In terms of UI stuff, how do you find a tab among a thousand?
When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.
When the tab page title shrinks and all I see is favicon, I feel lost.
Also in Firefox the tabs never shrink to just favicon, the tab heads become a scrollable list. Much better than Chrome imo.
I'm quite comfortable with a tab group filled to the point where the tab bar only displays favicons, but hasn't gotten to the point where it lets me scroll yet. That way I can rely on spatial memory to get to the right tab, without necessarily seeing the title!
Of course, searching for the right tab is an option, just like you said. I love the fact that Firefox also activates the correct tab group automatically.
I use buffers (in Conkeror). Buffers are just tabs without the actual tab UI. So unless I'm switching buffers, the only visible UI difference between having one buffer and 2000 buffers is the string "[2011/2011]" in my status-line showing my current buffer number and total number of buffers.
I can press C-x b (switch-to-buffer, I bind to M-a) to show a filterable list of my current buffers (favicon, url, title). I can type part of the url or page title (even when tab is unloaded) to filter my buffer list before switching to one. I can also navigate tabs "spatially" (from tab #2 to either tab #1 or #3) or by recently used (bury/unbury-buffer or switch-to-recent-buffer which shows buffer list in most recently used order) or by domain (next-buffer-same-host) or by whether the buffer is playing audio (switch-to-audio-buffer).
Also, in the vast majority of cases I only access recent tabs near the end of the list. I can press 9 or 0 to go to my second-to-last or last buffer.
And I can always switch to a different wm altogether if I'm not comfortable.
Obviously you can easily achieve the same thing in separate windows as well, so ultimately I suppose it doesn't make a huge difference, but it's the way I find makes for the biggest difference in separating workspaces.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
It allows you to use your tab-list in a hierarchical way, sort of like a filesystem. I group things under obvious roots, and then collapse it till needed.