Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Nadya | Hacker News Reader

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>I could picture for example grouping/ungrouping tabs in a single window, bundling similar tabs, changing the color of the tab depending on how often it's used, a better way to nagivate between multiple browser windows (or "super tabs"), etc

Grouping/Ungrouping tabs, to my understanding of what you mean, existed in Firefox and was just removed from the browser and pushed into an add-on. It's called "Group Tabs" and I use it extensively. Or I could have this mistaken for 'bundling similar tabs'. I'm not sure on the semantic difference you mean between the two.

Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.

I use a Firefox addon called FireGestures. Not for the mouse gestures that it is primarily designed for - but because one of the wheel gestures: "[Popup] List All Tabs"

Basically it allows me to hold down right click and use my scroll wheel to switch tabs from anywhere in my browser window. So I hide the tabs up top and get more screen estate! A win-win scenario!

It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/Wz5Jx9p.png

Vivaldi does it! They call it tab-stacking, and this is the reason I'm switching over. The browser itself is still a bit glitchy, but I loves me some tab-stacking.

I use "Tree Style Tabs" and the tab bar on the left side instead of at the top. It groups tabs on how you link-opened them from each other automatically, but you can regroup them depending on your needs. It's one of the reasons I never even considered switching to Chrome etc.

So you can access your list of open tabs from anywhere on the screen? Sounds good.

> Multiple browser windows seems redundant with multiple tabs or the Group Tabs mentioned above.

Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?

>So you can access your list of open tabs from anywhere on the screen? Sounds good.

Yep! Hold right-click and use my scroll wheel from anywhere in the browser window. So not the userChrome (tab area, bookmarks bar) or off-screen (my OS desktop).

I have another program that is "tab aware" bound to a different hotkey: I can press alt+space and begin typing in the Title name of a tab to open that tab from truly anywhere on the screen. It could be nice to be able to have "global hotkeys" for a browser that does the same thing.

>Surely it's the complete opposite: if you have multiple windows, then why do you need Group Tabs?

One is passing off handling multiple groups to the Operating System (handle multiple instances of your browser) while the other is the browser handling multiple groups of tabs. Different ways of handling the same thing with trivially different workflows (alt-tabbing and hoping you alt-tab to the right instance of your browser or {Ctrl+Shift+E / Rebound Hotkey} for tab groups and selecting the proper group that you can name.

Being able to name my tab groups instead of having 19 different instances of "Firefox.exe" helps when trying to find the proper group rather than the proper window.

Multiple windows lets you split screen estate though! But IIRC there are add-ons to let you split the browser screen to render 2/3/4 tabs at once for that use case.

They have their pros/cons but have a lot of overlap and redundancy.

You seem like a tab power user. Just curious if you have any sort of "tab junk drawer" like what OneTab provides for Chrome.

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