That being said, I'd also be ok with process-per-window, as that would give me the same basic ability.
Have you imagined an alternate scheme to tabs, where there are 100s of thousands of potential "tabs" which can be organized, called up in groups, moved in clumps together, and shared?
Imagine each group of tabs like soldiers in a Command and Conquer game...
Firefox also does a neat thing with tabs that have been opened and not used in a long time, effectively unloading the website and reloading it once you visit the tab (for some reason it doesn't do so with tabs that I keep open in the background on purpose, like Gmail). They also had memory fragmentation problems, which they gradually fixed and now I'm very, very pleased with Firefox. Chrome is really draining my resources at 30 tabs opened, whereas I've had Firefox open with 100 tabs without issues.
The one process per tab model does have an advantage for misbehaving long-running apps. For example I had problems with Asana at some point, as I think it was leaking memory or something and Firefox couldn't handle it. In Chrome, you can find out what misbehaving tabs you have and simply close it.
If Firefox can switch to the one process per tab model, but somehow keep its current efficiency in managing memory, that would be so awesome.
Just bring up the menu bar (or hit Alt), then go to File -> Exit, which should close all Firefox windows but save the current tab history. Then, simply restart Firefox, again go back to the menu, then do History -> Restore Previous Session.
Besides the few tabs that get auto-loaded (i.e. the ones you were viewing in each window), the remaining tabs should remain un-loaded until you manually re-visit that tab (at which point the page will be redownloaded or loaded from cache into RAM).
* [A task based web browser - Conquering information overload](http://www.slideshare.net/mohanrajrm/a-taskfocused-approach-...)
* [A task-focused approach to support sharing and interruption recovery in web browsers](http://vimeo.com/9088447)
I am still waiting for a plugin which allows me to impose a efficient low-cost organisation layer over tabs (have made multiple feeble attempts to do a plugin which helps organize tabs using mind-maps, a org structure that is my personal favorite). I have tried almost all plugins over the years which could potentially solve this for me - but have not been successful in finding one that fits my needs.
It would kewl if this vein of technology grows. Perhaps cached tabs could store a snapshot for offline-browsing and recall after the page is down, too...
...or if multiple web pages could be combined into a single browser page.
Yes, some kind of meta-layer would be neat.
Maybe even combine a "multipath" "narrative" "storyline" into a navigable structure for communicating ideas from multiple perspectives, like news stories or technical manuals or software/hardware/testing/docs of the same product..
sorry for all the quotes and sky-high speculation - i'm buzzing on caffeine, and very excited to chat with other people about the possibilities of extra-tabular information navigation!
I'd love to have something indexing and closing old tabs for me in the background instead of manually managing them. Heuristics like 'this tab or any pages on this domain haven't been visited in a week, index the page and close the tab'. At times I use tabs as reminders, perhaps adding some intelligence like "This Kickstarter is expiring in 3 days and hasn't been viewed in a week, you still interested?" might be nice. Any tab with future dates approaching might be worth alerting people to. A summary page might be nice with the last closed tabs, the upcoming dates tabs mentioned above. Pinboard or the like integration would be pretty awesome, that is primarily how I'm managing tabs now.
The more I think about this the more excited I get. Of course the tough part is satisfying each of us who have their own reasons and their own process for managing multiple tabs.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tab...
I have been thinking of something that combined Bookmark, History and Open Tabs.
So yea, that behavior is quite possible today.
(The standard tab UI also does not facilitate massive numbers of tabs, but tree style tabs solves that problem beautifully.)
The ability to queue up a reading list, to tag elements, to expire portions, to group stuff for later, to annotate it.
A mix of tabs, bookmarks, a tool like Readability, and Calibre.
- Tabs need to communicate with each other, or with a "host" application. In-process communication might be simpler than inter-process.
- Some people have WMs that don't provide an acceptable tabbing interface, and you want your application to have an acceptable interface everywhere. In this case I guess I'd suggest distributing a separate tabbing program along with your app, but that kind of separation of responsibility has definitely gone out of fashion.