Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

I can tell you exactly what made me use tabs instead of bookmaking sites: opening a bookmark means making a new connection, new round-trip, loading, parsing and rendering a full page. Having a page open in a tab means it's already there, in exactly the state you left it in. It will still be there if the Internet goes down. It will still be there after it comes back up. It will be there tomorrow, it will be there next week, after hibernating and waking up your computer a dozen times in between. It will be there even if the page is already removed on the server.

The difference between a tab and a bookmark is like between a book on your desk vs. in a public library. In the latter case, when you need it, you have to go there and fetch it - not only taking time, but also possibly failing, as it might not be there anymore.

Is it a perfect interface? Not really. What I'd really like would be this, + in addition a bookmark feature that actually freezes and snapshots the page I'm on - to get the same behaviour as tabs, only persistent. It shouldn't be hard for browsers to do, given that IME at least some browsers displayed this behaviour at some point when restoring pages after browser crash.

For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved. As a spitball idea: Cmd-space, type in "research open sourcing my kindle", and get given a browser and some sort of note collector. Collect the various things from the session into my note, refile the entire stack as a project, and move on to the next task. In the future, I can access the actual project and receive a workspace with terminals, an IDE or whatever else I need to Get the Thing Done, archived versions of the sites I opened, etc. Ideally, the environment would be designed to reduce distractability.

That still doesn't feel like a complete idea, but every use case the author has for tabs -- "this is a quick session", "I don't want to lose this page", "I need to remember this in a week" -- seem like they'd be very hard for browsers to do well. Instead, a browser more closely integrated with the OS (which might go a way towards fixing Electron resource consumption to boot) and a uniquely designed desktop environment might be better.

The trouble with history is that it's a soup of every random page you've ever visited.

The trouble with tabs is they're a collection of web pages you at one time thought you might get back to, roughly sorted by the time in which you first opened them.

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528

Now I use a firefox extension called "Bookmark Stack" for that. I can easily add the current page to a stack and later restore it. Since it is a stack, the most recent entries are always displayed first. Since these are bookmarks, syncinc is also easy.

I wrote that extensions myself, but there are others like it. Since using it, I rarely have more than 10 open tabs. That may not suite every workflow, but it definitely helped me.

"The most sophisticated and efficient users of Google today find that “trying to navigate the growing deluge of data [just within their scientific field] has become a second job.” The United States’ library of scientific papers for health and medicine adds new ones at a rate of two a minute, year round. Like Memex and the Web, Google has solved the problem of published work burying itself unread by pushing it out to a vastly wider layer, one we will perhaps never manage to tame. We have not escaped [Vannevar] Bush’s quandary:

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought [find that] truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. … publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record."

http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/

This works across windows as well. The other one I use even more is ^ which searched browser history. Quite handy.

Gnome 3, started out suggesting that it would be a semantic desktop, allowing groupings associations of activities. That fell by the wayside, so the best thing left is to use something like virtual desktops to separate projects/workflows. But then you are pushed into multiple windows likely with multiple tabs.

I use multiple browsers on multiple devices, and bookmarking isn't that nice. I see why people end up using browser syncing and end up in vendor traps. On desktop, I can easily copy paste urls. Perhaps into my own mini-shared db for read it later style groupings. On mobile copying URLS is hell for me.

Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. It would need to be more than 'recently used/accessed'.

I have tried running Firefox with the bookmark manager open and the history, but it has been really poor performance wise, and it's just not a nice interface.

Looking at my tabs today, I have a small grouping of shopping tabs, of things I might be interested in ordering. From about three weeks back. I know if I throw these into bookmarks, and even tag them, they'll still be lost. I should probably have dealt with that there and then. I tend to build up tabs in Firefox, once I hit the width of the browser with tabs and they scroll it becomes UI hell for me. So I try to confine to about 12, but that's easier said than done. And as said I run multiple browsers, at least four on mobile and four on desktop. Throw tabs into the mix and it gets ugly. But if this was reduced to something like a simple list of URLs, with some grouping shared between machines that I could relaunch easily, probably in the same browser I was using previously they'd feel much more manageable. And less crufty.

Going back to the shopping example, that's task focused. And it might be accompanied by a few notes written in another app, and I might want to share that with my partner via email etc. Associations have to beyond one piece of software.

To be clear, I'm talking about grouping tabs but I'm not talking about the current Firefox feature called "Tab Groups". You had a row of tabs that showed the web pages open in the current group. And you had a second row of tabs that allowed you to switch between tab groups. You could close a tab group and close all the tabs within the group.

Has anybody found an alternative even if it's in a different browser? I dislike having multiple browser windows open.

Each new session would start a new comments section.

Each new manually opened tab would be a top level 'comment' (with timestamp).

Each pageload would be a paragraph in that 'comment'.

Each new tab opened via a link would be a 'reply' to that comment quoting the 'paragraph' it was opened from.

That seems like a good metaphor to me because it solves the traceability of "How did I get to this page". It doesn't solve the UI of tabs though, though maybe it makes it less necessary to keep tabs open.

Whereas a browser bookmark is like it's analog cousin, a mark stuck in the book and returned to the shelf.

Tabs allow for better singular focus than stacked windows. I use desktop workspaces/multiple desktops in much the same way I use tabs. If I have multiple monitors, I'll put a group of related applications together in a workspace, but rarely will I put more than a single application on a monitor.

Eg editor on one screen, terminal on the next and a browser (UI work) or DB interface on the 3rd. Which is the same way I organize my kitchen when cooking. Recipe on one side, prep in the middle, output on the other.

Open tabs are cognitive spaces - https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/

I think the next step would be to try and solve context switching between the spaces, making it less of a conscious task.

I wish there was a better way to do it.

I work on projects for a few days or hours at a time, and maybe only 10 of those tabs are relevant to a given project.

I'd like to be able to somehow only have the relevant tabs for my current project or train of thought.

Someone suggested I use the people profiles in Chrome which seems a good idea but obviously not good enough cause I'm not doing it.

I've switched to Firefox a while back and unfortunately cannot find an equivalent, so I'm back to manually wrangling.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...

Create/label a collection of tabs as a view. When you can name, 'work', 'bills', 'house', hobbyX, hobbyY, hobbyZ.

Open a view and it'll open all the bookmarks associated with that view. Edit views by simply dragging and dropping tabs into them.

Even better would be to include files and documents as well.

I open a tab to accomplish something. From there, I reach out in some primordial/human-brain breadth first search of links in order to accomplish my goal, branching off of branches and coming back up to some parent only to branch again.

For people like me, a linear set of tabs is indeed the wrong abstraction for the way I use the web.

Maybe browsers should embrace this instead of fighting it. Make tabs better suited as history and bookmarks. Users reflexively middle click and then go to that tab because they don't want to lose the page. The problem is that you lose the pages that you visited in the first place. Maybe the default behaviour of a link shouldn't be to navigate away from the current page and hide the current page behind the back button (where you'll eventually struggle to get back to it) or in history (which also isn't easy to get back to).

Maybe the default behaviour of clicking a link should be to open a new tab, so to speak, but to focus it while attaching it as a child to the tab it came from, thus creating a tree of history. Closing a tab just means hiding that part of history. Viewing history is just unhiding those closed tabs. Bookmarking is just reorganising that tree of tabs.

I would never use a browser that did this. I have many tabs open. I've even started using several (!) browser windows and profiles to have more. Being able to easily go back to previous stuff I've opened is really nice, even if it takes me a year. If I had to use bookmarks instead, then they'd probably stay there. I have many bookmarks that are about 10-15 years old. I don't think I'm ever getting back to those, because they aren't a constant reminder like browser tabs are.

Users should be able to decide which edge and position each tab is attached to, and move them around and group them as desired.

These are the tabbed windows I developed for the multi-window version of UniPress Emacs 2.20 in 1988:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

Users could move the tabs to any edge of the windows in the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck, in 1989:

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct...

Figure 3 shows the class dictionary of Object, and the instance dictionary of the NeWS root menu:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.g...

Figure 7 shows some digit editors, step editors, shift editors, a boolean editor, and a canvas editor:

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.g...

The tabbed window manager for The NeWS Toolkit let users drag tabs to any position along any side of the window:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

Previous HN postings about tabbed windows:

Side tabs are great, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more of them on the screen, to manage more windows. (2014):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726

"As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio." Tabs are at least three decades old now, and they weren't originally restricted to just one edge of the window (2018):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730

This would reduce (for me) a large amount of tab flotsam. Maybe there is already a way to do this?

Tabs, are an attempt not to have to switch desktop, or tile the plane. Its a "stack" metaphor, with the least cost exposure of the underlying stack, as a shuffled hand of cards fanned out.

Hand of cards, vs one piece of paper per desktop but many desktops, vs I cover the one desk, but all things have to balance the space.

Automatic bookmarks based on the signals you generate from browsing, history laid out as a tree, tabs remembered with temporal grouping so you don't have to keep them around. Notes and tags, with everything searchable, shareable, and easy to publish.

Next up, unification of them all.

If his friends and family are happy with using tabs that way, this seems like a very poor reason for browser vendors to change things up to show them the light of his workflow.

An obvious use case is to have a window for your work and another one for your personal stuff. You can also open a new window when you start googling stuff about a specific topic (let’s stay “how to do x in Python”). Then, when you got your answer, you just have to close the window with all its tabs.

Tabs are really obvious. You can do a bunch of stuff with tabs and there UI is so apparent that it doesn't get explained.

Apparently the usability threshold for people with 100s of tabs open is (a modern browser's) bookmarking. Any superior solution would need to be more obvious than bookmarks and easier to use than bookmarks.

(Split panel view would be nice, while we're at it.)

I often hover above 50+ tabs open. Every week or so, I catch up enough on the backlog to close some tabs and reduce it to less than 10. But I soon head down another rabbit hole of internet research and it's back up to 50+ open tabs again.

The bookmarks UI has extra friction because is a separate area that I don't want to "manage" and that effort isn't worth it unless the webpage is promoted in my mind to "reference status". Having dozens of open tabs is just an easier and a more seamless experience. I often cycle through open tabs with Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn similar to cycling through active windows with Alt-Tab. Bookmarks UI don't have a "cycle" mode.

Another problem with booksmarks is that the bookmark_links are not open. The booksmarks manager UI only show the title of the webpage but not what full page rendering is. Titles are often meaningless.

Of course, I could manually type in a better title when saving the bookmark... or... just simply not close the tab and consider it part of a "queue" to read later in a few hours or days. It's lazier and easier. Plus the full page already completely rendered visually reminds me why I wanted to read it later. Bookmarks UI obscure the _why_.

For the webpages I consider as reference material, I do bookmark those. E.g. weather page for a specific zipcode or a specific Youtube channel.

Examples of webpages being categorized into different mental organization buckets:

level 1: throwaway content: a trail of leaving a bunch of active tabs open is easier to get to than the friction of navigating the bookmarks UI

level 2: reference material that changes: bookmarks for things like weather page, current US Treasury yields, etc. Bookmarks are also useful for syncing/import/export across devices since bookmarking services sync at the level of "bookmarks" and not "open tabs".

level 3: reference material archived: webpage saved locally as .MHTML or .PNG -- to ensure I have a copy even if the url is lost from digital rot. Others might use Evernote or Zotero to archive webpages.

I do agree that Chrome squishing the tabs into tiny vertical slices makes it harder to use. I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a dock on the side. This would work well for widescreen monitors since many webpages would show useless whitespace on the sides when the browser is full screen.