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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

#291

Post by noisem4ker »

inshadows wrote: post #209
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.

It is still possible. See https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them...

Design-wise, it's still a more sane layout than the single row scrolling on overflow. It's also the solution most other programs and GUI toolkits use, with browsers being the exception I can't explain.

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

#293

Post by maverick74 »

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…

Conex ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/ ) works with horizontal tabs strip but has the advantage that it can hide all tabs that don't belong to the current container.

Now, if only Firefox would improve the speed of hiding and showing tabs used for container switch.................

(btw, does anyone know of a bug report related to this improvement???)

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

#294

Post by turnipla »

Someone1234 wrote: post #290
jpswade wrote: post #286

This is fixing the wrong problem. Tabs aren't broken, browser history is. When I tried to find a web page from a certain date a few months ago, it was almost impossible to find. I actually think Internet Explorer used to have quite a good history. That's what we need, not better tabs management.

It is even worse in Firefox, half my history is just outright missing. It is like it only saves the final page each tab was open to instead of anything I browsed using that tab in the interim. Not to mention the UI for Firefox's history is pure garbage of the worst kind. The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad, the fact that it isn't a screen and some kind of dumb pop-out /thing/…

> The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad

History is never more than 2 clicks away:

    - Open Library button, click History
    - Open History menu (macOS)
However, yes, core browser functions seem to be stuck to what they looked like in the year 2000 for most browsers. Only Safari basically tries to reinvent its UI every couple of years.

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

#296

Post by makecheck »

From the screenshots it seems they give space priority to the name of each tab group instead of the tabs themselves (when space was already at a premium). In one example, 3 tabs were barely intelligible yet the group name was fully visible.

It would be better to have:

- An alternate short name or icon that is automatically used when there is no space (common?).

- Relocated tab group name, e.g. small text “above” the tabs instead of stealing space from the tabs.

- An option to have no name at all, relying on other distinctions only (some people are color blind so you always need a non-color option; maybe different patterns of border lines, or shapes?).

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

#297

Post by castillar76 »

aembleton wrote: post #145
uhryks wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vivaldi browser supports it out of the box, and vertical is even the default iirc. It's thank to it I got used to vertical tabs and I cannot go back. While it has the drawback of making tabs hoarding easier, just having some tabs open for documentation, GitHub, test pages, quickly brings me to a point where horizontal tabs' title are irrelevant and I have to guess tabs by their favicon. On top of that, most screens a…

Last time I tried Vivaldi, the vertical tabs were not 'tree style'. By that, I mean they were all listed directly underneath each other rather than indented to show from where they were open. Take my current Hacker News browsing: https://imgur.com/a/p3w77RJ Do they indent like this? This is a really important aspect of tree style tabs because it adds another dimension of information. It also means that I can just min…

It's my one complaint about Vivaldi's implementation, yep: you can "stack" tabs, but this creates an absurdly tiny target space to click between tabs, and there's no way to create tab trees instead. It would be lovely to be able to create them, because I often create trees of tabs when browsing sites like HN: I pop tabs open behind HN as I see interesting links, and then click down the tree to go through the sites themselves.

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

#298

Post by justapassenger »

It’s sad that operating systems gave up, before even trying to, to properly organize content with windows managers.

There’s really no good reason why browser needs to have tabs, and have that exclusive ecosystem, not available to rest of the apps on the system. I’d love to be able to group and manage my windows as easily as tabs.

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

#299

Post by qubex »

waddlesplash wrote: post #264
qubex wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very impressive. I wish this had become a common feature of GUIs beyond the browser. One thing I liked a lot about the Windows95 GUI when it was introduced were the tabbed property and settings. They kind of went by the wayside as a general concept though they survive in places (not that I’ve had much experience with Windows over the course of the past 20 years or so). On the topic of moving tabs, I was a BeOS user a…

Haiku, the BeOS' spiritual successor, did develop the feature further into "Stack & Tile": https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/gui.html#stack-ti...

Beautiful. I’ve got a recent build of Haiku in a VM and I didn’t even know this feature existed!

Thank you.

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

#300

Post by snazz »

justapassenger wrote: post #298

It’s sad that operating systems gave up, before even trying to, to properly organize content with windows managers. There’s really no good reason why browser needs to have tabs, and have that exclusive ecosystem, not available to rest of the apps on the system. I’d love to be able to group and manage my windows as easily as tabs.

Sway and i3 let you use tabs nearly anywhere you can use windows. I'm not a huge fan of tabs outside of the browser anyway, but it works well.
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