The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs
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I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.
I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking for alternatives.
I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.
I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.
(Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.
The question was about videos in a background tab, which is controlled by the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.
EDIT: I would agree with you in your assessment of the default behavior however, if it were the case, that most people only have a few tabs open normally.
But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.
I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.
I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...
I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.
"Firefox doesn't do this" is not a valid one-sentence summary of what I just said.
This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?
And I'm very happy about better support for this kludge, but I do wish that someone would get to the roots of the needs that cause this use of tabs, and design the correct interface for it instead.
You could create visual groups and lay out sets of tabs and even name the sets, and switch between them at will. It was awesome.
From the way you describe it I think it sounds like a great start for at least some of the needs driving this. I suspect in many cases heavy multi-tab use comes from a need to lay out sets of documents for use together in some sort of spatial metaphor. The traditional desktop model often does a pretty good job of covering this for local files and native programs, but I find browsers to be far weaker at supporting it.
As a complement, for the potentially-life-changing(-but-not-right-now-for-goodness-sake) things and other valuable resources I will almost certainly never find my way back to otherwise, I think it might be a nice start if I had a 1-keypress way to drop them, with metadata, into an local, indexed archive. The followup challenge to that would be a really good interface to getting stuff out again. Tools like Zotero could in principle cover the first part of this niche automatically already, but I wouldn't want the backlog archive (sluggishly) dropped together with my references without any shadow of compartmentalization, so I don't really view that as a ready solution.
It also has a very interesting fresh take on history.
Or, if you want to look at it the other way, bookmarks are just tabs that don't load until you click on them.
I also research a project and then wait a while before starting it. This helps me get a better perspective on the project. I'll often leave my research open in a tab group so that when I start the project I can very quickly review everything and get up to speed. Using bookmarks in this scenario doesn't really work because bookmarks don't save session state very well.
Also many of us (I think) use some kind of vertical nested tabs.
The point made is that different people will use software in different and unexpected ways. Assuming that people use browsers the same way you do, or assuming that a certain scenarios are "impossible" because you personally are not likely to encounter it will harm your userbase.
Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.
From 2009, so rather ahead of the curve.
I have a group of tabs for various things in AWS, a group for various things in my build system, a group for the various Jira and Confluence things, a group for mail and google docs, a group for my company's HR requirements (timesheeting), a group for programming docs, and any one of these groups can have additional tabs for idle browsing while I'm waiting for something, and I can add additional groups if I'm on a secondary project.
The way I tend to browse is to hit a page, then load several promising links in new tabs. Load them over the network in parallel, because doing everything on one tab with back/forward is painful in the extreme.
Overall, it's ridiculously easy to hit 100 tabs.
Edit: fantastic, thanks for the suggestions. Will definitely check them out.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
not as nice as the old one (but it's improving!), I just use Tab Center Redux.
Chrome also just tinifies tabs as you add them (eventually making them little slivers that are hard to click on/close and impossible to identify), whereas Firefox stops shrinking them at one size and then lets you scroll through them. This itself makes it easier to have more tabs. So if you're a Chrome user having 100 tabs may feel excessive, but given that the experience is pretty pleasant in Firefox a lot of folks have workflows around this. If something is hard to do you'll never discover workflows that need that functionality :)
On top of that, the addons I mentioned make the experience even better.
For me I have >100 tabs often because I'm working on many things, and each thing may have 3-5 tabs open (github issues, code, a million documentation tabs), and I'm also reading news articles and such, and often queue up things to read later as more tabs that I get to eventually. Pretty easy to get there.
For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while.
I feel like many "dozens of tabs" windows are little projects like this. For example, doing development I typically have a bunch of documentation tabs open. We keep these windows open because there's no way to stash them into a drawer while they're not actively being worked on.
What browsers lack is a good way to treat these tabs as "persistent workspaces". I'd like to be able to close a window and be able to return to it later. Rather like an IDE which remembers your open files. So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name, after which every action would automatically update the saved workspace. Close the window, workspace stays saved. Open the workspace, everything is restored.
There are some browser extensions that allow saving groups of tabs, but there aren't any that behave like I described above.
If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly.
Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!
Let a group of tabs be a bookmark folder that has the "show" attribute set, and so dynamically tracks what is shown.
Want to show all tabs in a group/folder? Toggle show.
I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.
I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups.
I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs.
I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother.
Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.
Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty.
Best bet is to manually save your session at times.
I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like incognito, but persistent and within the same window.
The 'simplified' in its name makes me doubtful it has any of the advanced features I need.
These "redone" addons that work post 57 start out pretty bare-minimum but they rapidly gain features.
Tab Groups has a shot. I took on this project after it was
decided to remove the built-in Tab Groups from Firefox, as
I thought it could be a good and fun learning experience;
it hasn't been, if anything it's been stressful and
time-consuming. I don't really use groups outside of my
development profile, with my browsing habits I only find
them useful to a point, they're helpful for my
development/coding workflow, but I've used them maybe twice
in my main profile during normal browsing.
Its core functionality and basic workflow probably can be
made into a WebExtension, but only after an almost complete
rewrite of the code (with some major work done on Firefox's
side as well!), and still stripped down of at least some of
its features. Many of the new groups features I've wanted
to add since the beginning are impossible though, for the
same reason as I mentioned above: they either don't fit the
scope of what can be allowed through WebExtensions or their
implementation would be far too complex to do on my own.There's also tab groups and tab groups helper but those are about to disappear[1] and make firefox useless for this use case.
[1]: http://fasezero.com/
It's impossible to go back once you get used to that UX.
FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.
It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"
This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger
Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.
It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation)
My project context has a chrome window with all my task related tabs, my terminal window and my IDE. My communication context has my tickets, slack and other communications in it. Then there is one more context with podcasts, spotify or non project docs and reading.
It wasn't something I set out to achieve either, it just happened naturally once I started using shortcut keys to switch between workspaces.
Not related anyway except as happy user
Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming.
Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.
which is your favorite?
Fixed it for you. Like another person wrote, old Opera did it just fine in a period where PCs were much slower.
Just an example: I'm working on an ML model, I begin by researching prior work. I get down to 100 or 200 related papers in google scholar. I start going through the papers until I find the ones that are closest to what I'm looking for. I leave the tabs of the 10 or so papers that I have found open. Now I have 12 tabs open: 10 related papers, my specific google scholar search and my general google scholar search. As I go through the related papers I will happen upon different ideas, libraries/tools or referenced papers that I want to return to. These tend to build up and you can easily get to 6 or 7 per paper. By the time I finish 4 related papers I could have 40 tabs open. This whole process happened over the course of 30-40 minutes. I also tend to find new keywords to use in google while I'm reading these papers which I then produce more google scholar searches from and repeat this same process over again. Now imagine having done this many times over with various projects you're working on but not necessarily required to finish. That's how you end up with a few thousand tabs in onetab and 400 tabs open in chrome.
Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I feel they are important to read but don't feel motivated to do so ever.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt. So I had to triage away the least important tabs and bookmark them or force myself to read them, just to keep my computer running. I just starting using firefox though, which is not helping this bad habit.
You are not alone.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt.
Yep, been there before too. My "light" laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so Chrome starts to dog out pretty quick if I go tab crazy on it. It can handle about 25 tabs and then it starts freezing the entire system for minutes at a time.
Fortunately my "big" machine has 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor so it can handle 4 or 5 Chrome windows each with oodles of tabs, 2 or 3 Eclipse instances, and various server processes all running at the same time. I just can't bear carrying that thing around because it weighs a frickin' ton. :-(
If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.
You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.
I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.
I also use chrome profiles to separate my workspaces, so I don't have to load everything all the time and search through my tabs to find the one I want. I even sync them to different accounts.
Mobile is the only place I use multiple browsers, due to mobile browsers not supporting multiple windows, even though chrome has already had the functionality for it in the past (remember the chrome 'desktop' when chrome ran in metro mode? Alternatively, just have multiple entries in overview). On my tablet I have six browsers, which is probably more than I really need; two incognito browsers and four mobile browsers. Various combinations of add-ons (firefox) and not (chrome), incognito (focus and inbrowser) browsers, and browsers (chrome) with JavaScript disabled.
You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.
I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.
Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.
You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.
The feature I like best about diigo is for what I do read, I can highlight the sentences I want to recall or locate later.
But I have on more than one occasion been unable to remember how I got to a page, or even how to search for it, and in those times I found my system invaluable.
Less out of sight as well, the next time I do a google search, diigo plugin injects my existing stuff beside the search. I like the offline copy it keeps for me like you said.
It's not perfect but not a sinkhole of bookmarks.
I've tried all the third-party type attempt to solve it (everything from saving the links in a textfile I always keep open to ReadItLater, OneTab, Pocket etc. All those things are where tabs go to die, never to be read again. More like ReadItNever, amirite?). That's a "solution" I guess.
Now I try to be more selective in what I "keep" to read later, and as soon as I hit 40-50 tabs, I go through and kill a bunch of them. It hurts a bit, but not as bad as when I have hundreds of tabs.
Like you said about the boring material. I wouldn't think of them as boring. But detailed, and basically takes a long time to grasp. I will need to spend at least an hour or two on the topic. And i since it is not the most important things in life This two hours schedules gets put away for the time being.
Then there is the Apple News tabs hoard which happens in Apple Events.
Whenever I find something interesting, i open it in a new tab, read it little bit and leave it there thinking - I will get back to it later which never happens. Later on when it is getting enough that I can't open a new tab then using tab-snap extension I copy list of all the tabs open and email it to myself. This email list is like my own mini knowledge dump which have helped me retrieving things later on when required.
Doesn't matter. They're there for a reason. And there's still something a touch "different" about a tab, compared to a bookmark. It's hard to explain, but there really is a purpose to doing things that way.
By the way, there are extensions that will kill tabs that are inactive, but even on my 16GB MacBook Pro it doesn't take much for Chrome to start weighing things down.
If I google something, I like having a few different sources or points of view, so I open a bunch of tabs to look through.
Sometimes, I want to switch to a different task, so I collapse that tab tree for looking at later.
Sometimes, inside that tree, there's another topic of interest I want to know about, so I create another tree (with 3-5 tabs for different sources) inside.
I have a tree for music, various trees for work, various trees for interesting topics, leisure, etc.
So some of us think 100s of tabs are weird, because there's no way we could get any work done, before closing down those tabs.
It's not surreal if you think about it.
People put off cleaning there room and such... so there are bound to be people who put off reading tabs they see interesting.
If you're going to say book mark it then no. My bookmarks are a mess.
I've sent Mozilla a suggestion of doing machine learning and cluster my bookmarks for me. >___< Also if they can have topic labeling ml stuff on book mark that would be nice.
okaay, so there's now 10 potential useful articles to read, they're already loaded (yippee, saves time...) hmmm let's go through them hmm... that one's useless (close) that one's useless (close) that one looks interesting but i don't have time to read it immediately....
---->>> LET'S KEEP IT OPEN FOR NOW * <<<< ----
.... and move on whoops the phone's ringing i have to deal with a client's urgent issue, he also needs something to be fixed okay so it's an obscure issue i don't know anything about let's do some google searches damn we're under time-pressure again let's do the same trick, right-mouse-button on a stackexchange liiink, right-mouse-button open-in-new-tab on a forum paaaage, right-mouse-button on some git repository browser because i might need to compile that up or investigaaaate...
okay now the tabs are open and loaded don't have to wait for them to load let's review them... close, close, read, read, close, read.... hmm that looks like it's got the info i need, but...
---->>>> LET'S KEEP THE TAB OPEN IN CASE I NEED IT AGAIN TO FIX THE CLIENT'S PROBLEM IN THE FUTURE <<<<<----
okaay so i have time to go back to that particle physics research now and i can carry on where i was interrupted ...
--->>>> * BECAUSE I LEFT THE TABS OPEN.... * <<<<-----
repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. the technique saves vast amounts of time (through proper use of parallelism), uses the browser itself as a proper research tool, as well as an information storage mechanism "with history". the actual "browse history" itself i have found to be pretty damn useless, i can never find anything as it doesn't have a proper useable UI.
from your enquiry i should imagine that you're one of these people who sits there waiting for a page to load, sequentially, then closes it... sequentially. depth-first in other words. by which time it's been so long that you've forgotten what you were searching for. for those people who use internet search engines to do breadth-first searches, tabs are absolutely invaluable.
30 more for each comment page
20 for google news
10 for wikipedia (conservative)
at least 20 per tool's documentation section, since all docs are now broken down into a hundred 5-kilobyte files, it seems
20 to research cheap action cams on Amazon
10 to go through some configuration guides for a cloud product
10 for random facebook feed links
and 10 for youtube rabbit-holing
So, 160 tabs I have open. It's a slow evening.
API research
I can easily have over 100 tabs of just Reddit open.
I'm on beta. Had a few hangs last week but this week it is buttery smooth as usual.
edit: This was one of the reasons I loved the old Opera. It just didn't care. 50 tabs, 100 tabs, 200 tabs .. it just worked. I miss it.
- client asks for a say an audio player integration into an app
1. Research bunch of open-source audio player libraries available on Github. This is easily 20+tabs
2. Additional, sometimes temporary tabs get opened when researching individual libraries (like their documentation page, etc)
3. I want to pick a library, save the state if this research and go to implementation. (I create a new window)
4. Open documentation for the library or its Readme and start implementing, use Google, or stackoverflow.com as needed. Save state of this (don't) meaning, don't close it;nowadays i use bookmarks if it's a task i wont get back to soon)
Now, I'd have a bunch if tasks like this. Personal, professional, hobby projects, etc. Tabs should be cheap and should be lazy loaded. You should even be able to hibernate tabs manually (Vivaldi (chrome clone) let's you do this)
On desktop I have 4 pinned tabs, Gmail, workflowy, trello, google Calendar. Plus anywhere between 2-30+ tabs, depending upon the google term i am searching, or reading something. And none of these is Facebook Youtube Medium and such, as all these are blocked.
On my two Android phones,on main one, this one, this is tab number 98. Many of these are HN search pages, and links there on. Others include github, google, stackoverflow, jekyll, javascript related. Also, occassionally i go through, and prune tabs. Also the times I have nothing to read, I go back to these tabs, read, and then close.
The secondary work phone has 52 tabs.
Terrified of loosing all these, occassionally I use desktop google chrome option of open all tabs on other (mobile) device, and then export all those tabs to a html file.
It's easy to cross that threshold when you're doing research.
However i force myself to clear everything on startup.
Then I close the whole parent tab and sub-tabs when I'm done with a particular context, or go through my to-read-later tabs to catch up and close them.
All the bookmarks I have ever saved in my life on any browser remain without being touched because it's just another bunch of stuff hidden away with no context or relationships. So I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago (for frequently accessed sites, the Awesome Bar fulfills the needs). I have the same attitude with all the bookmarking and "read later" services. For me, if something is out of sight, it soon gets out of mind. This is where tabs help me focus on different subjects/areas much better than bookmarks (or even a page that has all tabs listed). I can easily find what I had put in a group of tabs and decide when to get to them. It's not perfect. Sometimes I find that some tabs are no longer interesting or that I don't have time for them, and so close them after several days or weeks.
I've seen some experimental stuff from Mozilla on improving bookmarking and addressing the issues with "save for later". One such effort was Dropzilla [1] in 2012, which I was impressed with. But it seemed like that was abandoned soon or not carried forward (if anyone has updates on this that I may have missed, please let me know).
Firefox has also been, in my experience (not meaning to start a browser war here), much better at memory management. In comparison, I consider Chrome as a toy that's useful as long as you don't want too many tabs (otherwise it just brings the system to a crawl). Stability wise too, I find Firefox extensions to be of much better quality. To date, I can't get session restore working well or undoing tab close working well in Chrome. Same goes for switching proxies quickly and other things too.
So, what I need is a browser that can handle hundreds of tabs well. For me that has always been Firefox, ahead by far.
The reason being that session management is terrible or non existent and bookmarks is horribly broken.
With firefox I have a bunch of extension and groups my tabs by activities. I guess some power users do so because it's more convenient and practical than having to remember one or two dozen URLs and reopen them when coming back to an activity later on.
Have you ever used CloudFormation?
I have the problem of moving a tab to a new window, and then 15 minutes later I have 15 tabs open. So I often have a few Chrome windows open at any point.
If I restart Chrome, only the focused tabs on each window are loaded.
I got 8 extensions installed at the moment, 6 of those are marked as legacy and will stop working before the end of the year. I also hope Mozilla focuses more on power users, but I think a lot of them will leave when their favorite extensions stops working and Google keeps favoring Chrome on their sites.
And no, Firefox WebExtensions are not compatible with Google Chrome WebExtensions. They're close, but not compatible.
I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create:
It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.
I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her.
You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager.
First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans.
Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad.
But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.
Bookmarks | Show All Bookmarks then keywords in the 'Search Bookmarks' is useful.
I have actually set the bookmark.html file as my start page. I can then use 'find in page' if I can remember any keywords about the page I am looking for, or just scroll down.
Ms Martin Senior needs to have her bookmarks backed up as well or there will be gnashing of teeth at some point in the future.
Imagery fine!
I think the main lesson is that bookmarks don't work too well or people just don't use them. If nothing else, make the bookmark display show newer bookmarks rather than the same old ones from four years ago. And maybe start preloading if they are opened regularly. Merge two features together, maybe add optional other organizational features for example similar to new tab screen.
The tricky thing is that there are a lot of things that are potentially supposed to happen while a tab is open. The browser is now it's own OS, and it may be very difficult for developers to use important features if tabs (processes) only _look_ like they are running.
A better history may solve their problem.
I have 2-3 tabs open most of the time. If I am looking something up, I go to 10-12. When I am done, it goes back down to 2-3. I can't even fathom under what situation people are using hundreds of tabs.
I have heaps of tabs open, but there are orders of magnitude more pages in my browser history. The latter usually contains so much that is too much to look through to find anything but quite recent entries. The tabs still open are pages still with some relevance to me, while the history is filled with lots of incidental stuff that is no longer of use.
[Edit: also, with open tabs the page content is already there so it's more quickly accessible. This can be useful if you need to look at it to help find the page you're looking for, and to get the content from the page]
For me, it reduces cognitive load. I don't keep in mind all tabs that I have open -- that's why I keep them open! To forget about them.
Bookmarks are mentally for things I want to save and reuse. But I'll probably open 40 HN sourced articles (from the main page and comments) per day, and continually cycle/review them for interest/effort throughout the day.
Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.
If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think
I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.
To me, the problem is that bookmarks are "while browsing, go to a different component that loads the browser tab with what I want".
Tabs, OTOH, are a placeholder for things that I want to keep just 1 step closer.
Saying it that way, I don't think it makes rational sense. But 1 cognitive step to a page instead of two is huge for me.
If i don't look at a tab for a few hours, it's not worth keeping around as it just adds to the noise without providing value. If i need to read something, i either read it immediately or bookmark it to read later. The result: i can confidently resume work without distractions at any time.
> You can't just glance at the top of the
> browser to remember where you just were.
With tree-style tabs, each root represents a train of thought. I just collapse them until I decide what to do with them. Sometimes I bookmark and banish them. Sometimes I come back to that thought next weekend.
Chrome's default tabs at the top, to me, are the distraction where each tab has equal weight. But I'm not going to say that anyone is doing it wrong if that's what they prefer.
In this particular example microsoft uses edge to push people to use the latest version of their adware/spyware OS.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmo...
IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue
IIRC pocket has had some serious vulnerabilites exposed.
Try it, then read the original post and the comments again. :)
I think this is the missing piece on all this discussion.
First you have to create some categories, but that doesn't take long and then you simply throw bookmarks in these categories. the end.
Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it.
I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?
Jeez. TIL. Couldn't live without it.
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).
It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.
Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"
Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
/me smh
Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)
One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.
Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
1. Open up Window->Task Manager
2. Sort by CPU
3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list
4. Try not to kill extensions
5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage
6. Kill everything over 99mb
7. Continue enjoying Chrome
Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.
Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
killall "Google Chrome Helper"
Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.
In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open
I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.
Why?
Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).
I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.
I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.
Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.
This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.
YM, as always, MV.
Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.
If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.
I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.
I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.
For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!
On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.
One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).
I just found it today and already I love it.
-
I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.
So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.
FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.
After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.
Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.
At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.
I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed.
Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.
Maybe.
I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...
Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.
"% <substring>"
Great feature, completely undiscoverable.
Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from one source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for. Notice how it offers to search Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature (I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a special box in its search results.
Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time. I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular site. I can't make FF do anything like that.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png
It's just the search box next to the location/url bar. Now has search options to start out at wiki/amazon/twitter etc.
E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news" likewise on Wikipedia.
What makes a URL "Top Hit"? If it is simple popularity, how do you propose Mozilla to gauge this? This problem is better punted to search engines, IMHO.
But at least it could autocomplete sites I've already visited. For example, say I've visited microsoft.com. The next time I type "micros", it could offer microsoft.com as the first autocompletion, which is what Safari does [1]. Instead you get this [2].
Sadly, the new extension model isn’t nearly ready for prime time yet.
They changed their add-on API and are in the process of deprecating the older one which allowed for radical UI changes. That's probably what he was talking about.
Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions API.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/
I wish this ticket would see some movement though! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101611
Well that's just false.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement.
the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's of tabs open and that should land sometime soon as well (even so, i'm a diehard firefox fan so it will be hard to make me switch).
Plus, having read that article, I feel much more comfortable leaving many tabs open (although I don't think I've ever had more than 100 open simultaneously).
Although I think the dev tools in Chrome are superior, I love the way I can step through the code and have all the information I need displayed neatly against each step without having to manually watch everything.
Is there anyway to get Firefox to do something similar?
The multi process will never work with the current XUL based gecko code base - they could have told us the truth several years ago, instead they put some resources to it, and it gets no we're - it will never work like Chrome 1+ or IE 8+.
Instead they should have focused on maintaining Firefox as it is and put more resources to Servo - which takes way too long already (a new Rust Lang doesn't help).
EDIT: obviously, I spend most of my day developing. Firefox definitely has my preference when I'm ust browsing on my own.
- Archive folder: bookmark dump to keep the links just in case I ever need it again (so they pop on the search bar even after I clean my history, you can also add keywords manually if you want)
- Buffer folder: to-dos, reminders and things I <need> to read soon™. I keep it at a maximum of 10 items at all times
- Follow up folders (plural): pages I want to check ocasionally for updates. Often used for pages without RSS. I don't like to use extensions to check for page modification because I want to do it on my own pace. This helps reducing my mental load because I know it's there if I ever need it. I often delete the entire folder if I don't feel it's useful anymore.
- The rest are folders divided by a main folder and subject. This way I can easily delete them after I'm done with that task (after a minute or after a year). Example: Programming > Project X, Programming > CSS fix for that thing.
Middle click on the folder to open everything at once. Done.
The position of the folders are crucial and also helps with muscle memory. I keep it like this: the more to the right (of the browser), the more disposable they are.
It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this?
Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regressions and given an engineer (or multiple engineers) who loves optimizing things carte blanche.
Really, I want to know what happened over there. Does anyone know?
I very reluctantly switched to Chrome. I loved Firefox. I even know today that Firefox likely suits my needs better... but at this point I'm too old and too stuck to change. Chrome doesn't yet make me so angry that I have to switch. Horowitz is right (along with every other entrepreneur) when they say for someone to switch, the next product has to be an order of magnitude better than the currently adopted product. Anything less isn't enough.
In many cases, it wasn't that Firefox became slow but that people installed extensions which made it slow. For years, you could solve 90% of those complaints by uninstalling AdBlock Plus.
That's not saying that the browser teams haven't made big strides, only that it's not such a simple story. Chrome running a certain JavaScript function 15% faster isn't a game changer if a side is limited by layout or poorly structured DOM interactions.
The fact is that javascript execution (not networking behavior but javascript performance) on many web apps differs by orders of magnitude between Firefox and Chrome. There are a handful of sites that I find literally unusable in Firefox on a new Macbook Pro because even after loading, sitting in the background doing nothing, they make the entire computer unresponsive due to high CPU usage. These same sites work just fine in Chrome and Safari.
Imo both FF and Chrome are very capable browsers and Mozilla lost significant market share simply because Chrome had better promotion.
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...
[2] http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/benchmark-battle...
I do remember opera being years ahead of all major browsers and being copied right and left and I also remember most major browser (not IE) having similar performance.
Maybe it's the web pages that have become more and more bloated with useless tracking, ads and scripting a.k.a. web 2.0
Personally I use Google Docs, but you could use a wiki or MS Word or many other things. The point isn't the technology, it's that when you have a whole slew of tabs open, and you feel the urge to keep them open, it's a strong sign that your mind is trying to gather info about a topic.
Putting it into a document often feels great. It gives you an opportunity to type out a few quick notes on the topic (like what you thought was significant about various links) or other thoughts you had. And you might find you want to share the document with people you're working with. And I find I feel more organized, not just because I cleaned up something messy but because I took a moment to focus my energies on something my mind was begging me to pay attention to. Sometimes you even realize you need two different documents on different subjects, and it's a little enlightening to realize the two separate themes.
Pocket is good for this too.
Someone (likely here) mentioned that setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true in about:config makes a dramatic difference in performance, and based on my limited experience, it does. So much so, that I'm thinking about switching to Firefox after many years of only using it sparingly due to lousy performance on Linux compared to Chrome (e10s has helped too).
edit: I should note that HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING are not enabled by default on the 2 Arch Linux systems I have (Ivy Bridge and Haswell iGPUs, up to date Firefox, Mesa and Kernel). Not sure if there is a white/blacklist, or if its just always disabled in Linux.
Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.
Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.
After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list.
As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.
Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though).
Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.
This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update.
The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.
At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To...
Macromedia Dreamweaver had tabs even before Opera browser, as well as Frontpage. Word, Excel and PowerPoint used to be MDI applications up to Office 2010 (up to 2003 with a good UI, kind of hidden but still that way until 2010). Photoshop on Win, older Acrobat, mIRC, etc use MDI and have tabs as well. Win3x had all the auto arrange and different MDI modes, Win95 unfortunately broke the "icon" MDI mode, though the mode still exists but doesn't work in Win95 or later.
So it would be great if Chrome and other browsers would support MDI with tabs like the old Opera 4-6. Use could auto-arrange two tab-windows within the browser main window side by side or arrange them in any way you wanted by hand. Very unfortunately Microsoft lost all their proper devs from last century and with it all the previous inbuilt WinAPI knowledge - otherwise Win8 and Win10 trainwrecks would never have happened.
It's extremely unlikely that will ever happen (if they were to do it, they would've done it by now).
It lets you hit a button and send all open tabs to a single page that persists between browser sessions. You can remove a link by opening up that list and clicking on it.
Has a bunch of other handy features too ... like publishing the list of links to a share-able URL.
1) Choose one of the compact themes, which have square tabs instead of curved
and
2) Re-enable the title bar
Happens on MacOS, and Windows for me.
I've seen others start opening multiple windows when the tabs get too small. I usually do that to keep tabs grouped into "pages I am unlikely to view simultaneously".
I've found that a vertical tabs addon (Tree Tabs, Tab Center Redux) is great for fixing this problem, since vertical tabs never get squeezed.
For just articles or something I'll want to read later, I've started using the Google Inbox extension to save the link as a reminder. From there I can snooze it until I have the time or motivation to actually read it.
– Yubikey – My Chromebook (I would use and equivalent FirefoxOS if given the choice)
There are performance issues in some cases but nothing major. It is still somewhat slow compared to Chrome, even though this may be due to optimizations done specifically for Chrome.
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...
v1 will be quite basic, just a list of saved pages. Expect more organization tools (folders, tags, etc.) in the further releases.
Please do sign up to be informed of impending release! :) (estimated end August)
Also, do leave a reply if you are keen on using ML (link classification) to help organize your pages for you. Unfortunately, because computers can't read our minds, this can't be perfect so folders are probably still relevant for your mini-projects.
I am not Einstein but it is probably not a bad idea to have a whole lot of interesting things around you all the time. Sort of like a cache or the way proteins are synthesized, like swimming in a nutritious soup. "Oh, look here is a piece that fits!".
One basically decreases the chance of forgetting interesting and useful information. "Out of sight, out of mind."
I narrowed down the problem to that add on by selectively disabling them.
Uninstalling and reinstalling uBlock fixed it.
YMMV, but figured I ought to speak up :)
You know what I really want? A way to attach titles to browser windows. This window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work" task, this one is "Research" on the new doohickey I'm thinking of buying...
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
Old Firefox played videos fine, but lagged on many page loads. I was about to conclude it was just too old to browse the web decently, but this... this seems incredibly usable.
Thanks Mozila, I'm definitely installing this thing on my main, much more modern machine tomorrow.
I measured by eyeball, using "time cat" on the command line. This might seem weird, but c'mon - I'm measuring minutes. Microsecond precision is not required.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
Would love to switch to Firefox, but I still find Chrome faster to use. Anyone tried vivaldi?
So wish this was possible.
There's a bug on file to consider adding this, but it has no momentum behind it right now since it's a bit niche: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740
I use All Tabs Helper to help jump between tabs. Finding tabs is hopeless without it. ATH also has features like mass closing tabs or unloading them. I wish it had a way to bookmark tabs, which I would use to close most of my tabs.
So, I'm very glad to hear this. Time to switch off ESR.
Now it might be worth it to give it another try.
In the meantime, I am seriously concerned about Thunderbird. Thunderbird is my MUA of choice and quite frankly, there are very few options to replace it, and none of them seems 100% okay (except, maybe, Evolution). Clawsmail is okay-ish, but so ugly to see and feature-poor.
The ability to open 5-10 times more tabs than I use is quite and edge case that mozilla usually doesn't care about, but the real question is what is the point of this when it comes with making firefox totally useless for said use case by dropping support for extension that make it practical or useful.
I put articles to Pocket if I don't read them for a week or so. I'll probably read them on a vacation, but I don't need a constant reminder how poor my time limits are.
"It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51."
I believe you meant to write "until Firefox 52." I think the usage of "until" would typically point out the exception to the rule, in this case Firefox 52 is the first version that is no longer slower than the previous.
Could do with a "fetch as desktop" mode, though.
Then again, "focus" might mean reading one review at a time. Or instead waiting until you're at a desktop and remembering to do it. If you forget, are you worse off or better off?
It's just a different situation. Depends on your criteria. Certainly, I've not missed it on my mobile.
Personally, I usually have something like 3 or 4 tabs open. But what I would really need is this:
Yup, hardware accelerated video on Linux. Chromium has it. Firefox doesn't.
It's 2017 and for me Firefox is still missing the basic feature of seeing smooth Youtube videos.
Anybody working on that? Can't you just take it from Chromium? I mean it's open source, isn't it?
The change is that now the tab item does not have an associated content window at all until you visit it.
open FF (it it's not already running) and wait for a hand full app-tabs to load:
* slack (there's no dark theme in the native app)
* skype (there's no dark theme in the native app)
* toggl (timetracking)
* email (office365, I stopped worrying about outlook/thunderbird)
* jira (gotta know what to work on next)
* social (fb&twitter - could probably also do w/o - I rarely open those)
* work
* private
* to read
I hardly ever left-click a link, I only wheelclick. but my ^w is at least as fast as my wheel click - since the awesomebar searches through history, pagetitles and already openend tabs it's really easy to navigate even between tab groups just by ^t, type 3 letters, press return to 'switch to tab' (really convenient icon there so you know you're going to close the new tab and switch to an existing tab at this moment)
if I want to restore a tab i killed prematurely I fire up the history - where I only use the 'by last visited view' - does anyone srsly use the 'by date and site' view?
tabs are something very different than bookmarks to me, a bookmark is something I return to on a regular basis - a tab is an open 'todo'. I don't use the usual bookmarks thou, only the bookmark-toolbar below the url - and my bookmarks there have no text - they get renamed to "" so I only see their favicon. entries there are e.g.
* HN
* blog.fefe
* oglaf
* xkcd
...
I have no idea what I'm going to do after the death of the tab groups extension.
one thing that really bugs me is that every time a show tab groups to 'normal users' (tm) they insta love them. I really wonder if no one used to use them bcs hardly anyone ever knew about them.
Having fewer tabs might also keep one more focused because there is only so much in front of you at a time. You don't have to process through a bunch of data that is unrelated to the current task at hand.
On the other hand, my desktop is an unorganized mess of random files...
To clarify: I am talking about a one-row tab scenario. With about 3-4 pixels per tab. And they were perfectly happy with that. Even seemed to feel it was a good user experience.
And in this case that happened. This guy is an actual Firefox developer.
This is as it should be and congrats.
Now I am wondering how I can possibly get into this mysterious world of having thousands of tabs open.
Tabs for me are like much more convenient bookmarks.
I've got a gazillion tabs open on Chrome right now and guess what, they're all actually open.
The tabs store state too, so they aren't just bookmarks - I just closed the browser with just your quoted text in the reply form, and upon restart, the text was restored.
Chrome does seem to work this way as well, but loads all tabs by default instead of lazy loading when a user navigates to the tab.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/session_restore#Restoring_s...
but the feature itself is much older.
The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.
The first cycle is not smooth because there's noticeable aggregate loading, but it's able to cope just fine after with a lot of tabs completely loaded. This has improved a lot rather recently.
And when I click a lazy loaded tab after startup there's no noticeable load for the individual tab, it's right there when I click it.
It's only when you force-load all the tabs that load times become visible, but that's to be expected.