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I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces". For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of
by atombender 9y ago
I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces".
For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while.
I feel like many "dozens of tabs" windows are little projects like this. For example, doing development I typically have a bunch of documentation tabs open. We keep these windows open because there's no way to stash them into a drawer while they're not actively being worked on.
What browsers lack is a good way to treat these tabs as "persistent workspaces". I'd like to be able to close a window and be able to return to it later. Rather like an IDE which remembers your open files. So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name, after which every action would automatically update the saved workspace. Close the window, workspace stays saved. Open the workspace, everything is restored.
There are some browser extensions that allow saving groups of tabs, but there aren't any that behave like I described above.
- hossbeast 9y agoIt's time to deprecate bookmarks in browsers, and add workspaces.
- gboudrias 9y agoDon't touch my bookmarks! I have all my tabs in my headspace at all times, I need bookmarks to mentally organize my stuff in the short-term/long-term category. If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly. Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- Hadley434 9y agoI get paid over $90 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I'd be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I've been doing, ------------>http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ http://ow.ly/iBXm30dNtIZ
- kbenson 9y agoMerge, not replace. If there's a special bookmark group that dynamically contains current tabs, then you have the best of both. Let a group of tabs be a bookmark folder that has the "show" attribute set, and so dynamically tracks what is shown. Want to show all tabs in a group/folder? Toggle show.
- bigbugbag 9y agoBookmarks sucks ! link rot makes them useless and it's time consuming and tedious if not impossible to manage when you have a lot of them. I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.
- joonoro 9y agoFirefox used to have this feature, but it was removed. You need to install this extension now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-panorama/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...
- lobster_johnson 9y agoAre the "groups" persistent and tied to the window? So if you change the tabs around, close the window, then "open" the group again, you will get exactly what you had?
- yardshop 9y agoThey are persistent, but I don't think they are tied to a window (I mainly just use one). But your groups are kept as you left them after restarting. I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups. I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs. I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother. Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.
- bigbugbag 9y agoLast time I tried the groups that were opened when quitting firefox would reopen at next launch but you could not "reopen" a closed group. Having more than one window was asking for trouble as in risking losing all your groups and tabs because there another firefox window opened in the background or the downthemall manager window when you closed the main firefox windows. Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty. Best bet is to manually save your session at times.
- nxc18 9y agoEdge has this since Creators update. Unfortunately, Edge is pretty bad in ways that actually matter (UI responsiveness, reliability).
- confounded 9y agoFolders of bookmarks?
- lobster_johnson 9y agoRequires automatic two-way syncing. Browsers have, for a long time, supported restoring a bookmark folder into a window as tabs. But if you then change the tabs, the bookmarks aren't automatically updated. This is one of the missing pieces.
- jeltz 9y agoAdditionally opening a bookmark fold as tabs does not support lazy loading so it will bog down your computer when you open all the bookmarks.
- Tomis02 9y agoYou had all that in the old Opera browser, but people liked slower and more resource-consuming alternatives better.
- spronkey 9y agoI miss Opera 12 so much :'(
- kronos29296 9y agoOpera was a damn fine browser. Used it upto version 12 from version 6 onwards. IE sucked during those days. All those widgets that nobody knew about. Opera was too ahead of its times and now it has moved to chromium which is really bad.
- jcrben 9y agoI'm pretty happy with OneTab https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/
- pacomerh 9y agoyes, OneTab is the thing! No need to have a million tabs open. It also lets you export the links as text
- Clamhead 9y agoWow, that's freaking awesome. Definitely using this from now on. Thanks!
- imcoconut 9y agosame, has helped tremendously
- vidyesh 9y agoI just want one feature added to it, the ability to just add one tab instead of all open tabs.
- lysium 9y agoRight click on the page, select "only this tab to one tab"
- bigbugbag 9y agoThanks ! did not know about this one. It lacks the ability to sort tabs by activity and is messy when you have 150+ tabs over 20 activities, also lack the visual preview of tab content but it's still useful.
- magoon 9y agoCan you just open a new window as a "workspace" and have tabs within that window?
- granitosaurus 9y agoThat's the most obvious and sane solution. Browser shouldn't aim to be it's own OS - keep it simple.
- chuckdries 9y agoThis functionality exists with bookmarks. FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder. It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs" This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger
- bigbugbag 9y agoBut you lose the state the tabs were in, which means risk of losing hours of work and tedious work to restore each state. Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoNot the same thing. The behaviour isn't "persistent": If you add or remove tabs to the window, the bookmark folder isn't automatically updated. Re-bookmarking every time you make a change isn't an option. You also lose state (history, forms, scroll position).
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- SomewhatLikely 9y agoIn Chrome you can "Bookmark all tabs" by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D or right clicking any tab and choosing that option. Then just close the window and when you want to bring them back later, in the bookmark tree you can right click a folder and say "open all tabs in a new window".
- visarga 9y agoThey all reload, which is not ideal.
- tmbsundar 9y agoAlso, they allow duplicates I guess.
- lobster_johnson 9y agoNot the same thing. The behaviour isn't "persistent": If you add or remove tabs to the window, the bookmark folder isn't automatically updated. Re-bookmarking every time you make a change isn't an option. You also lose state (history, forms, scroll position).
- bhnmmhmd 9y ago"Session Buddy" on Chrome has been really useful for me. It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation) https://sessionbuddy.com/ https://sessionbuddy.com/
- kronos29296 9y agoI use onetab though it only saves the tabs and can only be exported as plain text but it fills all my needs.
- fapjacks 9y agoI used to be a big OneTab user, but Session Buddy really is a lot better for reviewing, saving, loading, and editing your windows and sessions. If you've never used it, I'd recommend giving it a try.
- Natanael_L 9y agoSession Manager does the same for Firefox (not sure if it's been ported to the new addon model)
- beefsack 9y agoAlong the lines of your analogy, I wouldn't have papers strewn all over the desk, I'd have them in a pile or in a folder. Reversing the analogy I feel this is similar to using bookmarks or saving a list of links.
- ehnto 9y agoI use separate browser windows across actual Ubuntu/centos work spaces to separate ny contexts. My project context has a chrome window with all my task related tabs, my terminal window and my IDE. My communication context has my tickets, slack and other communications in it. Then there is one more context with podcasts, spotify or non project docs and reading. It wasn't something I set out to achieve either, it just happened naturally once I started using shortcut keys to switch between workspaces.
- davchana 9y agoI use the one called Session Buddy. It allows to save all tabs in one chrome window as one session, and allows you to open all those anytime, as well as to export as html. Also, autosave session just like Microsoft office autosave function. I will post link from pc in few hours. Not related anyway except as happy user
- usrusr 9y ago> So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming. Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- emiliobumachar 9y agoI speculate that general-purpuse virtual machine management software would fit the bill quite well
- michaelmior 9y agoHow would this help with the scenario described by the OP? Are you suggesting starting a new virtual machine instead of a new browser window?
- emiliobumachar 9y agoYes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. VMs can be named, saved and loaded straightforwardly.
- michaelmior 9y agoThat's massive overhead for managing a set of tabs which is exactly what Firefox is trying to avoid.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- j45 9y agoThe built in spaces feature of Firefox was quite good for making multiple desktops for different projects. It was still in Firefox the last time I checked.
- yoz-y 9y agoI've been trying to work like this but I just can't. So far I found no way of actually confining each activity into its own window. Mainly because opening a new page from an external applications opens it in a seemingly random opened window. I finally abandoned the idea and just use tab searching extension
- rachkovsky 9y agoI'm using zeerka.com for exactly that: research projects that are saved as groups of links. And it's browser agnostic.
- Lepole 9y agoHey, great idea ! I'm just use Firefox in the same way. Here i couldn't say thé fox is finnish. On linux it's thé best.