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Comment by quanticle | Hacker News Reader

First, thanks for making this and putting it out into the world. As someone who always tends to end up with an unreasonable number of tabs, I'm always interested in more and better tab management options.

That said, I'm wondering how this compares with TreeStyleTabs (1) for tab management.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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You might be interested in Sideberry (1) - it has tab groups as an additional instrument of organizing tabs, and automatically creates daily snapshots of hierarchy of tabs.

1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Hadn't heard of that before but it looks amazing. Thanks for posting the link!

I love Sidebery, but only recently discovered the tab grouping feature, and I love it.

I also us multi-account containers and would love to find a way to make the little ribbon of color on the edge more prominent.

I pin all of my tabs that use a container and so the color strip goes across almost all of the icon and it is quite visible.

> would love to find a way to make the little ribbon of color on the edge more prominent

I use a bit of userChrome.css for this. I think this is the important part:

  .contextual-identity-marker {
    width: 40px !important;
    left: 0;
    opacity: 0.6;
  }

Thanks for the link. I've installed Sidebery, and it's definitely more customizable and flexible than TreeStyleTabs.

The right solution really depends on your use case. I'm perfectly happy with how tabs work, hardly every have more than 10 open.

Tabs are for pages i'm going to use in the next 30 minutes (or that have state i want to keep), bookmarks for things i need a few times per month, and pocket/readlist for stuff i might want to read in the future.

No need to waste screen real-estate on anything i'm not going to use soon. And there's always history if i need to find something I've closed but didn't save to my bookmarks or pocket.

I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. Also, it uses some pop-ups that at times make it a bit cumbersome to use (still much better than FF without TST).

Since browsers are a place where we do a lot of work, I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers.

Yet, as many have said before, browsers do not seem to target power users: I cannot even change FF's shortcuts without recompiling the beast!

>Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF.

I didn't seem to have any issues getting the add-on installed in my Firefox. Yes, TST suffered from some instability when Firefox initially deprecated XUL and switched to the WebExtension model exclusively, but it seems to work fine now. It even picked up the theming changes in the latest update to Firefox seamlessly.

>I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers

Edge comes close. It has the option to orient tabs vertically. However, it doesn't organize tabs in a hierarchical outline like TST does.

> Edge comes close.

Did not know that. Edge is basically MS branded Chrome, right?

At this point, yes. At one point Edge had its own rendering engine, but MS chose to abandon it, and just use Blink instead.

There’s also Orion, at least on Mac. It hasn’t replaced my daily driver (Brave), but I’ve been using it as a ‘container’ of sorts for LinkedIn and have found it to be pretty good.

Brave currently has vertical tabs as a flag-enable-able option, and if they add tree hierarchy, I probably won’t switch. But if not, I’ll likely move to Orion, which has been working well for me.

> I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF.

The amount of nails FF has scattered in the road of moving the tab bar to the side is atrocious. At one point (in the halcyon days when the Firefox motto was "Your web, the way you like it.") tab placement was a user-configurable option in the preferences.

Then they removed that option, saying "Users can reenable the option with an extension."

Then they broke the extension for no good reason since, as you correctly note, with quite a bit of work is possible to install it.

I wish Firefox would get back to providing a functional browser instead of being a platform to install crap like "Pocket", "Hello", "Colorways", and whatever has flown beneath my radar.

I’m with you on the functional browser. I switched to Chrome for work because of how it does tab groups natively. I manage around 300 on-prem hosts, and I manage K8s and shit in two clouds, all with a fairly low rate of automation.

So I’ve got tabs open for managing VMWare, Foreman, two monitoring systems, two cloud providers, gsuite, and about eight spreadsheets at all times because that’s how we track assets and do IPAM. That’s like 20+ tabs that I bounce between all day long. I’m not going to use bookmarks to navigate this, I want a max of two clicks to get to the right tab. And so Chrome’s tab groups solve my problem perfectly.

Also, in my defense, since automating things and deploying an ITAM tool is kinda my job, I started here less than a year ago. My predecessors were let go when a new manager came in and found out that the Linux env was ridiculously insecure, and then they refused to make the env comply with some of the most basic security guidelines (like security patching more than twice a year). Then my counterpart left for a better job after three months, so I’ve been left alone to support an infrastructure that’s falling down around itself while also trying to secure and enhance it (i.e. rebuild everything).

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