Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

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 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...

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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 :-)

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