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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

#71

Post by jmchuster »

crucialfelix wrote: post #38
mrtksn wrote: post #34

This looks nice but in my experience, it is unrealistic to have Chrome with many tabs open on a laptop. The machine would slow down, drain the battery and force me to close tabs before I need to classify them. Did that change too? IMHO a feature as a tab limiter would be more productive for me at least, forcing me to close or archive tabs before opening new ones. I have ancient tabs of great finds that at some point…

The Great Suspender is essential for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

i've found "Auto Tab Discard" to be a much better alternative

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

#72

Post by nneonneo »

nikita2206 wrote: post #65
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…

My personal experience was that neither Firefox’s pioneering alternative to what Chrome announces here (tab groups), nor tree style tab extension were convenient enough to use. With tab groups you obviously very quickly neglect trying to group newly created tabs and even if you, it’s not very helpful (except for sand boxing - that’s a nice thing to have). Tree style tabs were just a pain in the ass, it was constantly…

I just killed the horizontal tab bar after installing Tree Style Tabs (it's a quick trip to edit a profile CSS file and is quite well documented on the TST github page). The tree tabs are really all you need.

Tree tabs work just as well with 5 tabs as they do with 50 (or, heck, even 500). I use them as a mix of short-term bookmarks, active browsing contexts, trains of thoughts, etc. It has quite fundamentally changed the way I browse around the Internet, and I can simply never use Chrome or Safari the same way again.

I often similarly need to research some particular thing a bunch. With tree tabs, one parent tab contains the main context, and every time I open a new link in a new window it will appear as a child. In the end it's a big tree of tabs with one root tab, with the tree giving a nice hierarchical organization based around where the tabs came from. TST gives you the ability to group multiple tabs together ("stacking" them), and then you can rename the group and collapse it (or, for more permanence, bookmark the entire tree).

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

#73

Post by behnamoh »

gnicholas wrote: post #40
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…

Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible. It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.

As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a piece of software is the keyboard shortcuts it supports. More keyboard is usually better.

Another feature which I like is tab pinning. It's esp. useful if you're playing/running something in the background (YT music, Jupyter notebooks, etc.)

Finally, I tend to use "session buddy", which is another extension that saves the current state of tabs. I can save them and quit Chrome. Later, if I'm looking for a certain tab, I can just search for it in session buddy's saved sessions.

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

#75

Post by remarkEon »

Cool, something similar exists in Firefox (with an extension). Still not going to switch to Chrome, though. I have the Chrome browser open once or twice a week because, as one can imagine, gmail works better in Google's browser - but once I finish fully migrating everything to protonmail and my own @ I'll have no reason to ever use a google product again (run a NAS I can access remotely, collaboration in Microsoft Office works "good enough" and tbh I prefer the version controlling for what I need it for, DDG is at least at parity with Google search and is frankly better for images).

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

#77

Post by colordrops »

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 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 of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs.

This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.

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

#78

Post by cmckn »

gkoberger wrote: post #19

Maybe I'm wrong (EDIT: seems I'm wrong!), but I feel like the people with dozens of tabs open (guilty) aren't the ones who use organizational features? Also, it's a hidden feature, but you can already Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group.

My exact thought! I have numerous tabs open, and have zero interest in fiddling with an approach like this. I don't think this can ever be faster than opening a new tab, for me. Safari on iOS added a feature last summer to auto-close tabs after a certain age, and I love it.

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

#80

Post by KingOfCoders »

gnicholas wrote: post #40
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…

Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible. It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.

As a tab Horder I also use FF, though it gets very slow with 100 tabs after some time on OS X (iMacPro).
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