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"We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online li

"We need a way to organize browsing, to see all of our tabs at once, and focus on the task at hand. In short, we need a way to get back control of our online lives." Will power? Priorities? Reducing friction or eliminating annoyances is not always a good thing, and may not accomplish what you want. Worse, it may give you undesirable side-effects. For example, people complain about freeway traffic, how it takes too long to drive from your home at X to shopping at Y. So city planners go off and widen existing freeways, and maybe build new ones. For a while things are great; little traffic, and it's easy to get around. Before too long, though, you find that traffic is no better than it was before. But there's lots of new housing construction in your area. Seems the promise of easy access encouraged people to keep living far out from the city. You still have bad traffic, plus more people, and worse air quality. Had there been no attempt to reduce the friction of traffic there would likely be incentives to drive less often and fewer miles. There would be more opportunity for stores opening up closer to where you live; more locally businesses would thrive. Likewise, maybe the annoyance of managing large numbers of tabs is a good thing. It's a reminder that maybe you're getting carried away and need to adjust your focus. (Raise your hand if you've ever been silently relieved when a tab-heavy browser crashed and you couldn't recover them.)

dekz 16y ago
"Probably didn't need to read those 50 tabs of reddit anyway before my exam"
abp 16y ago
Will power? Priorities? Likewise, maybe the annoyance of managing large numbers of tabs is a good thing. It's a reminder that maybe you're getting carried away and need to adjust your focus. What does these three(will power, priorities, focus) help you with information organization? With this thing i actually can, for example, map a plan of a learning trial and resources therefor into a priotized tree structure. Thats to nice. Any external management of that gets obsolete. A step further this could be the exobrain on steroids. Other people are using personal wikis for such things, for example. Here you get graphs(later probably even mindmaps) with screencaps for free (while wiki users need tools for graphing into images or the like). Also, writing little conclusions on nodes you've covered aren't impossible. Don't think about the possible problems, think about the possibilities and advantages. With your points(will power, priorities, focus) you can then easiliý archieve the latter two. Just to admit, I've thought about something similiar for Google Chrome for a while now. My thougts just weren't gone so far, until now. But basically I was thinking and sketching in the same direction. :)
- jamesbritt 16y ago
  Part of my point is that not everything is worth doing (or worth doing much), and making those things easier to do just makes it easier to do things not worth doing. "What does these three(will power, priorities, focus) help you with information organization?" Maybe the things being organized aren't the things you should be focusing on. Perhaps your focus should be elsewhere, your priorities different. If not, then yes, better tools for organization are a win. I'm just glad there is friction to doing certain things that are often just not that important, like endless Web surfing.
peng 16y ago
Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done. Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a non-problem.
- chrisbolt 16y ago
  Open a new window, drag any existing tabs into that window. The solution already exists.
- mbrubeck 16y ago
  "Not a problem for me" is not the same thing as "not a problem." People's browsing habits differ. Some of us do use multiple windows and tabs so we can switch our focus away from a task and return to it later. Mozilla's user studies and large-scale data mining through Test Pilot bear this out, e.g. http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505 http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505 - among other things, that analysis of several thousand Firefox users found that tab opening/closing behavior among the participants followed a bimodal distribution.
- yxhuvud 16y ago
  counts open tabs 43. It would be horrible to manage without any grouping mechanism and hierarchical organisation. Thanks Tab Kit.

dekz 16y ago

"Probably didn't need to read those 50 tabs of reddit anyway before my exam"

abp 16y ago

Will power? Priorities? Likewise, maybe the annoyance of managing large numbers of tabs is a good thing. It's a reminder that maybe you're getting carried away and need to adjust your focus. What does these three(will power, priorities, focus) help you with information organization? With this thing i actually can, for example, map a plan of a learning trial and resources therefor into a priotized tree structure. Thats to nice. Any external management of that gets obsolete. A step further this could be the exobrain on steroids. Other people are using personal wikis for such things, for example. Here you get graphs(later probably even mindmaps) with screencaps for free (while wiki users need tools for graphing into images or the like). Also, writing little conclusions on nodes you've covered aren't impossible. Don't think about the possible problems, think about the possibilities and advantages. With your points(will power, priorities, focus) you can then easiliý archieve the latter two. Just to admit, I've thought about something similiar for Google Chrome for a while now. My thougts just weren't gone so far, until now. But basically I was thinking and sketching in the same direction. :)

jamesbritt 16y ago
Part of my point is that not everything is worth doing (or worth doing much), and making those things easier to do just makes it easier to do things not worth doing. "What does these three(will power, priorities, focus) help you with information organization?" Maybe the things being organized aren't the things you should be focusing on. Perhaps your focus should be elsewhere, your priorities different. If not, then yes, better tools for organization are a win. I'm just glad there is friction to doing certain things that are often just not that important, like endless Web surfing.

peng 16y ago

Too many tabs has never been an issue for me. Can anyone actually read more than one tab at once? If you're thinking of buying a DSLR, then focus on researching cameras. Close those tabs when you're done. Exercise restraint, guys. Tab grouping is the classic engineer's solution to a non-problem.

chrisbolt 16y ago
Open a new window, drag any existing tabs into that window. The solution already exists.
mbrubeck 16y ago
"Not a problem for me" is not the same thing as "not a problem." People's browsing habits differ. Some of us do use multiple windows and tabs so we can switch our focus away from a task and return to it later. Mozilla's user studies and large-scale data mining through Test Pilot bear this out, e.g. http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505 http://surfmind.com/muzings/?p=505 - among other things, that analysis of several thousand Firefox users found that tab opening/closing behavior among the participants followed a bimodal distribution.
yxhuvud 16y ago
counts open tabs 43. It would be horrible to manage without any grouping mechanism and hierarchical organisation. Thanks Tab Kit.