Hacker News Reader

Comment by idleloops | Hacker News Reader

Noticed the 'tabs-on-demand' feature a few weeks back in Nightly. That's a great feature, that should have been in there earlier.

You can turn this behaviour off as well. I'd like to see perhaps the option to turn it off on an individual site basis. Or perhaps set a default value of off for pinned tabs (I haven't tested, the behaviour of pinned tabs.)

View on HN

The feature actually was there since Firefox 4, but wasn't default. In Firefox 4 it was an about:config setting, sometime later a checkbox was added to Firefox preferences (General, Don't load tabs until selected). I've been using this feature for as long as it has existed, and with the way I use tabs it has been a great help to me.

Pinned tabs load automatically.

I have the feeling that in the beginning, the idea of preserving your tabs was precisely because you wanted them to be prerendered. Then it became a way to have some sort of "front line bookmarking"

I feel like browsers have failed to innovate on bookmarks. The problem with bookmarks is that once you have too many they become unweildy. There should be a separate between "stuff I visit a lot" and "this great article about Early Modern Spain that I want to read later". I'm glad that Safari is delving into the latter a bit now.

Unsorted bookmarks + Awesomebar in Firefox works great for that. It's search-inside-bookmarks is great.

Opera's Speed Dial is nice, too.

I don't know about the Opera version of tabs but in Mozilla 0.9.3 I used tabs because the new window delay was ~2s due to excessive XUL overlays and I installed the save tabs extension because the browser crashed every 2 hours or so and I wanted to keep my tabs.

Exactly, I think they caught on as they are a more intuitive UI than delving into your history or using bookmarks. When rendered repeatedly until you read them (perhaps weeks after,) they make for very expensive bookmarks.

Tabs/history/bookmarks I believe are the most pressing area for UI development in the browser.

A lot of this management could be pushed into the OS shell. If you could manage Windows easier - you wouldn't need tabs.

Tab behaviour is so inconsistent across browsers, apps and different OSs it hurts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com