On Browser Tabs
abuqader.substack.com
On Browser Tabs
1–10 of 187 posts
Re: On Browser Tabs
#2I'm probably in the minority because I never use tabs much ---- I prefer multiple separate (overlapping) windows that I can size and arrange as desired, because I often use the information from multiple sites simultaneously. I've seen a lot of others who flip back and forth between two tabs many times, trying to compare them, and have never thought they could open two windows and put them next to each other. Of course, I've been using browsers before they had tabs, so it could be experience, but I wonder if the current "single content" model has severely degraded users' ability to compare and contrast different sources of information.
Re: On Browser Tabs
#3I... 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 interface. This is one reason I’m really excited about the Nyxt browser.
PS: Part of it might be FOMO, but part of it is also that these links represent certain threads of thought/exploration and are like bookmarks of things to revisit at a later time. Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew, but that’s not a fully satisfactory solution. I think we need tools & interfaces to better (more holistically) accommodate people’s intellectual workflows; what we have today is geared much more towards consumption.
As an example: why can’t we easily group tabs into projects and have bidirectional sync between the browser and project related resources (Eg: Some markdown/org file, or sync with Evernote/Notion/Roam, etc) so that whenever I resume working on the project, I get a warm start with the context mapped out (continuing from the previous session). And I want a much tighter relationship between my tabs and my project notes (akin to bibliography of references), including annotations on webpages, etc. If we are to use the web more effectively, the ecosystem surrounding browsers needs to grow up and help us get there.
Re: On Browser Tabs
#4I'm probably in the minority because I never use tabs much ---- I prefer multiple separate (overlapping) windows that I can size and arrange as desired, because I often use the information from multiple sites simultaneously. I've seen a lot of others who flip back and forth between two tabs many times, trying to compare them, and have never thought they could open two windows and put them next to each other. Of cours…
I found myself using separate windows more during my time with a heavily customized Manjaro install, where I used a tiling window manager and had lots of ways of quickly adjusting my window layout with minimal extra information needed.
I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible (even if macOS manages to be even worse). There are a few third-party applications to sort of emulate tiling WMs, but they're very clunky and software likes to act "surprised" about it and often have weird behaviours. That, and the requirement of window chrome.
That being said, for your specific example of flipping through two tabs, I still find that very useful as a visual diff: get both tabs on the same scroll position and spam Ctrl+Tab and your brain will quickly generate a diff between both. The ideal solution would be actual universal diffing tools, but that's far-fetched.
Re: On Browser Tabs
#5I keep my tabs under control and always set FF to start with a fresh session so I loose all tabs every day. Works for me.
The new FF for android though forces a new tab to get to my favorite websites and does not allow for a clean session after close, so I now have 47 open, mostly the same 4 websites :s
Re: On Browser Tabs
#6I... 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…
This is quite a staggering amount imo... Why not just avoid painstaking and just start fresh? Is this a form of FOMO?
Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs.
If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?
Re: On Browser Tabs
#7I'm probably in the minority because I never use tabs much ---- I prefer multiple separate (overlapping) windows that I can size and arrange as desired, because I often use the information from multiple sites simultaneously. I've seen a lot of others who flip back and forth between two tabs many times, trying to compare them, and have never thought they could open two windows and put them next to each other. Of cours…
I found myself using separate windows more during my time with a heavily customized Manjaro install, where I used a tiling window manager and had lots of ways of quickly adjusting my window layout with minimal extra information needed. I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible (even if macOS manages to be even worse). There are a few third-party applications to sort of emulate tiling WMs, but they're ver…
> I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible
Have you tried Microsoft's FancyZones? I find it works well enough to be worth installing on all my windows computers.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overv...
Re: On Browser Tabs
#8I... 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…
Whenever I have more than 10 open tabs, I close all of them. Searching a URL from a fresh browser is faster than browsing through tabs, especially with the history in the URL bar.
Re: On Browser Tabs
#9I... 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…
At that point isn't it better to just set up some bookmarks? Navigating 700 tabs is much harder than navigating a hierarchical bookmark list.
Personally I only keep open tabs that I am actively working in, if I have more than ~15 I get less productive since I have to hunt through to fine the one I need. Several times a day I just clear out all my tabs aside from a couple pinned ones.
Re: On Browser Tabs
#10I... 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…
Have you tried OneTab? It's an add-on that squashes all your open tabs to a list and saves the list to a page. You can reopen tabs, remove them, etc. from the page. It's super good.