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This extension makes me sad. Not that this extension isn't done well, but I think the existence of it, and that it's on top of HN reflects a sad state of UI in

This extension makes me sad. Not that this extension isn't done well, but I think the existence of it, and that it's on top of HN reflects a sad state of UI in our browsers. Let talk about tabs. The reason that tabs exists is because we don't want to switching between windows when we have multiple tabs open. But think about it, why are tabs any better? When I have about a dozen tabs opened on Chrome, all I can see is a tiny favicon. Any more than that I only see an (x). Firefox and Safari are a little better in that their tab bar scrolls, but still only slightly. The reasons we open multiple tabs is primarily for cross-referencing, and secondarily "preview", i.e. the intermediary state of article quality evaluation, the state between I-dont-want-to-open-this and I-want-to-save-this-for-reading-later, and/or I-like-it-so-much-I-want-to-bookmark-this-for-eternity. How are tabs, tab ordering, top sites, tab preview thumbnails, tree tabs and any of these incremental "improvements" on tabs going to help us do xref and eval articles? For cross referencing, I typically open one "root" page, and then drill down to the rest. For this use case, a hierarchical arrangement of pages is probably a good idea. An MRU and/or stack on top of that is even better because maintaining a tree traversal ordering in the head all the time is hard. Too bad FF took this one feature that doesn't scramble my thinking process away years ago. I know there's control tab, but that's not good enough because that's a "cross hierarchy" mechanism. As soon as I click on a tab that belongs to different "group", MRU is messed up. I really want MRU by groups. To address this, I need to address why I'd click on a different tab in the middle of xrefing a group of tabs. This is usually because I'm taking a break, so I press Cmd-T and introduce a new group. The problem with how tab orderings are typically done now is, what the break is over, I still have a bunch of "pages" opened waiting to be evaled, but I do want to get back to the previous grouping. How do I do that now? My tab bar is full of tabs in various different states now. To solve this problem, I can open a new window and put a new group there, but the problem is, the screen is not that large a laptop, and I frequently maximize my browser. So any extra windows are just going to be hidden in the back and I'll forget about them until a month later. I don't really need an actual side bar that takes up screen space all the time to show me the hierarchical relationships of tabs. I mean, it's only useful if MRU doesn't do what I want. I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like the 40 year-old GUI pattern just doesn't work for browsers anymore.

abtinf 9y ago
I use tabs as a todo list. For example on HN, I quickly open all the comment pages of headlines that look interesting. Tree-style tabs are excellent for this use case, especially because I can collapse the tree when I need to move onto another task.
veli_joza 9y ago
Vertical tabs in tree structure is currently the best way to use web, especially when you pair it with auto-unloading of inactive tabs. I'm also disappointed that nothing better appeared in last few years. Developers seem to be extremely conservative about UI. With WASM it seems that browsers will take over most of OS functionality and the UI is getting in the way. IMO we should ditch tabs, bookmarks and history. They all implement the same thing - a way to reach a place you've visited before. And they all require to be micromanaged in specific ways. The browser already knows which sites I've visited recently, and all the backtracking and branching I did. This information could be visualized as tree so that I can backtrack to any node and resume browsing on a new branch. The browser should also be doing memory management so that revisiting recent site is as fast as switching to another tab. And while we are at it, why not allow full text search across recently visited sites?
- posterboy 9y ago
  "the best" is an exageration. The web is named so for a reason: it's a graph, not strictly hierarchical. Which is rather difficult to represent in a list format. For wikipedia e.g. I really want to have a graph instead of a linear history view, in at least 2 dimensions: ordered by time of visit and connection to related articles. I'm kinda ashamed I never got around to make this in 10 years.
- wyuenho 9y ago
  > MO we should ditch tabs, bookmarks and history. They all implement the same thing - a way to reach a place you've visited before. And they all require to be micromanaged in specific ways. The browser already knows which sites I've visited recently, and all the backtracking and branching I did. This information could be visualized as tree so that I can backtrack to any node and resume browsing on a new branch. The browser should also be doing memory management so that revisiting recent site is as fast as switching to another tab. And while we are at it, why not allow full text search across recently visited sites? Yes! This! Essentially, something like Emacs's undo-tree, but representing the tree in a more compact form, using some variant of D3 or Graphviz's tree layout algorithm.

abtinf 9y ago

I use tabs as a todo list. For example on HN, I quickly open all the comment pages of headlines that look interesting. Tree-style tabs are excellent for this use case, especially because I can collapse the tree when I need to move onto another task.

veli_joza 9y ago

Vertical tabs in tree structure is currently the best way to use web, especially when you pair it with auto-unloading of inactive tabs. I'm also disappointed that nothing better appeared in last few years. Developers seem to be extremely conservative about UI. With WASM it seems that browsers will take over most of OS functionality and the UI is getting in the way. IMO we should ditch tabs, bookmarks and history. They all implement the same thing - a way to reach a place you've visited before. And they all require to be micromanaged in specific ways. The browser already knows which sites I've visited recently, and all the backtracking and branching I did. This information could be visualized as tree so that I can backtrack to any node and resume browsing on a new branch. The browser should also be doing memory management so that revisiting recent site is as fast as switching to another tab. And while we are at it, why not allow full text search across recently visited sites?

posterboy 9y ago
"the best" is an exageration. The web is named so for a reason: it's a graph, not strictly hierarchical. Which is rather difficult to represent in a list format. For wikipedia e.g. I really want to have a graph instead of a linear history view, in at least 2 dimensions: ordered by time of visit and connection to related articles. I'm kinda ashamed I never got around to make this in 10 years.
wyuenho 9y ago
> MO we should ditch tabs, bookmarks and history. They all implement the same thing - a way to reach a place you've visited before. And they all require to be micromanaged in specific ways. The browser already knows which sites I've visited recently, and all the backtracking and branching I did. This information could be visualized as tree so that I can backtrack to any node and resume browsing on a new branch. The browser should also be doing memory management so that revisiting recent site is as fast as switching to another tab. And while we are at it, why not allow full text search across recently visited sites? Yes! This! Essentially, something like Emacs's undo-tree, but representing the tree in a more compact form, using some variant of D3 or Graphviz's tree layout algorithm.