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For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up minimal s

For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up minimal space) and up to 10 or so other ones open. Once I have more than that many tabs open I can't see the tab titles anymore which frustrates me so I'll close some. I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.

Manishearth 9y ago
If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can also force this by typing `%` before the search term. Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
- seanwilson 9y ago
  > Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs? Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    It also searches URLs and in some cases fulltext.
    - seanwilson 9y ago
      Why does a tab need to be open for this though? For me, the point of open tabs is that I know what they contain and can switch between them quickly with a quick click. Having to search for them defeats their purpose.
      - Manishearth 9y ago
        In my case I don't have to search for them, they're pretty well organized by related topic. I can switch pretty quickly, and sometimes need to do a tab search when context switching to another task. The "tab search" is exactly the same effort as opening a new page, in fact, what often happens is I decide to switch to doing something else, and type in the URL bar for history search, and it tells me I already have tabs open for it (which means I also have existing state in those tabs), which is great. I usually know that there's a tab open, but my workflow is the same whether they are or aren't.
      - weaksauce 9y ago
        you might like a small webextension I made for firefox and chrome that displays all the tabs in a new tab grouped by window. click on one of the links and it will open up the window and focus on that tab. firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ open source here: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
- esMazer 9y ago
  vertical tabs ftw!
- reitanqild 9y ago
  Edit: found your answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286 pointing to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681 --- Hi Manishearth! I know you work at Mozilla. If you see this: Do you have anything to share WRT the possibility of having extensions like tree-style-tabs in future versions of FF? This is probably the one thing that leaves most Chrome users awe-struck and also is really really really useful to many of us.
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    Tree Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/) is the WebExtensions version of Tree Style Tabs. It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve. There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back) This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last. The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's one that's probably easy to add. The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.
Mithaldu 9y ago
I use a browser that handles the favicons like a sane person instead of the travesty Chrome perpetrates. http://i.imgur.com/XEXHXJB.png http://i.imgur.com/XEXHXJB.png
- pkamb 9y ago
  Chrome does that as well until you get to a particular number of tabs, at which point it does annoyingly hide the favicon. But it's so much better than the scrolling tab bar or hidden tabs that Safari promotes to keep each tab a minimum width.
Nullabillity 9y ago
Favicons.

Manishearth 9y ago

If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can also force this by typing `%` before the search term. Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.

seanwilson 9y ago
> Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs? Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
- kuschku 9y ago
  It also searches URLs and in some cases fulltext.
  - seanwilson 9y ago
    Why does a tab need to be open for this though? For me, the point of open tabs is that I know what they contain and can switch between them quickly with a quick click. Having to search for them defeats their purpose.
    - Manishearth 9y ago
      In my case I don't have to search for them, they're pretty well organized by related topic. I can switch pretty quickly, and sometimes need to do a tab search when context switching to another task. The "tab search" is exactly the same effort as opening a new page, in fact, what often happens is I decide to switch to doing something else, and type in the URL bar for history search, and it tells me I already have tabs open for it (which means I also have existing state in those tabs), which is great. I usually know that there's a tab open, but my workflow is the same whether they are or aren't.
    - weaksauce 9y ago
      you might like a small webextension I made for firefox and chrome that displays all the tabs in a new tab grouped by window. click on one of the links and it will open up the window and focus on that tab. firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ open source here: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
esMazer 9y ago
vertical tabs ftw!
reitanqild 9y ago
Edit: found your answer https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14850286 pointing to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681 --- Hi Manishearth! I know you work at Mozilla. If you see this: Do you have anything to share WRT the possibility of having extensions like tree-style-tabs in future versions of FF? This is probably the one thing that leaves most Chrome users awe-struck and also is really really really useful to many of us.
- Manishearth 9y ago
  Tree Tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/) is the WebExtensions version of Tree Style Tabs. It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve. There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back) This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last. The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's one that's probably easy to add. The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.

Mithaldu 9y ago

I use a browser that handles the favicons like a sane person instead of the travesty Chrome perpetrates. http://i.imgur.com/XEXHXJB.png http://i.imgur.com/XEXHXJB.png

pkamb 9y ago
Chrome does that as well until you get to a particular number of tabs, at which point it does annoyingly hide the favicon. But it's so much better than the scrolling tab bar or hidden tabs that Safari promotes to keep each tab a minimum width.

Nullabillity 9y ago

Favicons.