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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

#241

Post by TheArcane »

padenot wrote: post #137
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…

> Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content. Try focusing the URL bar in Firefox and prefixing your query with '%'. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... shows more prefixes like this. It does not search the content of the page, but is super useful still.

The worst part is that % cannot search across containers

I'm baffled how firefox hasn't figured this out yet

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

#243

Post by TheArcane »

bad_user wrote: post #152

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…

I can't use % since Firefox still hasn't figured out a way to make it search across containers

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

#244

Post by throwaway287391 »

bbx wrote: 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…

My behavior is completely different depending on the tab UI. I'm a minimalist on my desktop: as soon as I'm unable to read at least 10 or so characters of each tab title I start feeling a little restless/cramped and go through and close all the unneeded tabs. This usually happens a couple times a day. I feel a tinge of stress whenever I look at a tab collector's browser window.

OTOH on my phone where the "tabs" aren't prominently shown in the UI I have hundreds of "tabs" going back months/years. (Occasionally I'll look back at them and it'll bring back some memories of when I was researching a certain topic or on vacation somewhere, which can be nice...)

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

#245

Post by quicklime »

Non24Throw wrote: post #84
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 don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new kno…

Is there a reason you can't already do this with windows (which are a visual grouping of tabs)?

You're right that cycling through tabs and making individual decisions on closing each one has a high cognitive load. Closing an entire window is much easier.

A while ago I realized this, and started to front-load that cognitive effort and make sure that the "root" of each "subject" gets opened in a new window (or at least detached early enough once I realized that I was branching off into a new subject).

An example of the root of a subject could be an item in an issue tracker, and that window could also contain tabs for code search windows, Google searches on that topic, Stack Overflow answers, etc. Once I'm done fixing the bug, I just close the entire window/subject/group, without thinking about each individual tab.

The front page of HN is also usually the root of a subject. I'll open tabs for articles and comment pages, and then close the whole window once I'm done with my break and want to go back to work. If there's something particularly interesting that I want to save for later, I'll detach that tab and close the rest.

For the C++/RAII people, this is kind of like making sure that every object has an owner, and that memory is freed when those objects go out of scope. This is a lot easier than manually doing a mark-and-sweep over all your tabs :)

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

#246

Post by LudwigNagasena »

qubex wrote: post #26

What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.

What is "hilarious" is that all OS provide awful UX, so browsers have to reimplement everything.

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

#247

Post by riezebos »

LeartS wrote: post #184
awll wrote: 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…

I think the "problem" is not always that you know which tab you want and just want to open it. Sometimes the "problem" is getting an overview over all your open tabs, a tab searcher wouldn't help too much there.

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

#249

Post by in9 »

this seems to me like another opportunity for chrome to be a memory hog, specially with the extra UI features.

But I am glad to be proven wrong here. Judging by the comments there seems to be a use case for a lot of the user base.

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

#250

Post by geerlingguy »

bbx wrote: 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 usually try to reset things a few times a day, and get back to one or two open tabs for the task at hand.

It’s seems many people who go the other extreme don’t use desktop apps but rather have to have a tab for Jira, a tab for Asana, a tab for email, a tab for chat (or three), a tab for music, etc. I use desktop apps and keep most of them hidden with notifications off; My brain kinda falls apart when there are too many things open at the same time!

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