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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

#201

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I don’t think my history in firefox is very ephemeral. It still remembers sites I opened years back.

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

#202

Post by aloer »

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 dislike tree style tabs because a typical website is built for consumption by users sitting in the middle in front of it. This is especially annoying when using a laptop and suddenly every website is off center to the way you sit/use keyboard and trackpad because of the tab sidebar.

Hiding the sidebar is no option either because

a) with most extensions the site would flicker because the tree is not an overlay but takes away real space from the viewport

b) and if it is an overlay, learning the spatial tab structure is much harder if its not visible at all times

It's interesting that the default Firefox behavior is to use tab overflow if too many are shown in the top tab bar. You need to scroll to get spatial understanding and this is the main reason I am not using Firefox.

Chrome OTOH will allow many more tabs to fit (with smaller icons/tab handles) and eventually cuts off the icons if it doesn't fit anymore. At the very least it gives you a better spatial overview of where you put which tab

full disclosure:

I have currently 37 open chrome windows with 550 tabs on a MacBook with 16gb RAM. This works extremely well because of the The Great Suspender extension.

I have not yet found any other way that helps with organizing tabs and is better than OS X spaces + separate windows + a fixed horizontal tab bar.

I have great spatial awareness over projects (OS X spaces), time (order of tabs) as well as content separation (chrome windows)

Apparently I am what the article calls a tab collector :)

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

#203

Post by dthul »

Kliment wrote: post #189
LeartS wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Amazing, thanks! I was always annoyed when I used the address bar to search for a tab and it didn't show up.

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

#204

Post by aljgz »

Anyone who keeps many tabs open and is a keyboard centric user, how can they use chrome? In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab.

I'd expect chrome to have an option to change this, but no, you need add-ons, and those just offer other hotkeys.

Nowadays, I keep my tabs open in, if I need another identity (like my work-related account in a cloud provider), I use opera. Chrome is only for: any site that only works in chrome + debugging my own web development activity

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

#205

Post by polote »

Who is this for? I don't see anyone who can use it. If you have less than 10 tabs you don't need to group them, and if you have more than 10 you will spend your time having them in the good group.

And at the end what is the benefit oh having groups?

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

#206

Post by nvr219 »

aljgz wrote: post #204

Anyone who keeps many tabs open and is a keyboard centric user, how can they use chrome? In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab. I'd expect chrome to have an option to change this, but no, you need add-ons, and those just offer other hotkeys. Nowadays, I keep my tabs open in, if I need another identity (like my work-related account in a cloud pr…

Firefox containers finally "clicked" for me and that's what I use for identities now. I have my personal container, work container, and work-login-as-admin container. It's great. I can open a twitter link as my work twitter or personal twitter with a right-click.

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

#207

Post by franga2000 »

verinus wrote: post #172
colordrops wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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! I just wanted to post the same thought- I want tabs, bookmarks and history to be connected to the context of the tasks I am doing- sometimes I am investigating a problem and open 20 tabs and I want my browser to record this (perhaps how long I stayed on the site) and present this info to me in an intelligent way.

I've though about this a lot and the big problems in the way of this are state and loading time. The state is a problem because keeping a tab open is the only way to preserve most of its state (scrolling, forms, etc.) and the loading time to cold-load a page makes bookmarks much less appealing for things that are related to what I'm currently doing. After those two issues are fixed, the rest is just UI.

I think Edge has some pretty neat UI for this kind of thing with whatever that button on the top left of the tab bar is called, but I haven't actually used it much since everything else about Edge is a hot mess.

If we could somehow dump the whole tab state to disk and restore it later, that would basically solve both of the above problems. But looking at the memory footprint of modern browsers, I doubt that's practical.

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

#208

Post by abjKT26nO8 »

DonHopkins wrote: post #167
kevsim wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?

Why WOULDN'T you want to be able to use tabs on all of your windows? And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to move any tab to any edge (top, bottom, left, right) of any window? And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to group and stack and tile tabbed windows from different applications together?

What I would like, is Emacs/Vim-style buffers. When you don't have one open, it's completely invisible. When you want to switch to it, you perform an incremental search for its title. No need to hunt for things on the screen. A lot faster and a lot more tidy wrt what's currently visible on the screen. No distractions.

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

#209

Post by inshadows »

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 old Firefox it was possible to have multiple rows and variable width tabs. So there was no horizontal overflow and tabs could have been wide enough so that title fit into each. I wonder if it's possible to get this back.

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

#210

Post by sergeykish »

qubex wrote: post #147
sergeykish wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1996 - Opera 2 had MDI 1997 - tabs first appeared in SimulBrowse 2000 - Opera 4 added tabs 2005 - Opera 8 removed MDI They tried, maybe MDI is not that good.

I think you’ve misunderstood me: Tabs is a form of MDI.

Tabs is a form of "Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface"?

Windows MDI is a nested window manager. Tile and Cascade, move and resize, maximize, minimize. That is gone. Windows stay maximized, title bar eaten by buttons and tabs.

Browser tabs is Taskbar:

* Navigation: Ctrl+Tab vs Alt+Tab

* Position: Top vs Screen Edge

* when open a lot both were unmanageable

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