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Comment by barryhoodlum | Hacker News Reader

I don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.

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This is true and always alarming to see on someone's monitor but TST makes browsing better even if you don't have hundreds of tabs.

Whenever I'm researching or buying something, having tabs ordered in the parent/child tree makes finding things and going back to listings or indexes much easier and the general experience much more pleasant.

I heard a theory somewhere that the reason people use their smartphones for everything nowadays is because they never used the potential of their laptops/desktops and don't see much difference in usability. Things like TST show you how much more efficient you can be on a real computer.

Certainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place.

My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data wrangle.

I have decided I'm just going to write a system where I paste the address/or use a bookmarklet, and insist on small text or context and/or the ability to tag and group. But it must be a simple and cross-browser/system.

The most annoying thing about bookmark managers is presentation.

What vertical tabs allow you to do is forgo tab management all together. With vertical tabs, you never really close a tab, but instead, you keep working on the small subset of tabs you opened most recently. Because they are in a vertical space, even though you have a hundred tabs open, the titles of the 5 or so tabs you are working on are as easily visible as they would be if they were the only open tabs.

OTOH, with horizontal tabs, once you’ve reached a certain number of tabs, they all condense into indistinguishable icons, and even before they have, you can easily only see a couple of the tabs entire titles at a time (on a laptop screen).

So even if you don’t manage tens or hundreds of tabs (although many others do), vertical tabs are still useful because they allow you to never have to think about closing a tab, and still have a great experience with the 5-10 tabs you are interested in at any one point of time.

Firefox doesn't behave as you've described -- I've got 27 tabs opened at the moment (probably the lowest count for months) and only 22 are on-screen, the rest have scrolled off to the left. All have enough context left in them for me to be fairly sure what they are. And if I do want to look at them all, there's a handy drop-down to the right of the tab bar which will show them all in a vertical list. Although I often have enough tabs open to need to scroll that list...

That's Firefox, and while I've got plenty of extensions, none are affecting my tab behaviour.

No, you're right. The comment you're replying to is specific to Chrome. Firefox behaves as you describe, though personally I still strongly prefer TST's behavior; it's a substantial further improvement over Firefox's default setup. Especially when you add in container tabs, and the ability to prefix url bar searches with % <space> to search through your open tabs.

Some people seem to strongly prefer Chrome's behavior. The only advantage I can see is that it forcibly prevents your tab count from getting out of hand.

I found OneTab [1] and Pocket (or similar read-it-later services) to be an efficient way to cope with too many tabs.

OneTab works similar to bookmarks but preserves the date & time they were added. It’s even possible to add a title, i.e. context, to a group of links along with the timestamp. Links can be moved around with drag and drop.

A great improvement to OneTab would be to be TST aware and maintain the tree structure.

Pocket makes reading bookmarks a lot more pleasant and the tagging system helps to preserve some context.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/onetab/ (also available for Chrome)

Re: forgotten context

I use Firefox's tag feature for this, helps you give a one or two or three word context like: linux, firewall, iptables or devops, cicd

I do use tags with firefox, but I juggle chromium, opera and other browsers and systems.

They just don't see it as a burden and/or are maybe not too honest with themselves ('yeah but I will read it later'). That being said: there are other uses for TST, can replace bookmarks etc.

Reminds me of desktops cluttered with icons

My desktop is icon free, my tab bar has 27 tabs at present (in the current context; I use "Tab Groups"): I'm buying two different things that need heavy consideration - computing and sports equipment.

Indeed, my desktop has at most 5 icons. Yet everyone I see has a screenful of overlapping items. It seems like chaos.

If I have > 10 tabs open, I feel stressed because it means I'm not actually completing tasks. Anything more than this seems like ADD.

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