On Browser Tabs
abuqader.substack.com
abuqader.substack.com
The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser interface. This is one reason I’m really excited about the Nyxt browser.
PS: Part of it might be FOMO, but part of it is also that these links represent certain threads of thought/exploration and are like bookmarks of things to revisit at a later time. Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew, but that’s not a fully satisfactory solution. I think we need tools & interfaces to better (more holistically) accommodate people’s intellectual workflows; what we have today is geared much more towards consumption.
As an example: why can’t we easily group tabs into projects and have bidirectional sync between the browser and project related resources (Eg: Some markdown/org file, or sync with Evernote/Notion/Roam, etc) so that whenever I resume working on the project, I get a warm start with the context mapped out (continuing from the previous session). And I want a much tighter relationship between my tabs and my project notes (akin to bibliography of references), including annotations on webpages, etc. If we are to use the web more effectively, the ecosystem surrounding browsers needs to grow up and help us get there.
Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs.
If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?
Yes please! I've recently got interested in Recoll, which might not know what a tab is, but does search web history.
> you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs
Caching is valuable. URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.
The Vimium extension for Firefox also happens to provide basic filtering of open tabs, although I've never tried it with anywhere near 1600. YMMV.
Other commenters have already mentioned Tree Style Tabs and similar extensions which can aid in grouping and managing things efficiently.
> URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.
This is a serious problem in my experience. To that end, Zotero is an invaluable research tool with browser extensions for (among other things) taking a snapshot of an open webpage. Its library exists externally to your browser though which might add friction to your workflow.
Can self host using
https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox
or pay a service like pinboard.
I can type github in the filter and then jump to the one tab I search or close all the tabs I don't need.
Also I'm not sure if it would be helpful for websites like github where I disable vimium to be able to use the website's hotkey functionality.
Personally I only keep open tabs that I am actively working in, if I have more than ~15 I get less productive since I have to hunt through to fine the one I need. Several times a day I just clear out all my tabs aside from a couple pinned ones.
But for me at least, I've realized it's less about keeping content for later, and acts more akin to the conversational bridge "well, if it's important I'll remember it later" -- It just gives me permission to let the tabs go and move on, with a pretense that I'll maybe come back to them :)
To use % search, open a new tab and type "% stack" to find the tabs visiting stackoverflow.
And then you can organise them somewhat into groups ?
I use tree style tabs with some custom theming to make it take up only enough room on the left to show the site favicon. It then opens up when I mouse-over.
I can't notice it when I have 10-100 tabs open. It's unbearable when I have 1000 (which happens more often than I would like to admit).
It should be noted, though, that my web browsing machine is an early 2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM; It's possible I wouldn't have noticed on a faster machine.
For example, there are many solutions to auto-suspend old tabs so they unload from memory.
No REPL, but hierarchical lists of tabs organized by domain, with the option to close en masse. Also shows duplicates.
There is also at least a Chrome extension that lets you filter and close tabs by domain (name escapes me).
Personally, I usually prune a window with many open tabs, usually created after a search for a solution or workaround for a bug, down to the initial search(es) and any useful results, then bookmark any remaining tabs into a folder, in the hope that a future search for the same topic might provoke an auto-suggestion, and in the usually vain hope that I might someday curate all the folders for related topics into a coherent hierarchy.
This is what I do when I need to look something back up and it works pretty great honestly.
It seems like it might be a difference between Firefox's behavior and Chrome's though, because any time I've used chrome the suggestions it fed me were autocomplete results from google search.
The great thing about Firefox's "Awesome bar" as I think it is (or was) called is that it looks through your history and ranks things based on frequency / recency of visiting.
So if I want to look up something, there's a good chance I can just start typing the word I remember from the page title and it will pull up the result for me.
- Sometimes I remember when I closed a tab more than when I opened a tab but its organized around open-time
- Once I start searching, I lose the context o time. I have a rough idea of terms and time and want to find something.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
You know that you can bookmark and re-visit pages right?
FOMO just leads to anxiety.
1. Tab groups: I have been an extensive user of tab groups in the past (when it was native in Firefox); it’s very helpful if your tabs cleave nicely into less than a dozen or so projects/themes, and you have no more than a few hundred tabs.
2. Tree style tabs: The extensions I’ve tried tend to be very slow and non-ergonomic for my use case.
3. The % trick: Didn’t know this; thanks!
4. Bookmarks: Yes, but browser bookmarks tend to be where information goes to die. It’s also very hard to organize in a useful way, or attach notes to it. How about some of the ideas in my parent comment, as a spiritual extension of bookmarks?
5. Amna: Sibling comment by @catchmeifyoucan. This is the first I’m hearing of Amna; seems quite interesting at first glance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781
6. One-tab: Interesting, wasn’t aware!
(I’ll keep updating this comment instead of branching off my responses; hopefully useful at least as a distilled collection of suggestions)
Try Sidebery:
I have a different group for any 'context' I often return to (or even a dump of 'researching random thing I may one day come back to'). Then I have one window open and I switch between contexts as needed and pick up from where I left off.
Minimalism and other philosophies don't really translate over into digital spaces. I have as much "space" as I want and nothing gets in the way of anything else. I see no problems with my status quo since 2003.
I have saved my session files every couple weeks ever since Opera introduced tabs and sessions in version 5 back in the early 2000s. With these I made some plots back in 2017: http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2017.png and http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2003.png
I REALLY miss TabMixPlus, though... (a FF extension broken with the purge of XUL from Quantum)
If it's about train of thoughts: for each tab try formulating and writing down a question that came to your mind while reading it.
That is the creative takeaway and it might ease your mind enough to close the tab.
Firefox does let you select multiple tabs and bookmark your selection as a folder, it also lets you expand a folder of bookmarks as tabs. I don't use either feature though, as my tab use tends to be more around not closing a tab until I'm done with the task associated with it, by which time I've opened another dozen and working out which I can close is too much effort.
This works great at home. At work I’m constantly fishing for which window some bit of information I currently need is in (though I’m not sure one window would fix that any better). So even MMMV.
Plus there’s whatever feature or bug fixes you were working on before that all started, and the research you were doing for a ticket you want to propose, and you have to get back to those when you’re done.
And somewhere there’s a window with this HN post you have to find again in order to respond.
I've tried lots of browser addons/extensions and tools over the years, but none offered proper salvation. I have a design in my head of what kind of tool I'd like, but like everyone else I have no time between work and everything else to build it.
Long ago I used to blame the tools, but these days I realize it's me. I put minimum 32 GB RAM into my boxes, and it's because of VMs and browsers.
'Junk Hoarders' -> 'Tab Hoarders'.
Maybe find a way to truly organize bookmarks and find a good bookmark manager plugin that lets you 'get to your stuff' as you need it.
Treetabs is useful for that kind of workflow, but very slow. I also use panorama tab groups.
Instead I have history that searches across all my work (news, python development, shopping, etc) and if I want to pause on some of it, without just leaving the tabs open, I have to manually delete and recreate the bookmarks to represent my current state.
I mean, how can you not get lost? Do you realize the thing you are looking for is on tab 248 before lookin it up again?
At that point these are not tabs anymore they are a directory or a history. I think using tabs for that is totally inadequate.
Unfortunately, browsers tend to be lacking in that department. They have a list of closed tabs to restore, but limited to a ridiculously small number like 10. They have a bookmark system but it doesn't save the state of the page like a tab. They have a history but it fills up with crap too quickly.
An unlimited, easily searchable tab close history could make keeping lots of tabs unnecessary. It is much easier closing a tab when you know it won't be lost.
Firefox has a built-in search engine for tab titles and URLs in its omnibar, which helps.
You're onto something here. I have a lot of tabs because it's a history of one thought to another. It's not just a set of tabs, it's a sequence of locations. Keeping them open is how I can remember to go back to them, how I can keep my state in them, and more.
I can envision a much better UX where your tabs become some sort of history entry where they are frozen in time (serialized to disk) and can be rehydrated. And you can easily scrub back to them even once they've been unloaded from memory and frozen. And you can create different sessions for different things, a window/session for today's HNing, one for today's work, one for play, etc. And you can reach back into historical sessions to load their state. And merge another day's session into today's because it had some outstanding tabs you wanted to get back to. And there'd be good ways to visualize this.
I know some things like tab groups and tab sessions exist. I personally use Firefox with tree tabs to get something like this. But there's more UX thought that could be put into it instead of just wondering why someone would want a bunch of tabs.
One of the main reasons I'm reluctant to close my browser and trash my tabs is because the exact sequence of tabs, what's open, the order they are in, the state on each one (like being paginated to page 58 in some in-browser book scan UI) is a snapshot of by brain and digital "desktop" at that moment. You're right, browsers do very little to help.
Mobile Firefox already has this. Desktop Firefox might have a version of it, but I'm not sure (sometimes I see a loading spinner on a gray background for a while).
I think you're totally on the right track. What I envision is the ability to drag a tree of tabs into a bookmarks folder to get back to it at another time.
Fundamentally tabs, bookmarks and history entries are all just references to URLs (with a bunch of metadata) anyway. It's weird to me that the UX of these hasn't really converged all that much yet.
IIRC people switched from IE to FF because IE had no concept of tabs.
For me it works like “memory palace” technique. Driven by addiction a graph structure with multiple root node starts to build up so I can follow traces of thoughts and contexts among tabs and windows.
I came here to complain that, actually, you can't.
Or rather, it's surprisingly complicated to export a simple list of current tab URLs to a plain old text file.
You need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
Why can't we just have:
about:tabs
... which is nothing but a one URL per line, text listing of all of our currently open tabs ? How simple and nice and useful would that be ?
Go searching for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing.
about:tabs would be the easiest thing in the world.
Thanka for volunteering! Can you link me to your patch?
Consider this an official, public bounty. Expires 2020-12-31.
I don't have time to write this patch but I especially don't have time for the lame, tired suggestion that FOSS cannot be critiqued by anyone but the authors.
(The bounty is $1500 if you "jhardy54" write, and have accepted, the patch. Consider the extra $500 compensation for this unexpected loss of smug, righteous indignation.)
(I want to clarify because I've had a patch open for 4 months that's received no attention from maintainers.)
It's frustrating to hear anyone struggle with that in this day and age. I've been there myself. But there are technical solutions.
I haven't had to deal with tab anxiety in years.
My browser stack is Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Multiple Tab Handler, and Tab Group Plus.
I regularly wrangle clusters of tabs.
If I have a tree of tabs that is spawned from an HN story or something, I can drag it into a new window, and then export it to a tgmg file from Tab Group Manager, put the tab collection file in my repository, and put a reference to it in my knowledge base. I might also embed it in an rtfd file.
If I don't need that kind of structure, I can just use shift or ctrl to bulk select the tabs I want, and paste the urls into my knowledge base. And effortlessly restore the list of urls to a new session when I want.
I'm able to re-create not just specific urls, but the context that I browsed them in.
If it is months or years later, it is really helpful to have a tree or list of urls, and maybe some notes. That makes it so much easier re-inhabit my state of mind during that research session.
I doubted whether it would be worth perusing, but I'm really glad I did. I love being able to recall research threads I started years earlier.
Unfortunately, it takes some effort to get set up to digest lots of tabs. I wish that this was recognized as more of a problem. It is so idiosyncratic that we are using open browser tabs as a temporary database to store lists of urls. Browsers should combine history, tab management, and bookmarks. It makes no sense anymore for those features to be separate from each other.
- 0: Personal Links I must check every day; for example HN, Reddit and other accounts
- 1: Links I need every day for my work, like Slack
- !: Links which require immediate action (TODOs)
- W: Any links I actively follow - those are actually tabs. Under that, I keep folders for different issue topics.
Also I use the emacs org mode to keep a list of TODO links.
It's also fragile at browser startup, sometimes the list is empty or the tabs are in a flat list. When I switch to bookmarks and then back, it's fixed.
So, generally very fragile. Which is annoying since the CONCEPT is so essential.
I figured that bookmarks, downloaded files, and open tabs for more than a day are mostly causing me remorse for not being able to ever get to those again. So I focus on tasks and use search to open what I need.
If you just find yourself unable to close stuff you have read once and will never touch again you need to train yourself to use your tools more effectively.
If you strap enough engines to something it qualifies as a jet including a bike but it doesn't make it a reasonable means of transport.
Maybe we need some kind of page mark and index system?
I also have dozens of things I keep an eye on, so there's no way tabs across the top would help me at all.
Main things I find useful about TST:
- You lose horizontal space, not vertical. This is great because you can now read the titles. I also do some magic to get rid of the tabs across the top, so I get some space back vertically.
- You can collapse a given tree.
- You can suspend a tab or a tree. Let's face it, most of your 1600 tabs do not need to be using resources. With suspend you keep the title and place so you don't lose it from your brain, but it doesn't sit there and eat RAM and CPU.
- You can style the sidebar to your liking. I like to make sure mail and slack tabs are their own colour, because they tend to be project roots from which many other tabs are spawned, and when they're uncollapsed I want to visually separate a set of tabs from the next. I also highlight the current tab.
An interface such as pearltrees would be a pretty good start, with visible links from topic to topic. The ability to collapse a group and all of its children, close a topic, annotate some tabs, full-text search, and maybe have them open again at a later date.
Maybe I'll get around to developing this at some point.
For instance, I am currently looking for accommodation, in addition to the usual stuff. I tend to open a (panorama) tab group for each sector or website, then a tab for each apartment, plus maybe a few more tabs for each to check on the map, pictures, contact forms, etc. I do not do that activity all the time, but need to leave that open to come back to it. I actually created a Firefox profile for this, but I'm using it to reply to this thread, so maybe the real issue is my with my ability to concentrate...
My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem.
I primarily use Brave and effectively start fresh every day. I might get up to 20 open tabs at any given time, and I sometimes use tabs as a sort of Inbox that needs to be cleared. But sometimes, it’s best to declare tab bankruptcy and start over.
Wonder if you could hook that in through a local proxy...
I also couldn't get it to work when I tried a while ago (which I imagine they've fixed).
The introduction of tabs was fantastic, and I'm very glad you brought it to us. It bundles windows together, I would rather pick up my firefox bucket and look for a web page there than to look through a dumpster of software windows. But it took me a very long time before I figured out how to not let it get out of hand.
If people are afraid of losing tabs, they just aren't trusting their own memory/curiosity enough. When something is important, your mind tends to remember it, and if it wasn't, then its okay to have lost it. If something was that crucial, you can just Google it again, and if you cant find it on Google you still have your browser history.
Based on trends I saw in NetCaptor, I wrote an add-on for my favorite browser at the time, Opera, and happily used it for probably years.
I don't have the code nor the binary anymore, but a screenshot still remains:
I can see it happening when you're in the midst of research or troubleshooting. But when I'm done or have solved my issue I'll note in my PR where i found solutions or add the useful pages to my bookmark service (raindrop). Then close all the tabs!
* 7 Brave (personal) windows with ~3-5 tabs each
* 6 Chrome (work) windows with ~3-5 tabs each
All of these windows relate to different things. For example whenever I check HN I fire up a new window. I might not have 2 hours of time to read/research everything interesting I happen to find so I just leave that window open for later.
Whenever troubleshooting I do the same as you, a window can get up to 20 or something tabs, but once the problem is solved those get closed. Or if there are interesting tabs in there that warrant future research, they get grouped in a new window.
On Mac I Cmd+tab through apps and Option+tab through windows of a specific app (don't remember what the default combo is). Or I swipe three fingers down to see all app windows. And I also use Tab Switcher[0], which allows me to Cmd+Shift+K to fuzzy search all open tabs.
This setup is not optimal, but it's not that messy/problematic for me.
It would be nice to have feedback from others on improving it.
I get there sometimes, but never in the same window.
I maintain multiple web sites, so each site has its own desktop. Plus there's another desktop for one-off tasks, and one for communicating (e-mail, etc...).
Within each desktop is a browser window, which may have five or six tabs. If I'm doing testing, that number balloons. But only while testing.
So between all the sites and tabs, I may have 50 or 60 tabs. But since they are kept in different browser windows on different desktops, they're manageable.
...What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session. I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and/or making noise.
That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a permanent quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk.
Browser history isn't it either: it's too comprehensive, is insufficiently contextualized, doesn't record relationships between pages (other than, maybe, relative time). On mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page was in the highly constrained display available. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content (though some such as HN do this well).
There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with which you're currently working open in front of you. I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration....
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
My present Firefox tab count is > 1550.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...
OK, found & am reading https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/
My preference would be CLI / terminal centric.
https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
Few more details here: getamna.com/demo
Interesting! Currently the solution is primarily a GUI based system using Chromium for rendering. But the data is stored into a JSON file organized a group of tasks with website urls. I haven't explored too much around a CLI before. I know that org-mode is super popular, but I've never played with it much.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
Tree-style tabs provide emergent context and semantic organisation without conscious effort which flat linear presentation does not.
It provides me such a huge benefit because I just swipe my hand to destroy dozens of browser tabs. And all the while I can see the name, have them hierarchical, change their groups, etc. I go on deep GitHub or Wikipedia dives and close or collapse that entire line of thought so easily. Tabs are essentially mind maps. I wish a larger vendor with real time/money would invest in a similar many-tab model. The concept is of course directly taken from the tree-style tab extension in FF, but even that extension has suffered since the move off of XUL, and I can't easily close a ton of tabs just by dragging over the close buttons anymore (among other things).
Usually I have no more than ten. Even when searching/researching something it doesn't get more than twenty - open all the interesting search results on the first search page, usually that's enough to find whatever I'm looking for. If not, tabs are being closed one by one or are being bookmarked with appropriate tags. Repeat for the next page of search results.
I imagine there's likely a correlation with ADHD, as well.
I don't think it will ever happen, but it would be nice.
I used the KWin tabs a fair amount, but they didn't fill the same use case as browser tabs. It would be interesting to see this implemented, of course you would also need to seriously patch the browser.
I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible (even if macOS manages to be even worse). There are a few third-party applications to sort of emulate tiling WMs, but they're very clunky and software likes to act "surprised" about it and often have weird behaviours. That, and the requirement of window chrome.
That being said, for your specific example of flipping through two tabs, I still find that very useful as a visual diff: get both tabs on the same scroll position and spam Ctrl+Tab and your brain will quickly generate a diff between both. The ideal solution would be actual universal diffing tools, but that's far-fetched.
Have you tried Microsoft's FancyZones? I find it works well enough to be worth installing on all my windows computers.
https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overv...
Also, by comparison I meant reading comparison, not visual comparison. But even the latter is easier with separate windows: resize them to the same dimensions, then put them on top of each other and increase the transparency of the top one.
I’ve been working on Amna as a way to help with intent driven work. Instead of opening a frenzy of tabs, it makes you write what you’re working on first, and then provides you a browser or multiple browsers to help you. It’s cool because when you have to get back to something, you just click on a task, and everything comes back. E.g right now I’m working on editing a website and sending out a newsletter, those are two completely separate items, and when looked at individually, they only have like 4 tabs each.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...
I've never found the need to have more than 8 or so tabs open really - and if I want to compare things, then I just open another browser window and pop it next to it, or on a different monitor.
I'm sure there are very good reason for people that have 50+ tabs open - everyones brain works differently after all - but it makes my brain itch!
As for people who have 50+ tabs open, I am left wondering if they are going about things in an effective manner. At least in Firefox, it is easy to select a bunch of tabs and bookmark them for future reference. It is also easy to load up all of those bookmarks at once when needed. It is a lot easier to deal with the eight tabs from Project A and the dozen tabs from Project B independently than it is to deal with all twenty at once. (Granted, this could be made easier. The big drawback with bookmarks is that they are a snapshot in time, rather than the reflection of a dynamic project.)
The new FF for android though forces a new tab to get to my favorite websites and does not allow for a clean session after close, so I now have 47 open, mostly the same 4 websites :s
Beta versions have the option to close tabs after a set inactivity time which I can't wait to land.
1. Seek: If you give it a search term it'll display the results as list of links
2. Sort: Any links or images you click on while in Web goes into a list called the Stack. I think it acts like your working memory in the same way that a traditional window of tabs might, and the act of sending links to the stack may be related to the "seeking circuit".
Links in the stack can be clicked on to navigate to, or swiped right to be sent to the Store section.
3. Store: Links here are saved from the stack as you use the app, and you can create folders.
* https://imgur.com/gallery/AwBTxlZ Here's an imgur post I just made with screenshots of the walk-through and a gif of usage. I don't use it anymore because it's been unsupported for years so I'm assuming that it's not exactly secure, but I loved the idea.
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }To be precise, I use a combination of Ctrl+tab, Cmd+L, T and O, in that order of frequency. I don't mind repeated tabs, so sometimes I'll just do a web search for whatever item I wanted again.
With Safari 14, Fav icon is now on by default, you would think this is great, except the Tab now shrinks to Icon size once you have a dozen or more. Instead of the old Fav Icon + Text Description in the Tab. i.e How Firefox behaves.
They also got rid of Top Site, and instead it is now an iOS Safari design like Start Page. You can tell by their much narrower design compared to your widescreen Mac.
One way to save memory if you have a few dozens or hundreds of Tabs, is to unload them by quitting Safari and Start again with previous session. This way all the Tabs are unloaded by default, they are there sitting idle. Basically just a list of Tabs. ( This also works on Chrome and Firefox )
But if you somehow finger swipe or accidentally press the Show Tab Overview, Safari will reload every single tab you have in the background just to create a Thumbnails for your Tab. If you have 1600 Tabs like some here, you will quickly run out of memory and start paging hundreds of GBs of data to your SSD. Basically shortening your SSD's life span.
And to those questioning why the large number of Tabs. I mean on one hand HN keeps pushing everything should be SaaS and Web Apps. Project Planning, Email, Social Media.. etc. On the other you have Research Notes, subject I need to research that instantly open a dozen tabs or Amazon / Online Shopping. Or simple daily RSS where I just Command Click all the news item I want to read. You also have sessions you want to read but you dont have the time right now.
All we really need is a Show All Tab Page as a list instead of Thumbnails once Tab number goes over certain number, with a Search Field at the top that hopefully search the Title and some Meta Data. I dont want to kill my 2015 MacBook Pro. It may be the last MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard judging by the way things are going.
I work on multiple projects and it's common to have multiple Github and alike issues, and other pages open. With Simple Tab Groups, you can select to group and only show tabs that belong to just one group.
It's easy to move tabs between groups. When the tab group is switched, tabs from the other group are offloaded from memory, effectively making them bookmarks.
Pinned tabs (webmail client, a note taking app, and music player in my case) are shown in all tab groups.
I know it helped a lot, because I use Chrome on my Android, and I always have ":D" in my tab button because I have more than 100 tabs open.
Since I use a tiling WM, the idea was that this would make it easier to navigate through my tabs, and also keep my attention from branching so often. If I had something that I found useful enough to keep around, I can move it to another virtual desktop.
Unfortunately, I never found such an addon, and I'm still not set on that workflow in general.
It doesn't reclaim the screen real estate occupied by the tab bar, but it has the behavior you want.
Vivaldi has a notion of tab-within-tabs, but the UI is very subtle and the tabs^2 very small and fiddly to reach with a mouse, thereby violating Fitt's Law.
Looks like this started way back in Firefox 4, and the UI was a bit all over the place, but I liked using it (mainly by keyboard shortcut):
https://www.computerworld.com/article/2514927/firefox-4-beta...
I _really_ enjoyed the ability to switch between different sets of tabs depending on which project I was focusing on at the moment. The Panorama UI made it quick, simple, and painless to do. It seems like most users simply use multiple browser windows, but I've honestly never been able to figure out how that works effectively when you're juggling multiple projects at once: when I'm not working on a particular project, I want it completely gone and (safely) hidden away so that it doesn't distract from my current project.
And then of course Firefox killed the Panorama feature. With the rationalization that no one used the feature and that it would be better implemented as an extension. Except that the extension went unmaintained after a few months. And then later, Firefox broke the APIs that made Panorama possible. The net result being that in the past few years, my productivity in the browser plummeted.
There are various tab management addons for Firefox but almost all of them have the following downsides:
* geared towards manually saving and restoring tabs (I don't want manual anything, I just want to switch between groups of tabs with a couple of clicks) * not actively maintained * buggy (as in, loses tabs for useful content that in some cases took a long time to find)
So far the one I've had the most luck with recently is Tiled Tab Groups (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro...). I don't use the UI for it, though, unless I'm creating a new group. I just click on the icon in the toolbar and select the group I want. It's still on probation as far as I'm concerned but it hasn't crashed or lost tabs on me yet.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cluster-window-tab...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...
Worse case scenario, I close something that will take 15 seconds to get back to when I realize I need it.
For home I keep a separate file per day. For work I have a monolithic "general_notes.md" which I add stuff to sequentially. Generally work notes need to be found quickly, so one file makes sense. For home I am not so time pressured, so grepping through multiple files is an acceptable solution.
I also no longer use bookmarks. I use the browser's autocomplete of sites I've been to before, and failing that either remember the complete url or give up.
I used to do a lot of bookmarking and a lot of tabs but I found neither really added value for me. If I don't remember the site, I probably don't need to be there.
That said, I don't try to really convince others to do the same (except vertical tabs) cuz I recognize not everyone will find the same value I do in it.
I would value a better reopen closed tab feature. Going further back and allowing me specify which closed tab I want back.
I guess, I want a browser history UI that's better integrated with tabs.
To observe difference, do the following:
- Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518507 , click 'parent', close tab, undo close tab, hit back. Where are you?
- Load the page that was the 'parent', hit back. Where are you?
Each tab is a history tree. The history page, on the other hand, is a linearized chronological list. They are non-equivalent.
Internet is such an integral part of our lives, and so many people's computer usage is all about just using a browser. Which is why it's interesting that even after about 25 years of the first browser, we have almost the same interface to accessing the INTERNET. And it definitely can be made better!
We should think about solving this problem
1. bookmarking,
2. will look at it any minute/day now.
3. need to read/watch further when I got time.
4. page no longer available on site.
5. music to play in the background.
So what a browser mainly needs a a way of bookmarking that also stores some of the state of the page. Like position on page, selection, video/audio-position, saved to local cache.
I can fit up to about 50 tabs per window before they scroll, which is usually more than enough, and I can still read their text.
And all I had to do to achieve this was type `:set tabs.position right`...
If there’s one company that can unfuck browsers its ironically Microsoft...
When I'm doing some research where I need lots of them at the same time, I use OneNote or sometimes Word to keep the links, adding a line or 2 of text about that link.
> NOTE: Session Buddy for Chrome is handy when suffering from power loss (MBP hang, Linux workstation power cord got kicked off, etc.).