This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?
Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?
Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.
The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.
How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.
> Do you just not have any interests?
Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.
I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.
An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.
To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.
When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.
> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?
You don't. There's google for that :-)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.
> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.
> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.
I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.
I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative).
It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
With FF when you start to type it intelligently suggests tabs you already have open.
Perfect for keyboard lovers like me :)
Reasons I have a lot of tabs open:
1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before.
2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it.
3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.
4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...
5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.
6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.
I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.
I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.
tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.
i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
Check out the Firefox Tree Style Tab plug-in [1], is this what you had in mind?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Chrome might be faster than FF and a Ferrari might be faster than a pickup truck.
But:
FF and the pickup truck is more useful for work IMO
and the Ferrari and Chrome comes with a price I'm not comfortable with.
You might have better luck with trying to implement it as an extension to Firefox although the extension API is (at least for now) going to be a shadow of its former self AFAIK.
My tab tree is the closest thing I've come to an effort-less mind-map that works for me. (Effortless as in ctrl-click to open a new sub-tree so I can always see what is related to what and how I found something really hard-to-find-but useful.)
Even though my current setup works well I'm quite sure I or someone else will be able to create something event better in the future.
http://lifehacker.com/203915/download-of-the-day-pathway-mac
- make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something
- open all outgoing links in new background tabs
so you can continue reading the current page
- leave several pages of reference material open
(e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing)
- open links that someone sends you to work on them later
I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer.
> and how can we get them the help they need?
Thanks for asking! Here is my idea:
Make an even better solution! What I need:
An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes
- multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.)
- possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.)
My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.:
- I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
- I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it).
- A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P
Feel free to suggest more great ideas here.
[0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on.
From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that.
(Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
You may want to give this extension a shot: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/session-manager/
That reads like "while <more than I use> is ridiculous, <as many as I use> isn't that unreasonable".
I never have more than about ten tabs open, and a hundred strikes me as ridiculous too. To each his own, though, I guess.
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
That would indeed be a much better use of space.
Also Chrome might be faster but FF has some unique advantages that makes it really great for serious work.
Also the speed advantage that Chrome currently has might be about to disappear : )
I never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.
"Chrome is so much better for my usecase. Look how much Firefox usage has declined, Firefox should just die"
"Here's my use case which Firefox is better at"
"Your use case is invalid!"
from HN comments this week.
Leaving a tab open means I'll actually stumble across the page again.
It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520
It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
We talk about privacy as fundamental right but are ok with chrome. We all know it's a memory hog but still are ok with it.
I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
By telling them about OneTab.
I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.