Here’s an idea: make the list of tabs vertical
Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
361–370 of 392 posts
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#362Neat, 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…
> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much. I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription. Also I note that Google's web page breaks using…
I noticed the broken down-arrow scrolling too, in both Chrome and Firefox. Shame on Google for this anti-accessibility. Up-arrow, page-up/down still work, which is strangely asymmetric.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#363Earlier quoted context omitted.
Man, I know I have a problem, and I thought it was bad at about 700 tabs across 25 windows (virtual desktops are enablers for the window count). But seeing this thread I clearly need to up my game/download more memory.
You definitely have a windows problem! Do you end up using large numbers of desktops as topic workspaces for them?
In principle yes. The problem is that they loose their topicness and quickly become "oh this was the closest virtual desktops to where you were in the grid with an empty space." This is largely because I made the mistake of originally implementing the transition system as a grid (this was 5 years ago or so). Since then I realized that I basically want a button that will let me create a new topic space, and then remove that space automatically when I close the last window in it. Figuring out how gc stale topics (I can recreate them from memory) and/or discover which topics already have spaces is the hard part (I have had the ability to display topics on desktops via conky for years and that doesn't seem to have helped).
I have also thought about trying to decouple how spaces are associated per monitor, but couldn't figure out a way to interact with such a system that wouldn't leave my brain lost somewhere in even higher dimensional virtual spaces than it already is!
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#364I 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…
> but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.
> but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.
I use Vim Vixen [0], which has a "b" command (for "buffer") to search all tabs in the current window by URL and title. Also tags "last tab" with #, so you can easily jump back and forth using the command. Pretty sure other such vim-style addons have similar features.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I found my kindred spirit! I have one Firefox instance presently at 3 windows and 3379 tabs and another with 10 windows and somewhere north of 2300 tabs. I wouldn't dare do this under Chrome/Chromium. On my system at least, I've noticed that Firefox does get less responsive around 8000+ tabs. Mostly it's just the start up that complains. Sometimes I'll get annoyed and mass-bookmark/close tabs (filed under dat…
Session restore is definitely not designed to scale up that high. I'm impressed that it works. If you're curious you should take a look at the session store data in your profile directory sometime, it's probably at least 50mb of javascript-encoded tab info and browsing history. (Yes, your per-tab navigation history is stored too)
Are you referring to the (previous.jsonlz4|recovery.(bak|json)lz4) files under sessionstore-backups? If so, you're very close: Uncompressed, they're around 40MiB. Each of my tabs doesn't store much history since they're usually opened and looked at--or saved for a later date with no further navigation.
I had assumed based on what I introspected from my profile directory the real bottleneck in my (ab)use was probably the JSON parser and/or my CPU. On my hardware, 8000 tabs seems to be the point where the hang detector fires, which I'm guessing is probably determined by dom.max_chrome_script_run_time? Sounds like you're telling me it's time for a CPU upgrade!
Anyway, I don't know if it's an interesting data point for you, but the only time I've had Firefox's session restore fail was if I killed my X session immediately after closing Firefox, presumably before it has a chance to save state. Even then, I've been able to restore it to an earlier state using some incantation of JSON from sessionstore-backups without losing much. Again, strictly a user-induced failure.
When I say that Firefox is the most stable and robust browser out there, that's not an exaggeration. If anything, it's an understatement. What's more, it's always getting better and improving. Since I see from your bio that you're a dev or contributor, I want to personally thank you for your efforts. Your work doesn't go underappreciated by us, even if we're less than kind to it. :)
I remember the browser wars. Consequently, I will always use Firefox. The internals exposed to idiots like me via the profile are pretty easy to reason about. I like that.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#366What 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.
Hover text: https://xkcd.com/934/
You could do tiling in Firefox for quite a while: https://web.archive.org/web/20170424172335/https://addons.mo...
Interestingly, the oldest archive of that addon page says version 4.14 was released three weeks after that XKCD strip - so excepting that it probably didn't have all the features of xmonad, we did have tiled browsing before XKCD suggested it.
Unfortunately, it's among the many killed off when legacy extensions were dropped. There is a webextensions version now, but it's not very useful - all it does is open and position multiple windows, instead of doing tiling within the same window.
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
You definitely have a windows problem! Do you end up using large numbers of desktops as topic workspaces for them?
In principle yes. The problem is that they loose their topicness and quickly become "oh this was the closest virtual desktops to where you were in the grid with an empty space." This is largely because I made the mistake of originally implementing the transition system as a grid (this was 5 years ago or so). Since then I realized that I basically want a button that will let me create a new topic space, and then remov…
Reading your comments put into words a behavior pattern I didn't fully recognize I'd adopted, though certainly not to the extreme as you (or with the direct intent).
I noticed that my tab + window use started to balloon when it occurred to me that rather than dividing virtual desktops by task (one for dev, one for email/general browsing, etc) I could start moving browser windows from each instance to different locations based upon whatever I was doing (or for that matter, application-specific tasks). It's an exceedingly simplified (and admittedly very dumbed down) version of what it sounds like I understand you're doing, but the strange thing is that I found expanding your mental state across virtual desktops with the granularity of a browser instance/window/set of windows is an oddly freeing phenomenon.
It's a sense of euphoria I don't think the average Windows user will fully appreciate even with the integration of virtual desktops in Windows 10 since most are typically not familiar with it!
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#368When 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 re…
> 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,
I recommend Tree Style Tab [0], which fully preserves this relationship. When one tab opens another, the child tab automatically becomes a child in the tree, making the whole thing very self-organizing. Also being a tree, the parents can be expanded/collapsed, if there's a group you're putting aside for the moment.
That's for Firefox, at least. It looks like there's a few that other people have made for Chrome [1][2], but I can't speak to how well they perform.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#369Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forking permits me to efficiently git rebase against upstream when there are changes, using rerere to remember easy conflict resolutions. A wrapper would not work as two of the options cannot be removed from the command line (and the author refused a PR that would have permitted such a wrapper).
I am the author. Flash support in Chrome is going away soon (but even if it didn't) I am not going to be publishing any code with support for that crap baked in. However, it is understandable if you disagree. Re: referrer option, as I explained, it's a nop. So no point in having extra code for that there either (I really should remove it).
I had to use Flash two weeks ago to get a food handler’s permit online due to pandemic and terrible horrible choice from a list of 20 options, so I am unusually positioned to disagree from personal basis. I do agree that it should die and I can’t wait for it to do so either!
Re: Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs
#370My favourite part is how they're taking something firefox had for years and then removed, and presenting it as an innovation!