You're Gonna Need a Bigger Browser
berjon.com
berjon.com
This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee.
People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.
I disagree with “a good book is one that confirms what you already believe,” even if Willy Wonka writes it.
This reading seems too dismissive and simplistic, and not respectful of the people involved. At the base of the article:
Many thanks to the following excellent people (in alphabetical order) for their invaluable feedback: Amy Guy, Benjamin Goering, Ben Harnett, Blaine Cook, Boris Mann, Brian Kardell, Brooklyn Zelenka, Dave Justice, Dietrich Ayala, Dominique Hazaël-Massieux, Fabrice Desré, Ian Preston, Juan Caballero, Kjetil Kjernsmo, Marcin Rataj, Margaux Vitre, Maria Farrell, and Tess O'Connor. Needless to say, anything dumb and stupid in this article is entirely mine.
Is there a specific point you found circular or hand-wavy?
Based on my past experiences with other UX people who want me to live without a UI element that I'm attached to, I'd be willing to bet money that he's failed to understand something about how my brain actually works. And mocking people who might have my preference goes a long way to convincing me that he won't want to listen to why people like me don't want to use his version. Whatever it is. (He didn't make that clear.)
I agree with you the point about tabs comes across as insensitive and lacking in empathy for people who like tabs.
Take for example: For all users, tabs are the wrong answer to something people want to do: organise their information, even if it's just a small current stack of interactions
Criticism of tabs is warranted and it's worth exploring other solutions, but to pretend that tabs have no use cases, thereby seeming to suggest that anyone who likes them is "wrong" or, even "dumb", is difficult to support. This exaggeration makes the points less effective.
And mocking people who might have my preference goes a long way to convincing me that he won't want to listen to why people like me don't want to use his version
Totally agree.
I thought the article made good points, but often stated them poorly, diluted them with unwarranted insensitivity and hyperbole, and was hard to read.
Fortunately, browsers can and do accommodate both of us. I hope they continue to do so.
You do NOT want tabs and you do NOT like them, but you do NOT know that. You just think you do. Open your mind up.
I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet. e.g. I've had a tab group for a while for buying new shoes. Really, most of these tabs should be bookmarks, but I'm just not bothered enough to change it (yet).
Interspersed among the FOMO tabs are things I'm currently working on. These are strewn all over the place and I've observed two things about how I use them. First, when I try to prune work tabs I am always overzealous and I find myself reopening the same tabs over and over. Second, I'm sensitive to where tabs are located spatially and I'm able to frequently find my way back to oldish tabs.
So basically, I'm saying "I have a system," but that is a flimsy defense and the real answer is probably "I'm not bothered enough to change."
Ha! Like a tab succubus
* Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth)
* Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable.
I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.
This.
The hundreds of tabs I have open are bookmarks, I don't actually use them as tabs.
Bookmarks are things that meet or surpass a certain threshold of usefulness. My open tabs probably include things that should be bookmarked, but all of that information needs to be screened for what's really worth saving. Clusters of tabs for various trains of thought take time to condense into purified bookmarks.
In order for me to have less tabs open, I guess reality would need to become much more boring.
Ironically, as I'm browsing the web, Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. are all maintaining various growing data structures about me that encapsulate key information, like what content is the most engaging for me, my social graph, or tracking the sites I visit most. People act like having 1000 tabs is a problem, but no one cares when Google's database gets it's 100,000th record for the data they're keeping on you. I wish that raw data could be shared with the respective users. It would be nice to know more about my digital self than the algorithms do. It's another facet of what makes these tech companies god-like.
Thanks for explaining what you already have, I’ve always been SO confused by people with hundreds of tabs. I hope I wasn’t the only one who read “people either use 3 tabs or 300” and thought that was insanely out of touch
Back to my comment that started this: That would be a flat list with no grouping and little to no context. Tree Style Tabs automatically organizes them by context.
For example, one of my root tabs is Youtube. Immediate children include a few channels that upload a lot of videos so I don't subscribe to them (they'd drown out the ones that upload rarely) but want to keep up with them. Those then have child tabs for their videos I want to watch/listen to at some point, but haven't gotten to yet.
I do the same on here, one of my root tabs is the Hacker News homepage. This one has a bunch of additional long-running tabs, interesting projects I want to try out myself, or reminders to try something out and maybe switch to it instead of whatever I'm currently using. Most of these have further subtabs as I've started exploring whatever it was but not yet finished with it.
And yeah, you could do such groupings with bookmarks... but that's manual work. This is automatic.
However, this makes me think: what if there was a tree-style-tab extension that let you convert a tree into a bookmark folder? Then I wouldn't feel bad at all about closing half or more of my tabs.
This could be optionally combined with some sort of bookmark/page archiving service so you can be extra-sure that content will be waiting for you if you ever decide to look at it later.
Both open browser tabs and bookmarks get auto-completed by the omnibar in contemporary browsers. One important difference is, after a new browser session is created, those pervious tabs go away, but the bookmarks stay. The "chaos" bookmark method results in more chaotic omnibar auto-complete suggestions over time. Unfortunately, that seems like a worse outcome.
Firefox doesn't load tabs after a restart until you click on them, and I use a tab unloader so tabs also get unloaded after a few hours (mentioned in my original comment that started this chain).
It's currently only using about 3% CPU.
I also find the tab scrolling UI of a long list easier than manually waypointing stuff into folders and then trying to remember what, where, and other context of the saved items
I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read, but my tab counts rarely exceed 20. I read those articles/comments, and I Cmd-W to close them. At the end of the day I end up with 0 tabs, and close the browser.
Even when I'm in the middle of doing research, I open a ton of tabs, save the promising ones as bookmarks in a folder, and close the rest. I take my cue from that scene in Ratatouille where the chef says "keep your stations clear" [1]. I try not clutter my tab bar with irrelevant tabs so my attention is not divided.
I've seen people who open 100s of tabs, and they do what I do except they never close tabs. To me that seems to be a sign of a cluttered mind, but it's the same kind of mind that is able to find objects in a messy room, so who am I to judge? Whatever works I guess.
The risk of not closing/bookmarking tabs is that you're one Cmd-Q or system hang away from losing all your tabs.
That's what RSS is for.
When it shut down, I never went back to RSS.
I use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through them. I might ctrl-click additional links in the article or comment section to browse through when I'm finished reading.
If I'm interrupted, I'll open a new tab, or a new window if there's too many (I prefer 10 or less, since you can then use ctrl-# to jump between them.) Eventually, if I've given up on them, I'll close a bunch in one go. Or I'll just close a whole window because I haven't looked at in a while.
Easy come, easy go.
So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.
As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.
Yea that's nothing, haha. I currently have 3592 open. Like you mention, research and tab hoarding go hand in hand. Even recreational research: everyone is familiar with the wikipedia spree with its innumerable hyperlinked articles and references, and now you suddenly have 20 additional open tabs. I'll read maybe two of them, but the others piqued my interest enough to warrant opening, so definitely not closing them. If you never purge, you eventually end up in the hundreds/thousands.
My tabs get auto suspended when they've been idle for thirty mins, which prevents the memory usage from becoming ridiculous enough to incentivize me to change! Though I do need a better system, such as a tagging/categorization system for links. At least half my open tabs are things not of immediate relevance (duh), but HN posts/random blog posts on $NICHE_TOPIC that I'll (hopefully) get to eventually; eg building a DIY keyboard. Especially the blog posts, I can't be sure that I'll stumble upon them again. Sites like MakeUseOf can fuck off, they always float to the top of the SERP.
Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?
But overall I actually think the visual aspect is the reason, its mostly an unavoidable nag saying "DONT FORGET!" Closing tabs sends them into the abyss, unless you precisely remember what you're looking for (for someone wont to ctrl/cmd click hyperlinks, good luck finding those). And I do use session buddy to save and organize contexts (and keeps the tab situation somewhat "sane") but—and similarly with OneTab—those just get sent off to the extension's local db and you forget.
> Do you end up with a “feel” for where the tab is, similar to how we get used to the contours of our camera role on a smartphone?
When I used to only have a few hundred, spread out into different windows, and designated virtual desktops for each meta topic, definitely. It's what I want to get back to.
I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen.
In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them.
Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed.
The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a window has been at the tab limit for a couple days and wasn't compelling enough for me to act on before, I'll close all its tabs. If I didn't take notes about it or process it in some way, too late, gone now.
I actually do take screenshots of some of my tabs, full page screenshots, which I think in practice is my 'bookmarking' system. I title the file with what it's about - say, "shadcdn.png". Now it's 'saved', in theory anyway for me to look at at some undefined future date (no hurry).
That's my system, which works well enough.
The biggest problem is that sounds more verbose. I'd be saving the page as a PDF, but then I'd have to hunt more to find out why I saved it, since save as PDF often extends beyond one page iirc. Really one page of screenshot is plenty for my needs.
Also PDF's are a lot "heavier" than images. I can scroll through 50 images in a minute, using feh. I don't know how I'd go through multiple PDF's actually, but in any case I imagine in the best case scenario it's still slower. The effort of loading 10 PDFs would deter me from doing it as often, I think.
Finally, using scrot to get the screenshot, it's as simple as one command. Using ctrl+d, it doesn't even require a terminal, I just enter it into the 'command bar' (basically like an always-open browser address bar but for commands on i3). I also do scrot -s to save images sometimes if I don't want the whole page, but that takes slightly longer. With scrot (no arg) I get the whole page instantly, with scrot -s I have to draw a box around the part I want to save.
About 90% of the time scrot (for screenshot) - then open terminal, rename file - is good enough and takes on the order of 15 seconds. It's already very lean, and I don't think I can abstract away the naming part, which is where most of the time goes anyway.
If I wanted to save time I could just not rename the screenshot and keep the name as basically a timestamp, but then I don't know the image's contents. I did actually try using OCR, which kinda worked, but not as well as renaming, which succinctly gets my point across better than OCR's verbosity. Bottom line, if I want to remember a browser screenshot, it's worth 10 seconds of my time to explain why through a descriptive filename. I save <10 images daily so I can spare that.
I should say I've had no issues using scrot: works 100% of the time so far, faithfully getting what's on my screen. If I did have glitch issues I might search for an alternative - but I haven't had any so far.
Chrome may be the default browser on Android, but Firefox is as easy to install as any other app in the Play Store.
I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace.
Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".
DRM (or hardware attestation) is the key to the market now.
It's actually very clever: once banks start blocking non-DRM browsers, that's a game over for all opensource and competing projects. The browser (and therefore the internet for most of the population) will then be controlled by the largest ads corporation in the history.
Sad, but this kind of an entrenching seem to go very quick and very well in the mobile land (see second part of the comment [0]).
(I don’t use separate browsers, but I gave Facebook its own Chrome profile.)
A new browser would need to do one everyday thing really well to get part-time use. The question is what that is.
Because those banks have recently replaced SMS OTP with mobile app push confirmation dialog. But the bank's app does not want to work when there's any app installed on a smartphone not specifically whitelisted in a bank.
Everyone hates SMS OTP them here at HN, but here's an alternative.
History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.
1. The page titles don't often align with my search terms. 2. Most of the history is clutter of Google searches and other noisy stuff I don't care about (as you've mentioned).
To that end, I've been using readwise or raindrop to great effect. I can save the pages I really care about and then organize them as needed. I don't really believe in the whole "I need 100's of tabs open" model, get some help y'all.
Imagine being able to resume a complex web-app, complete with input form text and the entire application state. A huge limitation of most browser suspend/resume implementations is that they often cause data loss.
We've all had the experience of letting a tab get too "stale" and suddenly it drops you back to the main page or the (dreaded) empty form. This mistrust becomes a constant mental burden, often forcing you to unnaturally twist your workflow due to fear of getting burned again. Yuck.
Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".
And as someone who opens up hundreds of tabs and returns to many of them only several months later, bookmarks serve a different purpose in my workflow than tabs. Tabs are single-use; I close them after I consume the content in the tab and never open them again. Bookmarks are reusable, pages which I may want to return to multiple times.
What, you mean just like one big uncategorized list of tabs?
I can't resist quoting the article:
> (If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)
How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.
I've noticed that when looking through deep documentation, it's often much better to go back to Google and refine the query than it is to go through whatever crap software the doc site is hosted on to find stuff. Not all docs sites are like this, but I encounter crappy doc sites quite often.
Keeping a tab open includes history in what is saved, which can be quite significant (if that tab was not opened as a fresh tab so has no history), a simple bookmark does not.
People here are suggesting storing more than that, not less, including the DOM so it's content can be searched later.
Almost no one used it back then, and it would be even fewer people now. After all, the time of always-on machine which can act as a server "for free" are gone. Even desktops sleep nowdays when not used, and no one would be crazy enough to kill their cellphone/tablet battery to run something that can be served by cloud faster, more reliably and often for free.
Berjon, points out that despite being a cornerstone of the web, browser design has stagnated, suggesting we re-envision browsers to enhance user control. He argues for integrating browsing, search, and social media, and imagines browsers as 'agents' with server-like functions, offering services like personalized data management.
Berjon also critiques tab management and the current browser business models, advocating for reinvestment into the web. He's hopeful for change, emphasizing financial incentives for innovation.
Particularly intriguing is the concept of Personal Data Servers, aligning with my vision for a federated search engine in DownloadNet, which could evolve into a social sharing tool where you publish your local search engine for others to use: https://github.com/dosyago/DownloadNet
Notably missing is the role AI could play in amplifying user agency within this framework.
At my company, we're crafting BrowserBox to redefine browsers as empowering user agents. It’s an open-source initiative critical to the web’s future: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox
Bandwidth-wise, it should be fine to host over the cellphone network, I’m not very interesting, I’m sure I’d only get one or two visitors a week.
Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely.
I don't like the environment much but I care about the time to context switch between projects (with text, email, and phone interrupts).
I also find the sign-in process to be very broken and an attempt to reduce the sign-in time is my major issue. It is a lot worse with many 2FA authorisation schemes — TOTP, email, text message, open this or that app on my phone.
If the time to open a new tab (including the sign-in process) was 50ms then I would have one window and use some mechanism to open a set of tags.
Perhaps a tab group suspend function that frees up resources and securely saves authentication state and context information?
Updates would probably slow down a lot, but I doubt that everyone would stop working on it, and that nobody new would step up to maintain whatever the most popular folks were.
what? I'm completely fine having a number of tabs running "apps", every day, for decades now. It's no different than apps in the system tray.
Visceral reaction: Outside of FLOSS, technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate because bundling them is often the first step to an over-aggressive capitalism entirely consuming their utility. The "Feed" that eventually becomes a heavy advertising venue or even a brainwashing tactic, has destroyed Twitter, and Facebook, and others as user experiences, rendered things like Youtube into potent infohazards, become a foundation for post-free-speech worlds in which the Platform is expected to Moderate Content for rightthink because the Platform is (for the sake of engagement!) deciding what to show you in an Editorial Capacity. The corruption of Google Search, or the Amazon review functionality, or then the Amazon search functionality, is a major short-term loss for human agency at least as big as the writer envisions, and it's being done because bundling different concerns provides an opening, gives the corporate board an erection during quarterly P&L briefings. Over the Possibilities.
If you care about the user experience, consider how long my grandfather's wrench was permitted to remain a wrench, rather than autonomously transforming into a screwdriver, or a brick, or a nice welcoming block of cheese, or a magazine subscription, or a bonfire, or Ebola. The owning entity only has to learn how to use the wrench once a generation; The interface does not drastically change to combine my love life, my choice in cereal, and my ability to tighten bolts. I have to re-learn some online tools once per YEAR because somebody is bundling something in a way that is in the short term slightly more profitable. I have a closet full of useful tools that don't exist on my cognitive plane any more and I'm not sure I want to investigate deeply enough to figure out what cosmic horror they became. In order to preserve my agency, I need to be able to flip back and forth between those tools and summon up capacities that I have not engaged in for several years; The state of web applications (and by extension, the browser) makes me as a tool-using ape feel like I have dementia with the number of holes that now exist in my knowledge versus my past self.
You don't need a bigger browser. You need a predictable environment that you can buy and own, that doesn't tear itself to shreds when you're not actively handing it a geometrically larger amount of money every five minutes. Most layering violations (outside of FLOSS) that you observe are trying to pick your pocket with one hand and scramble your neocortex ("The way you THOUGHT that the platform worked") with an icepick with the other.
No, my use of tabs may not be Technically Optimal. It is a way of organizing information. But it's predictable, and it's within my cognitive grasp, and it lets me do a great many things without entirely losing track of them. I don't want to have to relearn an entire means of organizing my information because you thought that my tabs belonged in your bookmark service†, or in your AI personal assistant†, or that they should be tidy and Bring You Joy. I don't want somebody to rearrange the papers on my desk; That would be profoundly disturbing because it breaks the model for how I think, how I predict things, and how I remain effective.
†Which you DEFINITELY will refrain from charging a subscription for. For a year, maybe even two, before seizing that chunk of my exocortex.