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Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

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

#181
post #129

It seems to me I’m in the minority by being a minimalist here? I have at most 10 tabs open. Same for Sublime Text open files. I regularly close all but one tab/file just to reset my cognitive load. This does force me to rely on the history from time to time, which I must say is a true pain in Chrome. You can’t even search or filter by date. Also, revisiting a page will move it up the top of the list, which is annoyin…

I'm with you, I hate having huge numbers of tabs open, in both IDE and browser land. Some of the devs on my team end up with 30-40 files open in Visual Studio at a time and it just loses me.

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

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible. It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.

As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a pie…

Session Buddy has been very helpful for me also! I can get dozens of tabs out of my face in seconds if I need to really focus on one or three things exclusively.

It's not super often that I go back through the tabs I store, but the peace of mind of knowing where they are is wonderful. I used to do this with text files (shudder).

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

#183

I'd love if a browser supports horizontally and perhaps vertically splitting the browser window/tab like you can in iTerm or tmux or terminator and let us view multiple pages at once in a single browser window area. Whichever page is active owns the address and toolbar.

Absolutely this ^^^

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

#184
post #160

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.

Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice.

If you have 2 tabs or 2000 tabs it doesn't matter, going to a tab it's always a sub-second operation.

It is kinda native, at least in firefox: CTRL+L opens the address bar and on there you can search between open tabs. In my opinion it just needs some small UI improvements because at the moment the visual indicators to differentiate between open tab, search, history item, favorite in the results are not clear enough and the results are (or appear) mixed.

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

#185

I have a dream. What I really want was likely not possible when tabs were invented, but should be now. I want least recently used tabs to automatically fade away, but still be fully known and searchable the way that 'search my computer' or 'google search' works. With search filters like last hour/day/week/month. And it seems like history should be kept per tab, not altogether. This way I keep a minimal-to-medium numb…

The great suspender will get you part of the way there.

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

#186

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…

> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open.

Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much.

I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription.

Also I note that Google's web page breaks using the down-arrow key to scroll, so that's just another piece of reflexive shittiness Google are forcing on web users.

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

#187
post #140

Shamesless plug: I've built a tiny WebExtension for Firefox that I believe is the fastest way to jump between tabs ever, with the keyboard. It's for those of us who have more than 15 tabs open. You basically click a one key, and then fuzzy search through your tabs until there's only one option left, and the tab opens. Alternatively you enter the tab number and it opens. It's probably one of my most useful weekend pro…

This is actually really nice! While I don't have a lot of tabs open at once, dragging my mouse over and clicking is really tedious. Even though the Firefox address bar allows you to switch to already open tabs, it's still not seamless. This is great for noticing the name at a glance and switching quickly.

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

#188

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…

This, combined with automatic archival. I hate coming back to a tab I’ve opened months ago, only to see that the content has disappeared.

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

#189
post #184
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice. If you…

Try this: ctrl-L, type % type space type search term. It restricts the search to open tabs only.

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

#190

I have a dream. What I really want was likely not possible when tabs were invented, but should be now. I want least recently used tabs to automatically fade away, but still be fully known and searchable the way that 'search my computer' or 'google search' works. With search filters like last hour/day/week/month. And it seems like history should be kept per tab, not altogether. This way I keep a minimal-to-medium numb…

This is a wonderful concept. Absolutely love the idea.
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