what's the use case here that's better than just having separate windows for separate concerns?
Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
271–280 of 392 posts
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#272Anyone 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…
> In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab.
Coincidentally, this drives me nuts with Firefox and is always the first option I disable. If I open 10 tabs from a single page, I want to be able to cycle through them with the keyboard easily. Having CTRL+Tab go to the most recent tab completely ruins that.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#273This should really have the option to collapse the tabs in each group (only showing the colored dot or group name).
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#274I usually stick to 5-6 tabs at a time. I don't understand how can people deal with 40-50 tabs or more.
I'm with you. I don't like it when I have more than a few open at a time. I also don't like having unread email or chat messages because of the same impulse. They're to-do items that haven't been done yet so I deal with them and move on.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
State is why we use tabs instead of history. A lot of this thread is about what to do with tabs once they are opened, not analyzing why they open the way they do.
Back is unreliable. The page might reload, dynamic pages like reddit will generate new results or reorder them. The safe thing to do is click all links in new tabs and then come back to the original link page. Right clicking the back and forth buttons hides a ton of relevant information thats not visible without a context menu, AND its broken into two context menus. I have to remember which button to right click.
Even on a google search, its easier to middle click all 10 results and then close 9 tabs once i dismiss them than it is to click back 10 times and try navigating between each step. And if i run into a site i like, now im in the sticky situation of wanting the current tab open, and the previous tab in history open. Which one do i want to inherit the navigation history? Thats part of the reason its easier to ignore history near completely (only using it for specific linear non branching navigation.) Its significantly less thinking, mouse movement, and task switching. Step 1 open all links, step 2 analyze links. Not a back and forth.
I open tabs to replace all history navigation. I keep tabs open as short term bookmarks until they can be closed or bookmarked.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#276Oh what memory will we use!
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#277Earlier 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…
I don’t think my history in firefox is very ephemeral. It still remembers sites I opened years back.
Chrome is 90 days
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#278Am I the only one to use windows as tabs groups? Shift + click on tabs to select multiple tabs, then right click > "Move Tabs to New Window".
hah, me too. In addition I move groups of windows to different virtual desktops to further organize my thoughts. Nice thing on Windows is that Alt-Tab in a virtual desktop only switches between applications in that desktop. So once I switch to a particular "context", I only have to work with tabs/windows in that flow.
I need a tab to have more than just a favicon for context, so this works for me.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#279When I feel I have too many tabs Open, I simply close the entire window. I don't understand tab hoarders. I've watched them use browsers and they almost never revisit those hoarded tabs. They actually start from a new tab and search or type in a URL when they want to go back to previous tabs.
Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and keep a max number of tabs visible.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#280When I feel I have too many tabs Open, I simply close the entire window. I don't understand tab hoarders. I've watched them use browsers and they almost never revisit those hoarded tabs. They actually start from a new tab and search or type in a URL when they want to go back to previous tabs. Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and…
The problem with history is it loses spacial relativity. How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs.
Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls, by understanding their distance from each other and the rules of how they open.
Another thing tabs do, is allow you to designate what NOT to return. If you use something like GoToTab [1], it will specifically NOT return results that have been closed. Merging everything to history doesnt give you that separation between "not relevant in the future" and "maybe relevant in the future."
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goto-tab/hjfkaobgk...