A Study of Tabbed Browsing | Hacker News Reader

A Study of Tabbed Browsing

dubroy.com

50 pointsluu52 comments

This seems to be all about tabs or windows.

Am I the only one who uses tabs and windows?

I have one browser window always open with all my everyday communications: Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, a corporate Outlook webmail account, a Discord team, etc.

Then if I do something different I open a new window for it. If it's an HN break, I open a new window for the HN home page and start middle-clicking (or Ctrl/Cmd clicking) each of the discussion and site links that look interesting. Now I have a window loaded up with those tabs that I can either look at or come back to later.

Time to do a Google search on a particular topic? New window for the search, then middle-click the most promising results. Now I have a window grouping the research on that topic.

So I end up with a number of windows for different activities or topics. Each of those windows has several tabs that relate to that specific interest.

I have one friend who opens everything in a single window with dozens of tabs and no organization to them. I tried to demonstrate this system of a window per topic with fewer tabs in each window, but it just didn't register.

It seems so easy though: New topic? Ctrl+N for a new window about that topic. Then open tabs within that window just for that topic.

And when I'm done with a topic, I can close all the tabs related to that topic in one fell swoop.

I admit this is a very naive question, but it seems like such a practical and obvious approach - so why doesn't everyone do this?

I feel exactly the same, and I've rarely met people who do the same!

Specific task has its own window, with all related tabs in there. Another window, another task/context.

I do the same on Chrome, but on Firefox there were Tab Groups. For the time being it needs to be ported to Web Extension. Firefox also does not reload all tabs on start, unlike Chrome. That's a thing that I don't like the most about Chrome.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/

   Firefox also does not reload all tabs on start, unlike Chrome

That's a choosable setting in Chrome -- resume where you left off, or start fresh.

That's not exactly what he is talking about. Both browsers can keep the list of tabs where the user left off.

But Chrome will actually load all the opened tabs, while Firefox will load only the focused tab when starting. It will load the remaining tabs only when they get the focus.

I think he means that firefox has the tabs available to click on, but not actually loaded until you click on them. Chrome goes and opens every page when it comes back up, and ends up with a substantial (re)startup time due to it, especially by the time you're around 100 or so tabs in

Basically, firefox does lazy loading, and chrome does not

Check out https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Definitely a practical approach with Chrome.

I prefer Firefox, and instead of opening a new window for each interest/topic/task, tabs are grouped using Tree-Style Tabs [0], with only the in-focus group expanded. When done with a topic, it's easy to close (and/or bookmark) all related tabs by closing that tab tree. The new Firefox Containers [1] makes this "grouped tabs as windows" approach even better, as individual containers can even be hidden from the UI.

[0] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Thanks for this really great idea. I am also the one with 100s of tabs open in same window :-( From now on, one window, one topic :-)

I have tried to train myself to do this a lot of times. However, most of the links I open come from other applications, except for HN or googling I rarely open links from webpages. This always results in links opening in random windows.

My final solution is to use two browsers and pinned tabs. I use Safari for slacking off and googling. And chrome for work related stuff with pinned tabs for Jira, Jenkins and what not. I then use Browser Fairy to redirect links from various applications to one or the other browser (e.g. everything from iTerm gets opened in safari, stuff from slack gets a prompt, non associated apps open links in Chrome)

I still accumulate crud in my Chrome tabs, but at least it is livable.

Same here. For everyone that does this, I hereby recommend FireTitle (currently Crappy FireTitle) which lets you label windows with specific names and maintains them labelled across restarts. It immensely helps navigate the myriad of windows that (at least in my case) you end up with.

A must in my workflow.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/crappy-fireti...

I've tried many, many add-ons and this is the only one that is simple and at the same time the most effective at keeping my windows tidy and helping me choose between them at a glance.

Combined with tree style tabs this is very useful. Tree style tabs provide organisation nearly without you having to do anything special. But sometimes for a deep dive shopping session or researching something across many sites, I open a new window. I don't keep them around though, I like my Emacs window and my Firefox one be one alt tab apart most of the time. I'm so used to it in fact that when there's a third window I feel partially impaired. Also, when sth is in an other window that I don't frequent (say in a different workspace) I tend to forget about it. I restart my computer and my two pillar apps infrequently, so it's possible that such windows remain unseen for weeks. But tree style tabs combined with vimium-ff allows me to use a single window most of the time, except temporary tasks that will require me to open and close numerous tabs in a short period of time.

One problem with tabs vs windows is that it just looks at two "solutions" and isn't approaching things from a use case perspective. Not that this is easy, with people having wildly different browsing habits.

Thanks to the magic of the middle mouse button, I always was a heavy tab user, opening "sub-tabs" in the background for plenty of link-heavy sites (like HNews). In the early days I created lots of top-level windows and used Expose for switching between them. After discovering TreeStyleTabs, I became a one-window guy again.

So it seems I'm in the tab camp. But there's still the question why I need to have that many tabs open in the first place? It's not like I'm heavily multi-tasking. There's a good reason for opening those three zeit.de news articles in separate tabs, but why do I need to retain the tab group with 13 react-redux links or 27 interesting CPAN modules?

We've got a problem with browsing history. For long-time storage, there's bookmarks. I'm using pinboard for this for unified access and tagging. But if I file something there, it might be that I forget it, so I keep a tab(-group) open.

Heavy tab users seem to be closer to using them as TODO items than mere window management. So it might be a good idea to look at TODO/GTD/Calendar apps for improving the stats quo. Not just filing vs. on-screen, but different levels of priorities. Maybe a bit of "AI", where Clippy reminds you that you've got a tab-group stored that contains this exact Stack Overflow article about handling NULLs in Oracle. And from there, you have quick access to the browser history "surrounding" those pages, even if it was a year ago. A "mega-expose/Jurassic Park file explorer" view of saved tabs/bookmarks, where you can drill down by tags, text etc.

The tech wouldn't be the big problem, probably doable with browser extensions. But getting a good initial design for this is the difficult part.

And then you find out that some Hypertext paper from the mid-70s already had all that.

One of the prime benefits of using tabs as TODO's that I experience is that it is literally _zero_ effort to retain something on your TODO list, and practically zero effort to remove something from it. This means I don't have to worry about losing things I still wanted to keep track of, yet the amount of things I retain that I no longer care about is limited. Yes, there's still quite a lot of tabs that could theoretically be closed, but the cost of keeping them open is not that high (at least in Firefox, where they simply scroll out of view).

So I'm not sure how much of a problem it is. There is a history function in the browser, but it's cluttered with things I don't care about that makes the things I do care about hard to find. If you look at that as a problem, then tabs could actually be seen as a solution to that.

> the cost of keeping them open is not that high (at least in Firefox, where they simply scroll out of view).

As a way to save some memory, if you haven't disabled history and set Firefox up such that it reloads your session when you quit and reopen, you can just restart it every now and then, and only the focused tab will get eagerly loaded.

> So it might be a good idea to look at TODO/GTD/Calendar apps for improving the stats quo. Not just filing vs. on-screen, but different levels of priorities.

You just changed zero-work instantly available all the time visible todo list into something that requires effort.

> For long-time storage, there's bookmarks.

Bookmarks are for things you are likely to remember later. Tabs are for things one is unlikely to remember later. Things you did not knew exist or cared, but now there is article on dzone you wanna get idea about.

My memory isn't good enough to make "likely" work out here, so that wouldn't be a good fit for me. Right now it's more about "will I use this soon enough", and of course that changes depending on how much time you've got available anyway. And when that happens, I file them away on pinboard or discard them. It does work, but better integration and UX would improve things.

And you might got that wrong: I don't want to assign priorities to tabs and/or bookmarks, I just regard both as being in different "priority" buckets, and maybe finer-grained distinction and ease of moving things back and forth would be a good approach. (Never mind: "all the time visible"? Not in my tab tree ;) )

Nothing near this but I do the following:

- Use tree style tabs

- Use vimium ff for the ^ binding, toggles between the two tabs most recently viewed

- Tabs means "read this ASAP"

- Bookmarks toolbar means "read it later"

- Other bookmarks folder is the bookshelf, for later potential reference

- Completions only come from bookmarks

- Bookmark heavily

- Make sure bookmarks have meaningful and findable names

Nowadays the only problem I have is linkrot. I have written a python script that analyses my places.sqlite, and it reports ~%8 linkrot, although some of that is SSL errors and some keyword search bookmarks. I'll try to extend the script so that it tries to change the likns that actually 404 to web archive ones where possible and safe. But other than this finding thing is easy for me these days. Also, DDG helps. It's my default search engine since some years I guess by now, and the ! searches have proven to be a very nice thing to have, albeit I've only scratched the surface with regards to them.

About revisitation: is there a tool that saves the contents of every web page as I browse, and creates a searchable archive?

I think there is a much higher probability that webpages I have seen in the past contain relevant information for future searches. It could be used as an offline library, or as an advanced revisitation mechanism.

Yes!

If you're on Linux or Windows, you can use the amazing Recoll: http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/usermanual.h...

Ah, that looks promising, though it seems like the web extension uses a download hack to communicate with the backend, requiring you to let firefox download such files by default. They really should use the native messaging api, that would also make it possible to search from within the browser, which is kinda important for a good experience I think.

That's something I'm exploring doing (web as a filesystem, plus document archive). There are some tools, though I've largely not found them useful.

I've just learnt of Recoll (sibling comment) on this thread, looking at that.

But yes, this is very much something I'd like. I'm using Pocket somewhat for this now, but with a tremendous amount of frustration.

Years ago I setup a local http proxy that cached everything. I never tried searching it but was able to pull pages and sites that had 404ed from the cache using it as an archive.

"Out of sight, out of mind".

If I close a tab, the chances of me re-visiting it drop to 0.

If I keep it open there is still hope.

Sad but true, even though I'm from the era of web rings and bookmark folders.

That's why I loved it when I noticed that Firefox didn't load all the tabs when you restored your session. So you can have tabs dormant.

Funny side effect of dormant tabs and the modern fast moving internet is that I sometimes find myself re-visiting tab after it has gone 404.

I'm a Chrome user.

I found myself getting lost in a maze of tabs AND windows, especially when I'm researching a topic. So I decided to go 100% tabs only. I achieved this by changing all the shortcuts I use for launching Chrome to include the newtab param:

  Chrome.exe <my-home-page> -newtab

This forces Chrome to re-use the main Chrome window (if it's already got one open) instead of launching a new window.

It now means I'm now only lost in a maze of tabs. Right now I've got about 40 open, and the top of my browser looks like a Toblerone bar. :(

I've tried extensions that put the tabs on the side, but I don't like the wasted real-estate when you don't have that many tabs open. So I've currently settled on the AllTabs[1] extension.

Personally, I don't think the ideal solution has presented itself yet.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alltabs/fffhmhcill...

Speaking of which, does anybody know how to turn off tabs in firefox, and make it instead open a new window when it would like to open a new tab? My WM already has tabs.

A bit of googling suggests that (historically at least, possibly still true) there isn't a built-in way, but you could with an addon. Most likely an addon can still do this - detect tab-open and convert to window-open ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I don't have any implementations I can point to, though. And a brief browse of about:config didn't yield anything interesting.

In about:config set browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick to true and instead of Ctrl + Click use Shift + Click on links to open them in new windows instead of tabs.

Also uncheck "Open new windows in a new tab instead" in Options in GUI or set browser.link.open_newwindow to 2 instead of 3 (it's the same thing) to make pop ups open in new windows instead of tabs.

There might be an extension to remap the Ctrl/Shift shortcut or abandon tabs altogether but I don't know of any.

Googling turns up results like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/ but it's of course not compatible with Quantum.

Thanks. I think I already did most of those. But the tab bar is still there, taking up space. And apparently I can't remap keys without an extension, or something.

I use tree style tabs, and wanted to get rid of the redundant tabs at the top. I used the following:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1525

> the tab bar is still there

I've been using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/hide-tab-bar-... but it seems this isn't going to make it into the Firefox Quantum era. :(

You can disable the tab bar with a "user chrome" file such as https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/master/src/static/... (instructions at top of file).

Mozilla is making noises about disabling this eventually, but it works for now.

You can turn them off. Instructions here,

https://superuser.com/questions/1261660/firefox-quantum-ver-...

works for me: https://i.imgur.com/ZMmJlZT.png

I first encountered tabbed browsing on Opera, and the other browsers later copied. I think it was actually cheaper in terms of resources than another window. So tabs are a hack, that caught on because Window managers on many OSs are so poor. And bookmark UI is so bad, that people prefer tabs. But if you use multiple browsers and multiple tabs, you can easily get discombobulated. I say that, but I can probably cope with about 10 tabs in each, if groups of tabs are related.

I like the idea of a freeze tab/site for later. Like when you shop or are filling in forms. But I'd love to see a better bookmark/history UI - and even have that embedded a bit more into the desktop.

Small sample size (21) and only one who preferred windows over tabs. Still, may be worth studying more.

I prefer browser tabs after resisting them for about a year. And I still prefer separate terminal windows. So maybe I'm not the best judge.

Speaking of terminals, I personally find that a combination of panes (i.e. arbitrarily nested horizontal + vertical splits) and tabs is really the best of both worlds.

Tile Tabs [0] was an extension that used to enable this kind of workflow for Firefox, but with the WebExtensions transition I thought it'd be no longer available, but it looks like I was wrong. There's a Tile Tabs WE extension [1] now, that attempts to replicate the same experience using windows, but it's not quite the same in terms of usability and space efficiency, and makes it mostly pointless if you have a decent tiled window manager that can accomplish the same layouts (which is what I have generally defaulted to ever since losing Tile Tabs).

This and vertical tabs are the kinds of features that I wish were built into the core of browsers because it needs a lot of UX attention to really shine. While I'm glad vertical tabs seems to be getting first-class treatment from WebExtensions, it's a shame that panes-based workflows appears to be getting shafted.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs/

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/

It looks like they’re working on panes

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7hs9tn/teaser_scre...

Beautiful! Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

The Firefox Test Pilot teams have been coming up with some consistently awesome features, and generally with great UX.

I can't wait to try out their take on panes!

Well, on the other hand I find the findings very conclusive, but the 'study' is from 2010 and I haven't noticed any major changes in the tab pattern as it ist presented to us as users.

So if there would be a larger study, we should think first about which actions we would take depending on the result as we got already some sound assumptions.

I use tabs instead of bookmarks.

Right. When you save session files full of tabs you get the history of the tab (how you found it, what keywords, etc) in addition to the site itself. It's very useful.

Hating Firefox now as there isn’t a Tab Mix Plus for Quantum.

I need to click any link, bookmark or search to open a new tab! This how I’ve browsed the net for ten or more years.

Anyone else frustrated about this and found a solution?

Lots of people are frustrated with their tab extensions dying and I assume most of them (like me) are now using the ESR release. (Note that Mozilla penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing history)

> penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing history

aka they don't support profile data migration between versions. "Penalise" is needlessly polarising.

On the one hand yes, but on the other hand prior to 55 it worked fine.

I feel like they could have saved that up for 57 as part of the cake icing.

Actually, they never supported backwards migrations: it just happened to work relatively well. They even explicitly noted this in the release notes. And it's easy to imagine that it would cost a lot of effort, especially with the massive amount of changes in 57, to support something that would be used only once by a relatively small number of users.

You mean you did not have to click links, bookmarks or search to open a new tab before, and if so, what did you use?

Or do you mean that you can't now - because you're supposed to still be able to. Although you might have to get used to using the middle mouse button rather than the left one.

Tab Mix Plus was an add on that Firefox Quantum no longer supports. :-(

It could be customized to open a new tab when clicking a link, clicking a bookmark, performing a search from the URL bar and more.

Now in Quantum I have to right click then choose open new tab vs. just one normal left click. Frustrating and a UX killer for me. It's why I never stopped using FF, but am going to have to now.

Middle click will do it with fewer key presses, as will ctrl/cmd clicking. Those are the habits I’ve picked up.

Am I the only one who doesn't group applications in Windows OS? I like to see what I have open and access it with one click rather than maintain multiple desktops and hidden apps under icons

If you're using keyboard as your sole method of changing apps and windows that doesn't matter anyway.

Did anyone notice that the study is about 7 years old? Maybe user behaviour changed somewhat since....

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