I don't want to piss on the OP effort, some people will find it useful.
For me, I don't understand the problem. Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?
For me, I don't understand the problem. Why do so many people need a tab manager in say Firefox, but not in Word, Excel, Windows Explorer or Total Commander?
I guess you could call me a "tab hoarder", I commonly have 50+ tabs open for the various topics and contexts I'm browsing and switching between. I usually also always restore my previous session from the day before, so some of the tabs are 2 weeks old but I have yet to finish the thing they're related to, so they stay up.
Compared to other applications that I close/open without restoring the previous context. I guess the terminal/tmux is the one that has the most context, and there I usually have 5-10 tabs open at any given time, for the same reason as above. And then I do use a manager of sorts (tmux), but for all the rest, I'm just opening/closing things as needed.
Lack of vertical tabs is why I don’t use Chrome.
The funny thing is that edge and brave managed to enable native vertical tabs.
I have a window open just with YouTube tabs of videos that interest me and that I intend to watch in the near future. As an OS-level window, it has weight and presence. Inside the window I have vertical and nested tabs. So I have videos grouped by topic or just by the rabbit hole I used. I can collapse them, move them around, etc. It's tactile. If I put all those videos into a YouTube playlist, it becomes static. It's a link in a list. It becomes less convenient and natural to add things to the list or even interact with them. There's no nesting, no grouping. Have you tried working with a YouTube playlist? It's abysmal. I'd rather keep them in a more concrete state as a tab which is integrated into my browser's tabs system (or whatever extension I use for it, in this case Sidebery) as part of a window that's a natural part of my OS.
This is all before considering how incredibly bad and basic Chrome and Firefox's history tabs are, which we also end up replacing with hundreds of tabs. I wish I had a vim-like undotree or anything like it to navigate my past tabs. There's a whole spatial component that's missing, whole dimensions missing, and I've never understood why.
You don't manage your Word documents in Word. You use the OS for that. That's pretty much why nobody needs tabs in Word.
Agreed, several of my friends hoard tabs instead of using the "bookmark" feature. I suppose it is because bookmarking is one more step and organizing bookmarks takes further effort.
Because they rarely open so many tabs there? I routinely open dozens of tabs in web browsers as I navigate to other pages wanting to keep the previous while I explore the web (I hardly ever left-click links - I almost always wheel-click) but I rarely ever open more than 6 folders in Total Commander or more than 6 documents in an Office.
Start day on task A. Open Task, Open Subtask, Open git PR to check comments, Open Azure portal to check something, check Kibana Logs. Do a seperate second Kibana query.
Get asked about task B
Open Task, Open OneNote docs on that task, open a chatgpt session for that task
This is a mild example
Why not close tabs as they are used? Because if I need them again the load time of many sites is atrocious and then I also need to remember how I got there. I would need to save my kibana query or make a note of how I got to that Azure blade. Neither of these update the URL to capture the state (they are not HATEOAS) or I donn’t trust them to.
For Firefox, I've found an extension that moves tabs to a new window. It mostly works, but there are rough edges. I apparently have enough resources for all my browser windows in my shaggy laptop for it to never swap. The overhead doesn't seem huge enough to warrant the removal of the possibility of disabling tabs.
It doesn't work well enough. It's mostly terrible, for example window size and position not being remembered, and opening in random places and sizes.
Also, you may be writing one document but have a hundred tabs open for research.
How do you know? Those apps have no way to customize on the same level that Firefox allows. But they also have their ways to handle masses of documents and windows, they are just not very good.
And why do you think they don't? I'd love to have a consistently great tab management experience in all the apps that have tabs (and all the apps that don't). It's just they are more closed, so it's harder to do that with some extension
And it's a bigger issue for the browser since you'd usually have more pages opened there