take before Google takes this feature away. They're not a company that keeps new products or ideas around for long if they don't take off. I wouldn't get too used to having it.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#155

Post by Yoric » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:38 AM UTC

Hey, Firefox tab groups!

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#156

Post by flobosg » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

I've been trying to control my tab hoarding in Chrome by limiting the amount of open tabs with the xTab extension[1]. It seems to help, even though I can bypass it by opening another window. As a side effect of this my browser windows tend to be organized by topic.

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xtab/amddgdnlkmoha...

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#157

Post by zorbash » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

akersten wrote: post #23

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15…

As a "tab collector" myself and after having tried some vertical tab implementations, I have been wondering why mainstream browsers choose to ignore this problem.

I wanted something which would let me quickly query open tabs, search my history and bookmarks and all without touching the mouse. So I released an extension which does exactly that[0] and here's a screenshot[1].

Surfing the web can me more intuitive. Chrome's upcoming tab grouping feature shifts the burden completely to the user and doesn't necessarily save the user any clicks.

It looks like the Chrome designers went for a quick win, letting the user nest tabs, so that they will no longer complain about the browser being unusable after 30 tabs or so. I think they're missing the job to be done.

[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tefter [1]: https://i.imgur.com/y1HfvI2.png

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#158

Post by morsch » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

oerpli wrote: post #124

I would like tab-management to work as follows: - Export Tabs as list. Format could be something like URL;TITLE[;GROUP][;...] - Import list as Tabs: The inverse Then I could use existing tools (xsv,fzf,vscode,excel) to do whatever I like with my tabs. Some things may be lost (cache, scrolling position...) but I wouldn't care as they don't work anyway with modern websites.

Tree style tabs supports exporting tabs/trees as lists. I don't think importing works, though.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#159

Post by Guillaume86 » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

john_moscow wrote: post #35

This is nice, but what I really don't get is how come the most popular browser in the world in 2020 not have an native option to go through the tabs in the most-recently-used order. This is major productivity improvement compared to ctrl-tabbing the tabs in their physical order. IIRC, multi-tabbed IDEs figured it out somewhere in the 90s and it has become a de-facto standard since then. But nope, Chrome doesn't suppo…

This is my number 1 pet peeve with chromium browsers, drives me crazy that they won't implement this properly. It doesn't look like the new Edge will either (no reaction on MRU features requests). Every few months I go check https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5569 to see if someone sane decided to reopen the issue but no luck until now.

Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

#160

Post by awll » Thu, May 14, 2020, 8:50 AM UTC

akersten wrote: post #23

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15…

In my case, I found that the whole concept of managing tabs just becomes moot at some point. The only extension I use to deal with the load of tabs I have open is funnily enough vimium.

When you press the omnibar opens and you can search your open tabs and immediately jump to them, all without leaving your keyboard. This is way quicker than manually going through your tab list and searching for the right one.