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Comment by breakfastduck | Hacker News Reader

Can't imagine a single use case for when I'd prefer a tabless browser.

I also can't remember seeing literally anyone complain when browsers start adopting tabs, even though people complain about anything.

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> I also can't remember seeing literally anyone complain when browsers start adopting tabs, even though people complain about anything.

Not complain per se, but people were commenting how tabs were a crutch for poor top level window management, and how their WM of choice had had tabs for ages. I'd say they aren't wrong about them being a crutch, but I guess crutches are useful at times.

Have WMs gottten any better at tab management? I know Windows added Sets recently, but I don't think adoption has been great. KDE and GNOME still don't. OSX has it against its entire paradigm.

You'd specifically see it with tiling window managers like i3. I can put any container node of the window tree in tabbed, stacked, tiled horizontal or tiled vertical mode. So, I can have tabs of any mix of programs, I can change the mode to see all tabs at the same time, each tab can have subtabs or windows organized in any way I see fit, I can fullscreen any level, etc.

The handling of those tabs also fit with the rest of the window management, like putting marks on a container so new windows appear at whatever place in the window tree I wish (like having a shell to my left and all windows I'm invoking having them appear organized in an arbitrary manner in a window container to my right), etc.

I can keep going, but if you're not familiar with tiling window managers, I feel like probably none of what I'm saying is making any sense...

I'm familiar with i3, but I feel as if the other features of i3 (configuration via text file in home directory (don't worry, the EBNF is in the header and the examples are annotated!), minimalist presentation, keyboard-first interaction (I still have a printed hotkey chart...)) are likely to stymie adoption even further than Sets, which are simply obscure.

Those other "features" are just conventions that come with being on a *nix OS. They're aren't unique to i3. But regarding adoption, of course power-tools (for power-users) don't get wide adoption. That's just how things are, since the majority doesn't have the time to put into learning how to use such tools.

This thread is about there being a use for a tab-less browser. That doesn't necessitate wide adoption.

(Not that I'm saying that a tab-less browser is of particular use, since one can just ignore tabs in a tabbed-browser.)

I use the Fluid app to create tabless views into web apps. Great for Slack, unless you use it for calls. https://www.fluidapp.com

Well worth the $5, imo.

But, no I see no point in this tabless browser.

For anyone who doesn't want to download something extra and is willing to DIY the launch shortcut, you can do this with Firefox (and Chrome too I believe).

1. Go to about:config and set browser.ssb.enabled to true.

2. Restart Firefox

3. Click ... in the address bar and then "use this site in app mode"

4. Launch directly from command line or shortcut: firefox -ssb "https://news.ycombinator.com"

Looks like ff's single-site browsers can't run extensions, which means they're not really useful for me. Every site I'd want to app-ify is also one I want to modify extensively.

I hate tabs. They make little sense using a tiling window manager like i3 that has built-in support for tabbed window layout.

Tabs have always bothered me. You have the OS, which has its own mechanism for launching and switching between applications. And then one of those applications (the browser) launches and switches between applications within it.

It’s always felt to me like that should be unified.

A few years ago, Mozilla had a tabless browser based on Servo. It was actually pretty cool.

Yup. My one beef about the mobile browser Firefox Focus is that it doesn't have tabs.

It does have - if you open something in a new tab there is a big dot in the bottom right

Not seeing it. Is it possible you're referring to Firefox and not Firefox Focus? Or maybe the Android version of Firefox Focus has that feature and the iOS version doesn't?

It does - long tap a link and you can open in a new tab.

By googling the issue I see that tabs in Firefox Focus are an Android feature only.

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