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On Browser Tabs

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Re: On Browser Tabs

#61

Post by bityard »

wlesieutre wrote: post #48
fmajid wrote: post #41

When I am working on a project, e.g. researching a laptop purchase, I will open a new window to act as a container for all those research-related tabs, then when I am done the entire window can be closed. Vivaldi has a notion of tab-within-tabs, but the UI is very subtle and the tabs^2 very small and fiddly to reach with a mouse, thereby violating Fitt's Law.

Firefox used to let you have multiple sets of tabs within one window and cycle between them, completely hiding the inactive ones. Effectively it felt like you had several browser windows within the one window, and picked which window was active. Looks like this started way back in Firefox 4, and the UI was a bit all over the place, but I liked using it (mainly by keyboard shortcut): https://www.computerworld.com/arti…

Panorama was a firefox killer feature for me. So slick, so useful.

I _really_ enjoyed the ability to switch between different sets of tabs depending on which project I was focusing on at the moment. The Panorama UI made it quick, simple, and painless to do. It seems like most users simply use multiple browser windows, but I've honestly never been able to figure out how that works effectively when you're juggling multiple projects at once: when I'm not working on a particular project, I want it completely gone and (safely) hidden away so that it doesn't distract from my current project.

And then of course Firefox killed the Panorama feature. With the rationalization that no one used the feature and that it would be better implemented as an extension. Except that the extension went unmaintained after a few months. And then later, Firefox broke the APIs that made Panorama possible. The net result being that in the past few years, my productivity in the browser plummeted.

There are various tab management addons for Firefox but almost all of them have the following downsides:

* geared towards manually saving and restoring tabs (I don't want manual anything, I just want to switch between groups of tabs with a couple of clicks) * not actively maintained * buggy (as in, loses tabs for useful content that in some cases took a long time to find)

So far the one I've had the most luck with recently is Tiled Tab Groups (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro...). I don't use the UI for it, though, unless I'm creating a new group. I just click on the icon in the toolbar and select the group I want. It's still on probation as far as I'm concerned but it hasn't crashed or lost tabs on me yet.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#62

Post by bityard »

For anyone else who considered Panorama to be their favorite feature of Firefox before they killed it, the closest replacement for it I've found so far is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro.... It's not at all perfect from a UI standpoint, but it hasn't lost my tabs or crashed the browser yet.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#63

Post by andrewaylett »

ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-... to give me an overview. Currently at 232 tabs in _this_ window, my other windows have 445, 108, and 18 tabs.

Firefox does let you select multiple tabs and bookmark your selection as a folder, it also lets you expand a folder of bookmarks as tabs. I don't use either feature though, as my tab use tends to be more around not closing a tab until I'm done with the task associated with it, by which time I've opened another dozen and working out which I can close is too much effort.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#64

Post by catchmeifyoucan »

dredmorbius wrote: post #57
catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

want to try amna?? It helps you break things down by task. I’d say it’s still super early, but seems like the right balance of random browsing and collecting items as part of a context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...

Interesting. Is there a demo / walkthrough? OK, found & am reading https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/ My preference would be CLI / terminal centric. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

Hey - nice! Yup that was some user research we had done. Working on making the website better as well.

Few more details here: getamna.com/demo

Interesting! Currently the solution is primarily a GUI based system using Chromium for rendering. But the data is stored into a JSON file organized a group of tasks with website urls. I haven't explored too much around a CLI before. I know that org-mode is super popular, but I've never played with it much.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#65

Post by dublin »

superkuh wrote: post #42
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

I'm there with you (1500+ in one browser instance). But I don't consider it a problem. I have tab suspend and full text tab search via add-ons, I group my tabs linearly by topic and date, and the older 1/3 of tabs I know position by heart. Because I use a single process browser+noscript instead of a "modern" JS-engine-centric browser (ie, Chrome/FF) even with 600 tabs of 1500 loaded in my ram usage is still under 3 G…

It's easier to use Chrome for my work browser, so it only has a few dozen tabs open, but my primary home/sidejobs browser is Firefox, currently running at somewhere in the 1600-2000 tab range. Only Firefox can do that without barfing. (And that's on the old Surface Pro 4 i5/8GB - it runs just fine.)

I REALLY miss TabMixPlus, though... (a FF extension broken with the purge of XUL from Quantum)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#66

Post by eclipseo76 »

ssivark wrote: post #39
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

In response to some of the suggestions: 1. Tab groups: I have been an extensive user of tab groups in the past (when it was native in Firefox); it’s very helpful if your tabs cleave nicely into less than a dozen or so projects/themes, and you have no more than a few hundred tabs. 2. Tree style tabs: The extensions I’ve tried tend to be very slow and non-ergonomic for my use case. 3. The % trick: Didn’t know this; tha…

> 2. Tree style tabs: The extensions I’ve tried tend to be very slow

Try Sidebery:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Re: On Browser Tabs

#67

Post by dublin »

bsanr2 wrote: post #22
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

Recently hit 4000, with ~2000 in a single window. One thing that I think helps is remembering that you (ostensibly) have a browser history. Rather than keeping every tab you might want to come back to, close the ones you expect to be unchanged later (or that don't currently hold a particular needed state). You can then reopen ones that float up to your consciousness (i.e., the ones that are important) as necessary. T…

Congrats, sir, I don't think I've ever exceeded 2400. (I almost always work in one window to reduce the session recovery risk of accidentally closing a window with a bunch of tabs I want to keep.)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#68

Post by reaperducer »

sevencolors wrote: post #24

I never understood how folks end up with 20+ (100+ !?) tabs just hanging around ALL the time. For me it's so much visual noise. I can see it happening when you're in the midst of research or troubleshooting. But when I'm done or have solved my issue I'll note in my PR where i found solutions or add the useful pages to my bookmark service (raindrop). Then close all the tabs!

I never understood how folks end up with 20+ (100+ !?) tabs just hanging around ALL the time.

I get there sometimes, but never in the same window.

I maintain multiple web sites, so each site has its own desktop. Plus there's another desktop for one-off tasks, and one for communicating (e-mail, etc...).

Within each desktop is a browser window, which may have five or six tabs. If I'm doing testing, that number balloons. But only while testing.

So between all the sites and tabs, I may have 50 or 60 tabs. But since they are kept in different browser windows on different desktops, they're manageable.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#69

Post by ci5er »

ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

Wow. A man after my own heart. I finally gave up (partly because FF can be quite the memory hog when left open for a long time) and utilize OneTab a bit and have multiple tabs in each of multiple windows and use TabSession Manager to let me kill those windows and yet re-instantiate them at will. I guess it just comes down to organization - a straight-list wouldn't help me get my head around it all (which is my problem with Sublime Text, where I have ~1000 unsaved WIP files. That's also a problem for me)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#70

Post by k__ »

kevincox wrote: post #56
k__ wrote: post #47

I always close my tabs as quickly as possible. "Tabs Zero" so to speak. I would value a better reopen closed tab feature. Going further back and allowing me specify which closed tab I want back.

Isn't this just browser history? I close tabs very aggressively (usually hovering around Tabs Zero if you exclude the always open (like calendar and messaging apps) and regularly fish things out of my history.

Yes.

I guess, I want a browser history UI that's better integrated with tabs.

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