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I don’t understand how people browse the web without this extension. That’s the number one reason chrome is not usable for power users. I’m also wondering why t
by gamma-male 8y ago
I don’t understand how people browse the web without this extension. That’s the number one reason chrome is not usable for power users. I’m also wondering why this is not natively supported by both firefox and chrome.
- hbosch 8y agoTomato/tomato. I don’t understand how people browse the web with more than 4 or 5 tabs open at the same time.
- gamma-male 8y agoYou never have more than 5 tabs open at the same time? You’re probably the minority and you probably have learned to do that because the tabs on top put these constraints on you. You would likely browse the web very differently if you had TST. Give it a try.
- gbear605 8y agoI also work in this way. I use tabs as my “working memory” for whatever my current project is. Having fewer tabs helps keep me on track working on a single topic. When I’m done with that task, it helps me transition by having closed all the tabs. When I want to save pages in the long term, I use bookmarks.
- mclehman 8y agoI use TST to supplement my working memory. I'm usually working within a particular subtree of all my (way too many) tabs. I probably still have more tabs in such a subtree than most people, but the same idea applies: the subtree keeps my focus on a single topic, and when I finish I can either collapse the subtree (my default) or close it entirely. What I find invaluable is the super quick ramp-up after context switching, especially if whatever pulled me away turned out to be more work/time than expected.
- petepete 8y agoIt's odd that so many people confuse the roles of tabs and bookmarks. Perhaps it's a sign that the bookmark UX isn't good (or prevalent) enough. I generally have four pinned tabs open for email, Slack and Trello, plus another five related to what I'm working on.
- jehlakj 8y agoI disagree. It’s the poor history UX that’s the problem. Get rid of tabs altogether and show the history on the left side. Or if you like fuzzy searching, look them up in the extension store.
- petepete 8y agoMy history is too messy, I often flit to sites for a couple of seconds and backtrack. Tabs make lots of sense, windows let me organise them into groups of things I'm currently working on. That's all sensible. Anything I come across that I think might be useful to my future self, I bookmark it. Again, working with the provided functionality. Sensible. When people have 200 tabs open and can't remember what's where, that's what puzzles me. I've seen people flick through dozens of tabs looking for a piece of documentation they saw yesterday afternoon. We already have the tools that make browsing and researching efficient. People just need to learn to use them.
- jehlakj 8y agoI’ve been using an extension that orders tabs by MRU and it has my history baked in. I don’t even use tabs anymore on my text editors as I found that it’s unnecessary if you have fuzzy searching that lists the files in MRU order as suggestions. The problem with bookmarks for most of us is that users don’t typically manage their bookmarks and delete the links they don’t need.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jplayer01 8y agoI'm not confusing anything. Tabs let me switch to different projects incredibly quickly. Bookmarks just don't work.
- seqizz 8y agoThat's a habit. I've been using TST for some time and this "no useless tabs" policy in my brain will not seem to change.
- gergi 8y agoThe minority on HN, maybe. Definitely not to the general public. The general user is almost certainly not using more than 1 tab at any time.
- kakarot 8y agoI have about 400-500 open tabs spread between three browsers on three systems which I'm using simultaneously. At least on my phone, Firefox Focus has helped immensely.
- gitgud 8y agoWhy though? Is it all in the same context? I can't stand 10's of tabs let alone 100's!!
- kakarot 8y agoEach instance of firefox has its own context. One is unsafe browsing, one is personal browsing, one is development-related browsing, a la Qubes. I used to have a problem with messy, unnavigable bookmarks so now I keep my bookmarks lean and rely on tabs to hold pages I may only need for a month or two at most. It's pretty quick to navigate to a tab with Ctrl+L
- mthoms 8y agoHow do you create different "instances" of Firefox on the desktop? Or are you just talking about different windows?
- kakarot 8y agoI run a hypervisor OS and all of my work is done in contextual VMs, which each run their own instance of Firefox.
- qu4z-2 8y agoYou can also run multiple profiles in parallel, using something like firefox --no-remote --profile-manager I have that as an alias in bash, and a shortcut on my Windows desktop.
- weaksauce 8y agonot sure if you are looking for one but I have an extension that I wrote because I am similar to you and always had a hard time finding the tab I wanted. You might find it useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/ Source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
- TylerE 8y agoand I don't understand how people have more than about 10 tabs and stay sane. Do you people like... not use bookmarks at all? Heck, most of the sites I visit on anything like a regular basis I only need to type in the first letter or two and they auto-complete.
- gamma-male 8y agoWe use TST :)
- wvenable 8y agoIt's highly difficult on chrome. On Firefox, I use a userChrome.css hack to give me multi-row tabs (which was an old Firefox extension). I have 49 tabs open right now over 3 rows and I can easily read most of the titles on them. I have never been able to use Chrome effectively because my browsing habits are so tied to being able see many tabs open at once. I almost always open links by opening them in a new tab and I always open a new tab when starting something new.
- ech000 8y agoSame here. The URL bar matches quite good most of the time, so it's more an omni-bar. If I need something, I type it in and it suggests me the page. Having the tab open will suggest me that tab. But having so many tabs open makes the tab UI useless, so I prefer to close them.
- krzyk 8y agoBookmark is for something that I want to be saved forever, tab is something that I want to read now or soon.
- piyush_soni 8y agoIt's normal for me to have 100 or more tabs. Bookmarks are for more permanent sites - that I know I'll probably have to access multiple times later. If it's just a one time thing, it doesn't deserve to be a bookmark. At the most, it can be a 'ReadItLater' (Pocket) thing. I use Containers and Tab Groups extensively.
- INTPenis 8y agoConsidering that pretty much all browser based exploits use JS I'd say the number one reason chrome is not usable for power users is that it used to not be able to block JS without loading it first. At least this was the case last I checked, haven't really bothered with chrome's technology since its popularity soared ~6 years ago and all my friends started switching to it. Even if this is fixed it will always be my major sore point about that browser.
- jchw 8y agoAre JS-based exploits a real threat anymore? Even if you do find an exploit, it looks to be an uphill battle, because you still have layers of security to break through, and they're going to differ by target OS and browser. Even on platforms where things are fairly predictable, like say game consoles, the exploits look complicated and are often not very reliable. Even in Firefox where the security story is still not quite as far along, I still am not really concerned about JS exploits. And most people now run browsers that automatically update. Few parties are going to spend that much money just for it to only be useful for a limited number of targets. Now that Flash Player and ActiveX are pretty much gone from desktop browsers for most users, I feel the game has changed. People now need to be much more concerned with phishing, XSS, and other flaws. Social engineering is probably more of a threat to the general public than browser exploits. (I do use firejail to sandbox my Firefox instance from the rest of my machine, but that's more a layer of last defense, and doesn't really prevent too much.)
- rgoulter 8y agoI'd guess episodic and spacial memory help. All the tabs I'm likely to access together are close together, & were opened at similar times. (So, you can remember what the page was about without needing the full title to associate the tab with the contents). I probably wouldn't have more than window-width of tabs open at once in a single window, and no more than 2-3 windows open at once. A tree is a nicer structure for the "where did I open this from", though; especially if the screen space is available.
- barryhoodlum 8y agoI don't know how people live with the mental burden and clutter of dozens of tabs of things they'll (if they were honest with themselves) never get around to reading. It's like watching one of those TV shows about hoarding, where people live in a rabbit warren of junk they claim they'll use one day.
- stinos 8y agoThey just don't see it as a burden and/or are maybe not too honest with themselves ('yeah but I will read it later'). That being said: there are other uses for TST, can replace bookmarks etc.
- blfr 8y agoThis is true and always alarming to see on someone's monitor but TST makes browsing better even if you don't have hundreds of tabs. Whenever I'm researching or buying something, having tabs ordered in the parent/child tree makes finding things and going back to listings or indexes much easier and the general experience much more pleasant. I heard a theory somewhere that the reason people use their smartphones for everything nowadays is because they never used the potential of their laptops/desktops and don't see much difference in usability. Things like TST show you how much more efficient you can be on a real computer.
- keypress 8y agoCertainly alarming to see. Mine build up, I keep them for a few weeks, bookmark a few, and burn the lot periodically - which suggests I shouldn't have bothered with them in the first place. My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data wrangle. I have decided I'm just going to write a system where I paste the address/or use a bookmarklet, and insist on small text or context and/or the ability to tag and group. But it must be a simple and cross-browser/system. The most annoying thing about bookmark managers is presentation.
- addicted 8y ago
- stinos 8y agoI don’t understand how people browse the web without this extension Using tab groups ('Panorama View' or 'Tab Stash' extensions etc) instead, for instance? I do like to add some organization to tabs, order by topic etc, but I personally never really saw value (yet perhaps, we'll see) in having a tree for that, 1 level seems sufficient for me. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of TST users actuallt use it with just 1 level deep as well.
- jplayer01 8y agoTST is mainly about having vertical tabs. Grouping and nesting them can be useful.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- zanny 8y agoAccordion my current workload (currently have about ~20 tabs). Anything that gets stuck for a while gets bookmarked, and I generally go through and close unnecessary garbage in the morning.
- franga2000 8y agoWhat I do is "simply" have a bunch of separate windows open on multiple virtual desktops (and 3 physical monitors). It's effectively the same hierarchy, just with only 2 levels (3 if you count virtual desktops) and I find I generally don't need more than that. Another thing that helps with tab-hoarding is a clever userCSS hack (from someone on Reddit) that puts my tabs into multiple rows so I can still read their titles, even if I have 20+ in one window. As for why it's not supported out-of-the-box, to put it a bit harshly, deep hierarchies scare "the normies". I find that more than 2-3 levels of trees are too much to remember for most people (hence the cluttered desktops and "bucket" folders).