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Comment by mikeyur | Hacker News Reader

I'm just going to come right out and say it: No tabs = fucking insane. I haven't tried it but I don't want my browser to navigate like iTunes.

Then again, it's just a mockup. Should be interesting to see where they go in the future though.

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If Firefox does away with tabs, then I will do away with Firefox.

No reason to use it if it does this. Other browsers are already faster, more elegant, and better in many ways. What most of them don't have is extensions.

But even with the strength of Firefox's extension model, expect mass abandonment if they do away with tabs.

I doubt tabs are the be-all and end-all of browser UI, but what they want to replace it with is certainly much, much worse.

Wouldn't "gimme back my tabs" be one of the first extensions written if this did come to pass?

Maybe. Since the developers are getting overzealous, my guess is that they might try to block tab use altogether, a la how the Gnome developers operate.

All software projects that are successful seem to go through an open, inclusive, customizable period, then a user-hostile, closed non-customizable one. Gnome, Windows, etc., have all done this.

No reason to suspect Firefox won't, either.

I'm going to remain on the fence. I had tabs in Vim. Then I switched to Emacs, found out the tabs options sucked. Now I have ido-mode. It's a nice mode of operation. Though I'm not sure it's a good mode for the average Joe.

Though, I've found people will learn lots of things if it has the right pay off. People get by fairly well on their own when it comes to web mail and the various social networking sites. For some reason they need training on "work" tools but personal tools.

Yeah, but when you're editing text, you're working with a relatively limited number of files, ones that you probably work with often.

That doesn't map well to web browsing, a lot of which is exploratory. I know I use the tab bar as a sort of `to read' list, piling up things I will pay attention to later.

Once I've piled up some context, I tend to hover around 40 file buffers open. Tabs just won't do that well even on the sidebar.

You're a lightweight! I work with somebody who never closes buffers (with ido-mode and enough of RAM, there's just not much point). When I met him, his Emacs session had over 1100 buffers open.

Then he found midnight-mode. I think these days he tends to have only 300-some-odd buffers open at any one time.

I use 'conkeror' as my main web browser, which is a emacs-like browser running on xulrunner.

I can have 10+ pages open and switch rapidly to the one i want by typing C-x b <3 letters of a keyword> return For me this beats regular tabs.

I've been using Conkeror for about four months now, and while I like the Emacs-like interface and the ability to mess around with the presentation of pages, there are definitely a few warts

1. I had no idea how much I relied on the throbber icon until it was gone. For a fairly new piece of hacker-ware, there are surprisingly few usability glitches, but this one makes up for most.

2. Emacs lets you display any buffer (browser tab) in any desktop frame ("window"). This is the only intelligent way to manage this relationship, and the fact that browsers effectively restrict tabs to the frames where they were spawned is what made me try Conkeror out in the first place. For the moment, though, Conkeror is like Firefox, although the developers seem to be working on it.

I've seen the Tree Tab AddOn and didn't think I would like it but it is much better than having a whole bunch of tabs open, which tend to get squished up when you have a lot open.

Also, with certain themes the active tab can be hard to see, they all look the same, the active tab should be indented or darker but some themes make them all look so similar it's hard to tell, that's not so with Tree Tab.

I have to second this. I've been using the Tree Tab addon for months now and have a hard time going back. I definitely wouldn't want to be without it for any widescreen monitors (e.g. every laptop I own).

I now, on average, have ~20 tabs open. When doing lots of fast research or having a very multi-tasking day, it will hit 40 or so tabs. But it doesn't feel like hell, it feels great, because they're all organized in trees/collapsible, and are just a very visible/readable list on the left side.

In normal Firefox or Chrome, I never let myself get more than 15 tabs deep because they're not organized in a meaningful way and feel like unsearchable clutter. With the tree-style tabs on the left, it's really easy to organize/reorganize them and feels more normal to have lots of them open at once if you need.

I unofficially challenge everyone reading this to try that tree-style tab addon for a month and see if you feel more productive/efficient using that over the top-style tabs. It will feel slightly weird at first, but give it that week/month and I bet you'll prefer it when you're done.

Here's the link if you need it: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

Edit: If you're not convinced, tell me which is easier to skim quickly.

This:

  * GMail, thorax
  * Active by Milest...
  * thread sync - Google Sea...
      * MSDN - WaitForSingleObj...
  * Twitter / Home... 
  * CNN.com - Breaking N...
      * Congressman came under fire in ... 
      * Jailbird ruffles features ...
  * hello - Google Sea...
  * hacker news - Google Sea...

or this:

+1 - I discovered the Tree Style Tab addon a few months back, and I absolutely cannot imagine living without it. If you don't already use it, give it a try now, you will never go back. This type of tab handling should be pulled in to every browser ASAP.

If you're the type of person that reads Hacker News, this plugin will improve your online experience by at least 5%. Get it.

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