The Inventor of the Browser Tab | Hacker News Reader

The Inventor of the Browser Tab

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20 pointssharmanaetor26 comments

This:

I think tabbed browsing gets out of control when users don’t have good bookmarking systems. I have friends who end up with 50 tabs open at a time. They want to return to a given page at some later date, but don’t have a good method of saving those for later or remembering to return. On mobile, that’s solved reasonably well with apps like Instapaper and Pocket. But on desktop, that problem doesn’t seem to be solved. Bookmarking systems can feel to heavy or permanent. And if you have been around a while, you know bookmarking apps tend to come and go (ie Delicious and Kippt).

Tabs (and I love them) are a poor solution to the horrible state-management challenge of browsers.

What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session.

What I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and/or making noise.

That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk.

Browser history isn't it either: it's too comprehensive, is insufficiently contextualized, doesn't record context (other than, maybe, relative time). On mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page was. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content (though as I glance up at my browser's window title I see that HN is actually pretty good for this).

There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with which you're currently working open in front of you.

I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration.

You might be looking for the Tabs Outliner Extension for Chrome. I've been using it heavily for the "middle-state" of saved and not open, but not bookmarked; now I'm looking for a "meta Tabs Outliner"-esque program, but I can't quite articulate my needs...

> What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session.

Tabs Outliner puts every tab as a leaf in a tree, and you can nest leaves and affect the visual ordering on the tab bar at the same time - you can also do this reordering while the tab isn't even open! This is good for a while, but for me when I have thousands, it's lacking in some retrieval sense: I guess I want to query for just these tabs that have connections, and cross-reference research annotations on these sets of connections.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjcrfKjobY

Hrm....

My first impression on watching this is that it's not quite what I'm looking for (tabs open, list grows, they stay loaded) ... but the ability to close tabs then re-access them looks promising.

The outline part is useful.

OK, this might actually be helpful.

The labeling feature would be handier if I could tag/label sets of tabs.

I'm giving this a shot.

Thanks!

> The labeling feature would be handier if I could tag/label sets of tabs.

You can! Instead of tagging each tab, you can rename the containing window's "Window" text, as if it was a manilla folder. Windows can also be contained in (named) Groups, allowing for hierarchical categories. Bottom-up tags can be accomplished by adding a note as a tag (I like using #hashtags to differentiate from plain text). In terms of retrievability, Ctrl+F doesn't discriminate!

> the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk.

I forgot to mention a workflow video for that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvlK1ttZ3dI

The dev has mentioned elsewhere that this extension is not (yet) designed to organize, but rather to get a handle on the tens/hundreds/thousands of tabs one may have open. It's done it so well that I have a lot of ad-hoc 'fuzzy' categories and random notes inside my outline I would love to be able to manipulate and build into a grand scheme or other. To use an analogy, it's like a great grafter/sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff, but there's no cooking oven.

Yeah, I'm learning.

I'll still say this wasn't quite what I had in mind, but it may well be good enough in terms of tabs management (there's still the content presentation, but that's another story).

I've been watching the vids, and they're really helpful.

I've given this tool mention on my subreddit (comment so far, story likely to follow) and on G+. After tabbed browsing and competing with vimperator, probably the biggest revolution in browsing I've encountered in 17+ years.

http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...

https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/B43j...

I wish tabs were truly first-class citizens in the modern browser. I'd like to be able to select with shift and command, just like files, a subset of tabs to transfer to a new window, the ability to save and restore tab environments by name, perhaps even email an entire window of tabs to another user.

I can do all those things in Firefox with the extensions Tree Style Tabs, Tab Mix Plus and Multiple Tab Handler. Hard to say which extension does what.

Using the "Windows" sidebar of Opera 12 and its session management you can literally do all of those things. It could do these years ago out of the box, no plugins needed.

You can even sort and search if like me you have far too many tabs open.

You can actually select multiple tabs with shift, and transfer them to a new window, in Chrome.

Chrom(e|ium) can do some of these things! You can use shift and control clicks just like in a file browser to select tabs, then drag the whole selection to another window, or off to the side to create a new one. Easily movable tabs + a tiling WM makes it surprisingly easy to keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open (very useful when you're trying to research multiple topics in depth at the same time).

It's my #1 most missed feature in Firefox, where you can move tabs individually between windows, but not in a group. Trying to split off a group of related tabs into its own window is so painful that I often just kill them all and manually navigate back to them in the new window. It's a shame that they wasted so much effort on the Tab Group feature just to abandon it, instead of adding a tiny bit of functionality to the existing tab interface.

Wow you can! It would be nice if there were keyboard shortcuts for it.

AFAICT, the Chrome multiple tab drag to separate into a new window doesn't work on Mac OS X, only on Windows (and Linux?). This one really hurts me every time I need it on the Mac.

What's even more frustrating is that multiple tab select works (at least, UI-wise it appears to), but then when you actually drag the tabs out only one comes along.

You are also still able to close multiple tabs at once. Besides selecting, I think that's all you can do.

Whoa. I might have to switch back to chrome. I had no idea.

I am not finding multiple-tab support via shift or control click on my browser (Chromium 33.0.1750.152 Debian jessie/sid).

This doesn't impress me. Tabs as an organizational concept have been around for a century, and they were most frequently used to organize sheets of paper. Of course they'll get used to organize web_pages_ as well. I see the "invention" of the browser tab as a totally obvious and inevitable porting of a particular technology to a related field.

The guy who "invented" the mobile phone keyboard did not do anything special by realizing that you could apply a keyboard to a small computer, and similarly, the guy who realized that you can organize digital pages with digital tabs didn't do anything special either.

> I see the "invention" of the browser tab as a totally obvious

Anyone could have done it but nobody did except that guy.

Tabs should be a mechanism of the windowing system and not of the web-browser or other specific applications, IMO.

Agreed, application-level tab support is a short term win. I wouldn't want to use a browser without them, but i would rather it was all a well thought out part of my main interface.

For my money the person who invented middle click opening things in a new tab without switching focus was the significant one.

I find the timeline a bit murky- I could have sworn I was relying on tabbed browsing in Mozilla m12 in 1999- http://beta.slashdot.org/story/8938, it was the single feature that caused me to switch.

The 1995 date in the article definitely preceeds 1999, but the path to getting it into Mozilla does not seem correct.

I just checked Archive.org, to see what the dates were on one of my old toys.

I wrote a wrapper for the IE control, using an MDI interface, somewhere between 1999 and 2000. Though it didn't use tabs it was the first time I'd seen multiple documents in a single process.

Looks like I was late to the party! (Sadly the screenshot on the archived webpage is broken..)

The linked "directly responsible" more or less meets my memory - MultiZilla first, Mozilla main later. The MultiZilla site of the time confirms it, the history links point to a 2001 start which would make 2002 in Mozilla itself reasonable.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010603123052/http://multizilla....

I remember tabbed browsing showing up in either Galeon or Skipstone, well before Mozilla supported these. My recollection is that Opera actually supported the feature first. And though I thought it was earlier, the feature seems to have emerged around 2003, well after the date (1997) given in this article.

I wish his browser NetCaptor (why not NetCopter?) had ridden the wave of massive growth via tabbed browsing that got Firefox & Maxthon really big -- Adam deserved it.

(...I also wish Adam used our Epic Privacy Browser instead of Chrome :-(

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