Stop abusing tabs. Love, Firefox | Hacker News Reader

Stop abusing tabs. Love, Firefox

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39 pointsg0atbutt39 comments

I actually use separate windows for this purpose. Tabs have been draggable between windows for a while now. Drag the tab off, you have a new 'group'. The system task bar keeps an ordering, so I have spacial recognition.

Also, at one point, I was curious, so installed this plugin so I could stop counting... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4422/

There's also tree-style-tabs... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/

I discovered tree-style tabs a few months ago and love them. However, I find myself running Chrome for its superior performance on my Mac. Is there a grouping tab manager anyone can recommend for Chrome?

I laughed when I read this: "I just counted. I have 17 tabs currently open"

Am I the only person that sometimes has literally hundreds of tabs open? I love tabkit, but a hundred or two tabs seems to be the limit with that approach. I'm definitely looking forward to Tab Candy...

I regularly have over a hundred tabs open in Opera.

I also found this part of the article funny, "I found myself abusing tabs. Sometimes I would leave tabs opened for days, just chewing at my system memory."

Wow.. tabs open for days? Try months! Once every few months or so, I go back through my open tabs and clean out the ones I don't care about, and ones that are actually worth bookmarking.

On rare occasions, Opera will crash and get in to a state where it can't restore the tabs I had open. That's a real disaster... but at least it lets me start from scratch with my open tabs.

I would like my tabs to be better organized, but wish the organization could be automated somehow. Even bookmarking sites and organizing my bookmarks is just too much of a hassle sometimes (though I do do it with some really important stuff). With open tabs, I rarely bother.

I have a few tabs that have been open for years. After the first time Opera corrupted my autosave.win file I wrote an autobackup script for it (and these days it's automatically committed to a git repo every hour then backed up with the rest of my git repos).

I can't think of a time within 6 months that I’ve had fewer than 50 tabs open. :-)

I wish browsers had a command to save the current tab or window-full-of-tabs indefinitely in cache (i.e. on disk), close it for now (so that flash & javascript stop taking CPU & network connections), but keep it in some separate list. It's much too much bother to save web pages to a directory on the hard drive and re-open them manually.

Am I the only person who just hooks up to Google's index and keeps one tab open for every page on the web? That way I never have to waste any time opening a page!

(seriously, though, every time someone mentions tabs someone posts your comment, and every time I'm more convinced that those folks don't get a damn thing out of actually leaving that much stuff open)

I'll preface this with, I don't have a better solution, so kudos to the FF crew for trying something new. That being said:

I don't find this compelling at all. Do I really want to spend part of my time browsing, by sorting and organizing my tabs into folders?

Did this ever work for email? I'm pretty happy with the Gmail model of searching instead of organizing, although that probably wouldn't work for tabs.

The idea is that you organize it as you go, rather than repeatedly wasting time every time you have to figure out which tab a page is on by scanning the tab bar.

As other people have stated in past threads, there's plenty of room in the idea for automated organizing to be implemented later.

I tried the addon (FF4 only), you don't really have to organize them all the time (at least from my experience).

If you have 1 tab open, and then click on a link, and open it in a new tab, it will automatically be grouped together with the "parent" tab.

One personal problem I found, it's just that I need to see the tabs all the time, while in this way the other groups are hidden: to see them with this addon you have to click the addon icon (navigation toolbar) or access it by shortcut.

This seems like a natural step forward in the browsing experience, and I for one am looking forward to it. But, at the same time, doesn't it look like tabs are starting to step into the domain of bookmarks more and more. What is the difference between an old group of unread tabs and a standard bookmark folder?

The problem I see with this is performance. Currently, Firefox tends to get really slow on Linux with multiple tabs open.

Here's a hint: there's no difference between bookmarks, open tabs (read or unread), and page history.

There is a very big difference to those of us who don't have persistent Internet connections. Because of a rather unique social situation, I spend a lot of my time house-sitting at the home of a family member who died recently. I have DSL at my own home, but that place has nothing except electricity, water, and gas.

The result is that I tend to grab a large number of pages from my home connection on my laptop, keep them as open tabs, and read through them when I am away from home. An RSS reader like Brief (a Firefox extension) is also useful for this method of short-term information storage.

My conclusion: an open tab (or a page successfully saved to disk) is something you can use whenever you want, but a bookmark is something you can only reach when you are connected to the Internet.

I guess I'm in a minority here. I rarely have more than 5 tabs open. I can honestly not fathom ever needing to use more than 50.

To the people who use gigantic numbers of tabs, what does your browsing workflow look like where you end up with that many?

If I plan to return to a site or page in the near future, I don't close it. Instead of using bookmarks or the like, I just click on the already open page and refresh it if needed. Periodically I'll clean up all of the pages that I thought I'd be interested in looking at later but never got around to doing so.

For me at least it's a combination of stuff I notice that seems interesting but don't have time to read at present (yes, one would think a delicious account with a "toread" tag would make the most sense), and stuff I find useful and think I'll want to refer to again Real Soon Now. This just grows over time, as the longer I leave something on my to-do list, the smaller the possibility is that I'll ever get to it. Yes, I recognize that I have a problem, but I'm not particularly motivated to try to fix it :-P.

Every now and then I go all "inbox-zero" style on my browser and close everything and start fresh, but it pains me a little when I do this.

On my work machine, I usually have 5-7 windows open, each with 25-35 tabs. Usually each window has stuff related to what I'm working on on that particular workspace. On my personal machine I usually limit myself to 1 or 2 windows (I don't have an external monitor attached to my personal laptop like I do with my work laptop), and I go anywhere from as low as 20 tabs to as high as 60. Usually on the higher end, though.

Having said all that, I'm not sure Tab Candy would be something I'd use. The video of it makes it look excessively cool and awesome, but I feel like that's a level of organization my brain isn't wired to do on a regular basis.

I have "Mindfulness In Plain English" (http://www.kusala.org/udharma4/mpe.html) currently open. I'm not sure, but I think I've had this open for more than one week. Reading it should help me with concentration. This seems somewhat ironic.

I do things like this all the time. Frankly I'm surprised it has taken this long for a solution to come up. Perhaps it's only power users that run into this issue? I'd love to see some data on how people typically use their browsers.

I know that my mother (apart from being a teacher, a very normal internet user) also has quite a few tabs permanently open, but that's mostly facebook and similar sites; she spends less time reading long articles than I do.

In other words: This is a problem that mostly power users who shifted all of their reading to the web face. I, for example, now only read about 6 physical books a year, but spend a lot more time reading online. I probably read the equivalent of a small book every day, it's just that this happens in the browser and thus instead of stacks of unread books I have heaps of unread tabs.

My non-computer savvy roommate generally has lots of tabs open at once, plus lots of applications open as well (which on a laptop are just system-managed tabs in effect).

I used to do that (keep tabs open of something I want to read) until I discovered this:

http://readitlaterlist.com/

In Firefox, if you right-click on the page and "View Page Info", the "Modified" field will tell you when you visited the page.

No, that'll tell you the value of the Last-Modified header (or equivalent). If you open your history, and filter based on the page title, you can see the visit date.

Only 17 tabs? Although I'd love to be able to organize tabs better, I don't care about that nearly as much as I care about the performance of my system when that many tabs are open. (a) Memory usage (b) risk of some plugin or javascript on a page causing firefox to start eating 99% of my cpu.

Theoretically those two problems can be solved concurrently, but still-- favicons, hotkeys, and the ability to drag and drop solves most of my problems with tab organization. I use alternate windows only when really necessary.

What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible. One process will be for the relatively safe, familiar, and stable, text-oriented type sites with minimal advertising (hacker news, gmail, wikipedia, python.org, clojure.org, paulgraham.com, etc.), and the other process will be for heavy sites, new/risky sites, or otherwise problematic sites (eg if I have a youtube tab open I can't ctrl-PgDwn past it, when I hit that tab I have to stop and use the mouse-- a pain in the ass).

While Chrome's process-per-tab model is really nice, they're still all tied together and there's a risk of losing everything sometimes.

What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible.

What's stopping you from running a separate process?

Firefox is a single-process application, and won't let you start another one (at least sharing the same user data; you can run a different build, but you can't share/use the same user data).

Given that you're looking for "functional independence", I don't understand why you'd want it to run on the same profile. Share your bookmarks and history between them with Firefox Sync, and tailor your selection of add-ons to the types of content you'll be viewing with each one.

When I used Firefox I had up to 15 tabs open.

When I switched to Chrome, I found that a few changes in behavior of tabs allowed me to maintain up to about 75 tabs.

When I enabled No More Tabs, (a piece of advice from a recent article posted on HN) I dropped to 5 tabs and I really haven't felt a lot of loss over the change.

When I browse with my iPad, I use 1 tab even though the device supports more.

I suspect the anything related to "tab management" is solving the wrong problem.

Well, I'm pretty sure I'm in minority here. After abusing tabs for a long time I decided to switch back to windows and I must say I'm very happy. Now when I Command-Tab in Safari I get a new window. These windows pile on the desktop, so eventually I must do something about them, either read, bookmark, when it's something I want to read soon I just drag the page icon to the desktop. And I think that's better for me personally than having hundreds of tabs open. Usually I'll go clicking and filling the desktop and at some point, start to read and close the accumulated windows.

But I try to avoid web applications for mail, rss and anything I can find a decent desktop app, so maybe my way of dealing with windows wouldn't apply to someone who wants to check gmail all day.

I never understood why everyone left this task to the browser. Your window manager's job is to manage windows, why not let it? I'll have at most 2-3 tabs per browser. But A simple cmnd-tab or use of expose and I can do everything Firefox is doing here, except even better.

I wonder if Google will compete with this in Chrome. For that matter, I wonder if a similar feature will make an appearance in Chrome OS. It would have the potential to be a subtle, but important tweak to the desktop paradigm.

Any innovation in this space is welcomed by a chronic tab abuser like me.

That said, I was pretty disappointed when they started talking about identifying why you wanted to revisit a particular tab group and then failed to take the next logical step of adding in timed notifications...

The spammy sounding recommendation feature and sinister-sounding tab groups that could be shared in real time sounded like options I'd want turned off by default too.

I have nothing to add to this conversation. However, I have to say that the comments about having tabs open for years, or hundreds of tabs open at once, make me a bit nervous. Like when I use someone else's computer and they have thousands of files on the desktop. I usually just slowly back away.

Hmm.. it seems like people are using tabs to deal with a problem that bookmarks have already solved. Someone on here said they have one or two hundred tabs open for months. Is that really necessary? Couldn't tabs organised in folders solve that problem and increase your computers performance?

Could work, but I'm sure almost no one will take the time to name a group, so you want to do that automatically (which you can do by finding out what those pages have in common)

Bartab ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/ ) is a good stopgap solution.

Sure, I'll have 2-5 and sometimes 10 tabs open. But 50? 200? "Save to read later" (as in later than in 20 minutes)?

I just use bookmarks.

Opening tabs is faster than closing them. When I'm trying to track down some information (say, understanding a bug) I'll generally open 3 or 4 tabs near-instantly (variously-worded google searches, checks on the appropriate bugtracker or forum, etc), then keep on opening new tabs until I track down the answer. Once I solve the problem I forget or don't bother to close the tabs -- it's a PITA selectively closing tabs, and they don't do much harm. Instead I'll do a close all every now and again, when I reach a point where there aren't any that I want open. But by that point it's quite possible that I will have worked up 100+ tabs.

[I know there are extensions to more easily close tabs; so far it just hasn't been worth the effort to choose and install one]

You'd downvote me to hell but I once had ~700 tabs opened all at once in 5 different browsers.

~200 is normal.

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