Need a browser with one Tab • Hacker News Board

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#21

Post by ajstiles » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:16 AM UTC

cwzwarich wrote: post #14

chewxy wrote: post #2

Opera had multitab browsing before Firefox did (or Phoenix). But then again Opera was paid software at that point. Nowadays I have a personal rule: If there are more than 10 tabs per browser, close until 10 tabs remain. Unless one of the tabs is this: http://i.imgur.com/9yacZ5b.jpg

Opera wasn't the first browser with tabbed browsing by far. There were a lot of Windows browsers that embedded the Trident engine, and some of them used variants of MDI for browsing. A few of them used tabs, the first well-known one being NetCaptor. Interestingly enough, it put the tabs on the bottom, which makes a bit more sense from a Fitts' Law perspective than putting the tabs near the other controls. This was a…

Fun to see NetCaptor mentioned here... I wrote it. The first version was released in 1998. I put the tabs on the bottom because HomeSite, the HTML editor that inspired NetCaptor, had tabs on the bottom.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#22

Post by calhoun137 » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:19 AM UTC

Dondrey's Law: The number of tabs a programmer has open is proportional to how stressed out they are.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#23

Post by thristian » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:27 AM UTC

With Firefox's tab-groups, the fact it doesn't load tabs at startup until you switch to them, and the TreeStyleTabs extension I can easily and efficiently have over a hundred tabs "open" and everything still stays fast and efficient and uncluttered.

Basically, I never use bookmarks anymore - when I'm researching some topic, I do a bunch of searches, open a bunch of interesting results, and when I need to task-switch to some other topic I shuffle them all off to a tab-group, name it, and come back to it weeks or months later.

Another good application is having a tab-group per project - I can have a collection of tabs with API docs, SQL docs, specifications and such, and stash all that state and restore it almost instantly. As added benefit, since Firefox's AwesomeBar will prefer to complete from the names and URLs of open tabs, an easy way to switch to, say, the "CREATE TABLE" docs when I have a dozen identically-iconned tabs open is to just say Ctrl-T, "CREATE T", Down, Enter.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#24

Post by melloclello » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:29 AM UTC

Yes and no, what we need is a better way to bookmark and navigate branching paths through our browser history.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#25

Post by smacktoward » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:46 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #20

smacktoward wrote: post #10

You might want to sit down for this. Are you sitting down? Good. The browser you want is Internet Explorer. (I know, right? But I'm serious!) IE lets you turn off tabbed browsing completely with a simple settings change. The following steps are how you do it in Windows 7/IE 10, they may vary slightly for other versions of Windows or IE. 1) Go to Control Panel > Internet Options. 2) Go to the "General" tab. 3) Click t…

This comment combines useful information AND witty humor. Reddit could learn from this.

Thanks! If you enjoyed this comment be sure to check out my upcoming book, Smells Like Tweak Spirit: The Grunge-Rock Guide To Browser Configuration Settings.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#26

Post by Myrmornis » Wed, May 22, 2013, 5:59 AM UTC

Just kill the browser and restart it. They were useful at some point yesterday. You don't need them today, or if you do, you'll soon find them again. Chill out.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#27

Post by nikcub » Wed, May 22, 2013, 6:00 AM UTC

I always have 2-5 windows open with 5-30 tabs in each. This is an interface problem that needs to be solved, nobody really needs that many tabs open. It becomes ridiculous when you don't want to update your browser incase you lose all your tabs.

I noticed that I am really using tabs as a form of nascent bookmarking. Each window is a group or project and serves as a reading list, and then each tab is an item to read.

With option + click it is easy to add items to the reading stack that you can go back to later.

This could all be replaced with a simple plugin that manages these stacks in a sidebar. You could then go back to using only a single window and the tabs as collections.

Bookmarks are too permanent, while tabs are too temporary - browsers need something in between that is a way of arranging what to read next.

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#28

Post by shanselman » Wed, May 22, 2013, 6:06 AM UTC

Yep, "Read Later" and Instapaper for the WIN. http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TwoMustHaveToolsForAMoreReadab...

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#29

Post by icebraining » Wed, May 22, 2013, 6:07 AM UTC

nemo1618 wrote: post #6

If you actually need a browser with just one tab, try surf: http://surf.suckless.org/

And if you want something a little more complete, there's uzbl-browser: http://www.uzbl.org/

Re: Need a browser with one Tab

#30

Post by entropyneur » Wed, May 22, 2013, 6:14 AM UTC

nemo1618 wrote: post #6

If you actually need a browser with just one tab, try surf: http://surf.suckless.org/

Wow, thanks for this! Didn't realize that the suckless project had a browser. Finally I can get back to controlling web pages with my OSs window manager instead of the weird in-application mechanism that tabs are. I've been missing that since the days of ie6 (seriously).