Show HN: Task-Based Electron Web Browser
alloy.simoncaminada.ch
alloy.simoncaminada.ch
It's a pity, they really were a guiding light of open source.
> The Tab Groups (Panorama) feature will be removed from Firefox in version 45. We know this may be inconvenient and we apologize. Removing the Tab Groups feature will make it easier for us to improve Firefox.
This is plain stupid. How much effort could it be to maintain this feature? Compared to Hello, or Rust, or Servo? None of these are useful to most Firefox users, but tab groups were. How more complex is this than the WebMaker or Persona, stuff that practically no-one uses? Is this harder that writing their current homepage, with blocks, pictures and fancy? I'm not touching a Mozilla product again.
Personally, I love tab groups but I can see most normal users not using it.
If the exact same functionality is available as an addon, why is this an issue? Persona is being abandoned as well, BTW.
Edit: I remembered the problem. It's not closing the last tab, it's closing the window that closes all tab groups for that window. More generally, the problem for me is that tab groups are local to a window. In practice this basically means that if you want to use tab groups, you can't also use multiple windows, because managing multiple windows each with multiple tab groups pretty much guarantees that you'll go insane trying to keep track of where everything is and which windows are safe to close.
I think I would much prefer if tab groups were shared across windows, and each window would "claim" a tab group as its own. Closing that window would either close that tab group or even just "detach" from it, leaving the tab group available for another window to claim it. Essentially, it would work sort of like tmux only with windows and tab groups instead of terminals and shells. (Possibly with the limitation that only one window can view a given tab group at once.)
I'd love to use tab groups to organize a large number of tabs, but ultimately, the fact that your tab groups are always a single close button away from being blown away is a deal breaker. (I know I can restore the window to get them back, but that's only if I remember while that closed window is still in the "Recently Closed Windows" menu.)
Alloy
Energy Impact: 651.4
Avg Energy Impact: 24.6
This is compared to Google Chrome, which, with 15 tabs open, has an impact of 11.2. When I looked into it, the energy impact of Alloy is near that one would expect on a stress test (ex: http://www.tekrevue.com/tip/use-activity-monitor-energy-tab-...).Any ideas what would be causing this much energy consumption?
I guess, I would use it for anything specifically not requiring security or dev tools.
As an aside, I've long thought that having support for tasks as a central feature of the UI at the operating-system level could be a useful design.
I know that Atom which runs in Electron has access to all your files where as Chromium does not. Does Alloy have the same security as Chromium or is it running on Electron's (I'm a native app so my JavaScript can access your entire system) level of security?
Sadly, Microsoft never updated the MDI functionality (eg auto arranging child windows, snapping child windows to a side, icon mode, etc). MDI used to be so great in Win3x and got broken in Win95. The icon mode isn't implemented in Win95 (and later) nor has Microsoft added a native tab-bar based on MDI child windows. On the other side Microsoft Office programs like Word and Excel (at least in v2010) still are MDI based programs which all the legacy downsides that confuse users (who never heard about those partly hidden UI concepts).