Vivaldi 3.6 Introduces Two-Level Tab Stacks
vivaldi.com
vivaldi.com
With top tabs there's at least the URL bar to provide some spatial separation between the two.
I've wanted to use tab groups for a while, but it never stuck because of the UI. I'm hoping this helps, and I love that they offer a sidebar layout, too.
I periodically bookmark my open tabs to a dated folder and close all for sanity. Bookmarks search via address bar will find any previous tabs that I still need to access.
You can set a date&time it will open again. It's perfect. I can better split private and business stuff, regular pages I re-visit and so on.
You can enable them in the chrome://flags and edge://flags.
If I were them, frankly I'd be ashamed a bit (or a lot) of bragging about it in 2020.... but that's just me, I guess.
(Nowdays [more like many a year], a Firefox user with even heavier TreeStyleTab addiction. Now, if only Mozilla would finally get its session API in order...)
I personally am not planning to give Vivaldi another shot any time soon after that mess.
If we go back to the root of what the web is, we have a graph where nodes are documents and edges are a user clicking on a link at a given time, and the user wants to keep a few of the documents in the current context. So not only is there's a graph, which is not easy to represent and navigate, but the edges depend on time. Maybe some VR thing can help us see something new here
That graph also contains a lot of noise - e.g. documents that aren't needed. I wonder if VR would help, by letting us see more, or if that better paradigm could also be implemented on 2D screens.
There's already various graph visualization tools. But the tricky part would be wrapping that up into something useful - like a tree graph vs. tree style tabs. And if this would be more than 1-dimensional, like TST, then it would likely have to be a full page.
Download fresh Vivaldi Stable - 3.6 (2165.34). Open non existent domain to land on a very light "this page doesnt exist" ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error page. Start Cloning Tabs by Shift clicking in the Tab bar, then Right clicking and selecting Clone. First you clone one tab into two, then two into four, etc. At cloning 64 Tabs to 128 opening every new Tab will be taking ~1 second per Tab. Cloning up to 256 open tabs will take you anywhere between 5-15 minutes!!! At this point switching between Tabs will FREEZE UI for 8 seconds.
Let me repeat - EIGHT second freeze while switching between empty error page Tabs.
At all times Vivaldi UI will be freezing with one maxed out thread of 16 thread 4GHz CPU, other 15 threads resting at minimal load.
Right clicking on the first open tab and selecting "close Tabs to the Right" will close 255 Tabs at once - this will FREEZE UI for ~1.5 minutes. >100 seconds of frozen UI while browser is closing 255 empty html only Tabs. Again one CPU thread maxed out, rest idle.
Welcome to a browser made using React framework.
I've seen people talk about Sideberry but I've never tried it.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co...
Why stop at two?
If you think that this is the feature that you have been waiting for, maybe consider the possibility that browser tabs are not the ideal way to store and organize information.
If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any software, or write your own, to manage this information. But how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well, just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new front page story about another system to do just that. I wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.
And should seek changing workflow or treatment.
I currently have a relatively small number of Tabs opened, 150. I guess to those who only have a few tabs open at max think of us as crazy or alien.
And tabs are imho the perfect abstraction. This is misguided effort.
The issue is with the way multiple browser windows are managed. When I have many tabs I must have a way to manage many windows as well. Visually!
Whether these can and should be improved on a browser level I can’t say.
MacOS is already very very good at this and much better than anything else
I extensively use app expose and spaces to visually and spatially find what I need and structure my environment by projects and topics. I have everything I need exactly where I left it, together with all other applications and information that was related to it
Adding more management features should not be the responsibility of the browser. That’s why I‘ve never been a fan of any of the popular tab management extensions or browser features
bruh
With bookmarks you lose so much important context. Our minds just don’t work well on lists of links
As I said it’s important the OS works the same way. I always have on the left most space my utility window for example with messengers and mail tabs open
I always have localhost for development for each project on the left most tab followed by the most common docs and tickets I need throughout the project. And then over time I build up tabs to the right. And naturally the ones in the far right are the latest ones so when I come back to the project that often helps recalling what was done last
And if it becomes too much and the tabs are still relevant then I just extract the middle part between localhost+docs on the one side and the latest research on the right and out it in its own window in the background
So essentially I use all the dimensions there are:
- within the tabs there is an order
- within the space there is an order (left half, right half on 34” wide screen)
- in depth there is an order (windows all the way to the back are the oldest and will be culled from time to time)
- and then there is the spaces themselves which are mainly for different projects
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-brow...
Just installed the new version with two-level tab stacks, seems pretty cool so far, but not yet sure how useful they will be in day-to-day browsing.
The one and only reason I stopped using Vivaldi every time I tried it is the performance. But it becomes more and more obvious the developers simply have different priorities.
Seems to me there's a subset of power users on Firefox just waiting for any other browser to implement tree style tabs.
Then again, I also use uBlock Origin... perhaps Vivaldi is slow without it. I'll also admit that theoretically I'd expect Vivaldi's UI to be slower due to being based on web technologies instead of native, but I can't say I can perceive a difference except in edge cases.
Tab handling was at least x1000 slower than Chrome last time I tested. It got dramatically slower in the last few snapshots and the official 3.6 Stable build.
Its not just tabs, address bar handling is totally broken, opening new tab and starting to type quickly will result in eaten letters. Opening new tab, clicking CTRL-F and starting to type will again open with ~1 second delay and lost letters.
Then we get into broken javascript causality https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ open in normal browser and Vivaldi, Vivaldi address bar handling code is overriding scrollTop with delayed location.hash update.
Then again I also tend not to have more than 5 mails in my inbox.
One big factor for me is the customizability without having to rely on extensions. I trust Vivaldi (and von Tetzchner), and don't have to worry about whether I trust extension makers. The customization options in Vivaldi tend to work pretty darn well too, which can be more hit-and-miss with third party ones in Firefox.
Single-key shortcuts are also a big win for Vivaldi for me. I got used to these in Opera and they're great for efficiency while web browsing. Maybe I can get them with an extension for Firefox, but it's enabling one check box in Vivaldi. It's similar to why some people like vim plugins for browsers, but with less vim expertise required.
I've also seen Firefox remove a lot of features over the years. XUL extensions being the big one, but there are others. Firefox Hello. Firefox Panorama, just as I was starting to take a liking to it. Vivaldi has a philosophy of adding features that let you customize the browser to how you like it, and if only 0.2% of users use that feature but it makes them really happy, that's fine. Firefox will remove features if not enough users adopt it. Thus my trust that Firefox is going to keep features that I like has been lowered over the years, making me more hesitant to try new Firefox features, and generally more hesitant about Firefox.
Although I'm considering switching part of my home browsing back to Firefox because of its ability to not autoplay videos. Too many sites have those nowadays (and too often, self-hosted and not as third-party ads that are easily blocked), and Blink-based browsers can't stop them, and I'm getting pretty tired of having to pause/hide videos all the time so I can focus on reading articles.
(Kidding. I just never close anything until I get annoyed because I like to use them as active working memory for a period of about a month or longer.)
It looks like Firefox and Tab Mix Plus offered it back in the day; I'm thinking that might be where I remember it from.
In contrast a hierarchical tab structure can act both as the stuff I'm currently working on as well as a way to store all things I find interesting in named groups. If you didn't manually tag all your bookmarks, ideally with a consistent naming scheme, finding certain sites again can be quite a task. But I know what tab group a certain website that I last used 2 years ago and can't remember the name/url of has to be in. It's basically the web version of a file manager. Why would I spend time to organise bookmarks in some folder structure if the structure already exists in the tab bar, always up to date?
And tabs solve this problem how? In most browsers they aren’t even searchable.
The only advantage over a folder of bookmarks is that you can close one with a shortcuts, whereas bookmarks require several clicks.
And Firefox automatically searches all tabs in addition to bookmarks whenever you type in the address bar, and lets you jump to that tab directly.
300 tabs! I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
That argument makes no sense. Both bookmarks as well as persistent tabs are not something you'd use in incognito mode. Also, if you use incognito mode for anything that should survive a crash you're probably using it wrong. Firefox and Chrome let you use separate profiles for a reason.
> 300 tabs! I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
No need to be condescending. Especially not considering a few years ago I also thought it's crazy. Truth is, it's simply how bookmarks should have been designed from the start. If you disagree that doesn't bother me, but your point about browser crashes is still not accurate.
if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?
This is on top of people wanting quick market share which requires compatibility with the "big player" :(
You mean the fact that their security is atrocious in comparison?
https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/
> At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and the most widely used – that was important to us. Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium.
I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet. If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision might be different.