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I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use Firefox (or any other browser) like that. I'm still waiting for a better UX on this u

I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use Firefox (or any other browser) like that. I'm still waiting for a better UX on this use case. Bookmarks are hidden behind menus and require some work to organize and sort them: it's easier to leave an open tab in plain sight that reminds me to eventually read it and decide whether to close it or save it as a useful resource. Last actual improvement I noticed was when Firefox stopped fully reloading every tab in session restoration. Any actual research on user-friendly UX to manage and organize lots of potentially useful urls ?

nicoburns 8y ago
I use the Simple Tab Groups plugin for this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... It allows you to move tabs into named groups. Only tabs from the active group are shown in the tab bar, and you can switch between groups using an icon in the toolbar.
- saidajigumi 8y ago
  As a pre-Quantum Tab Groups user, I find that Simple Tab Groups is considerably more stable and has a slightly better UX than the old support. So A+ for that. I still feel like there's some missing "secret sauce" here, but I haven't had the time to really delve into the problem to suss out what that might be. I do love that tab groups are malleable to the user's concept of organization, not some artificial notion such as grouping by website.
  - albru123 8y ago
    Unfortunately Simple Tab Groups (or maybe some internal feature it uses, probably hidden tabs) somehow leak resources and end up eating all the RAM for me. The end of Panorama (or Tab Groups as known nowdays) was a disaster for me, as I don't hesitate having over 3k tabs open.
    - nevster 8y ago
      Is Simple Tab Groups the current best replacement option? I still haven't upgraded from FF56!
      - qiemem 8y ago
        I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-... and have been really happy with it.
      - Vinnl 8y ago
        There's also Panorama view: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
      - nicoburns 8y ago
        IMO yes, and I've tried a few. It's only really now that the new tab group plugins have reached parity with the FF56 versions, but they have done :)
      - executesorder66 8y ago
        You can also try https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/conex/ https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/conex/ Works similar to tab groups, but each group is in it's own container.
    - nexxer 8y ago
      I've been using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sync-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sync-tab-grou... for hundreds of tabs. When I open up a tab group with many tabs in it, the extension loads all of them up (snoozed) in a way that takes a little bit of time to complete, but it works well.
CharlesW 8y ago
> I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use Firefox (or any other browser) like that. I'm surprised nobody's taken a cue from Apple's Stacks[1] to automatically group them by source. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209101 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209101
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  Tree Style Tab[0] automatically builds a tree of which tab opened which, and allows you to hide stuff based on that. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - Tallain 8y ago
    I use this add-on and it's great. My overall tab count has only risen a very small amount since I adopted this tool and I feel like I actually "work through" the open tabs in a more timely manner. It helps to see something like "(4)" to denote Child Tabs, and to know I have a bunch of Stuff waiting for me to sort through.
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  As long as they don't make it unchangeable. Of all the tab management systems I've tried, none of the automatic sorting mechanisms have worked for me as well as manual tab management. I like overflowing tabs into multiple rows, ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn to go left or right, and ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab (with the ability to hold ctrl and keep tapping to skip to the next tab without counting intermediaries as visited), and I've never gotten that from any browser but Firefox (and I think Opera in the past).
ianbicking 8y ago
One of the Test Pilot attempts in this area was Snooze Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ The engagement on that experiment wasn't very high, but I later went and read some of the user research and felt like there was some unmet potential: the concept was understandable, the functionality matched at least some real use cases, but it still didn't work, people didn't use it. Obviously Pocket is intended for this purpose as well. It's personally what I use for this purpose, though there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. If you make it easier to save the tab, there will always still be a point when you aren't sure if you want to save it or not... As far as I'm aware Mozilla hasn't done deep-dive research into tabs. Not all of our research is public, but we do post a public index of the research: https://firefoxur.github.io/ https://firefoxur.github.io/
- joombaga 8y ago
  > there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. It feels like that's the state I'm in with regard to most tabs. It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical. It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.
  - ianbicking 8y ago
    One user research task is often to give names to ideas that we don't otherwise know how to describe. Like in bookmark research they distinguish between bookmarks that represent something you saved, vs. bookmarks that represent some navigational shortcut you are creating for yourself. For tabs, I can imagine different ways of thinking about them: 1. An activity you have to complete. Or start. 2. A piece of information you think you may need to be aware of. 3. Something that interests you, but you are leaving for when you are in some particular state of mind (e.g., ready to read something long and involved). 4. Something shared with you, that you feel obliged to respond to. 5. One of a set of things that represents some pending task. 6. Something information you may need to revisit. Or you may have finished it, but it's yet to be "garbage collected". MDN pages usually fall in this category for me – I'll quickly come back a couple times to the page, but I only know I'm "finished" because I don't come back. So it sits there. And for each of these there's the state of "maybe". Maybe I'll need this. Maybe I'll need to be aware of this. Maybe I should reply to my friend about this.
vthriller 8y ago
One of my use cases for long-living tabs is short-living content: pretty often I have a time to take a quick look at it but not to dive deeply nor to stash it (preferably in HTML or something that's just friendlier to grep than quick screenshots). For quite some time I'm reminding myself, among other things, to look into why Ctrl-S in browsers sometimes initiates redownloads that result in pages with comments that differ from what I see in the browser at the same time.
Wowfunhappy 8y ago
I'm kind of amazed desktop browsers don't "pause" tabs when you open more than a set amount (a la mobile browsers). It seems like an obvious enhancement. If a user only has ten tabs open, pausing them would probably be a bad idea in most cases. However, if a user has 100 tabs open, they almost certainly don't need to have the oldest ones running the background.
- tdy_err 8y ago
  Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me. The Great Suspender uses this approach.
  - reificator 8y ago
    > Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me. The two exceptions are audio (including backgrounded video) and messaging/notifications.
    - NoodleIncident 8y ago
      If I want notifications from a tab, I pin it. I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active", and it's always on the tab bar no matter how far you scroll. So for my use case at least, the suspender just has to not suspend any pinned tabs.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - lowercased 8y ago
        > I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active" Just not... around. Routinely, after both clean shutdowns and system crashes, firefox just loses all my pinned tabs. It's the primary thing that keeps me from using firefox as a default all the time. There's weird 'restore last session' and folder searching you can do to try to maybe 'recover' some, sometimes, but... WTH? I'm pinning things - I want them around. If I didn't want them restored on browser launch, I wouldn't 'pin' them. Unless pinning is intended to be transitory, and I just missed the memo?
tempguy9999 8y ago
"you are about to open 2,800 tabs, this may take some time, are you sure you want to continue?" Or a similar message I got a few days ago. Been spending time cleaning them up. Yep, I open a lot of tabs. I'd long ago have run out of memory but I never enable JScript, which seems to be what eats memory (palemoon on windows FYI).
- ddoolin 8y ago
  I don't know if you meant JavaScript or not, but JScript is an actual thing that is (somewhat) separate from JavaScript, commonly abbreviated as JS.
  - gpm 8y ago
    > A lot of people think that JScript and JavaScript are different but similar languages. That's not the case. They are just different names for the same language, and the reason the names are different was to get around trademark issues. Douglas Crockford via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
    - ddoolin 8y ago
      Yes, and the following paragraph goes on to note differences and even calls his statement "not completely true". At one point it may have been more true than it is now.
  - tempguy9999 8y ago
    I genuinely did not know that! I've always presumed JS = JScript = JavasSript = ECMAscript. Hmm. In this case I meant the native scripting in palemoon (which is an FX fork I believe).
lostphilosopher 8y ago
Pocket is what I use for this: https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/ (Unaffiliated, just a user.)
- flippant 8y ago
  Pocket still isn't open source after being acquired by Mozilla two years ago.
weaksauce 8y ago
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/ also chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... Source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
LandR 8y ago
I use tree style tab along with tab suspender.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jeremysalwen 8y ago
I use tree style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) unfortunately it's a bit buggy sometimes, I think the original wasn't but it was rewritten for the switch to the web extensions api.
- lousken 8y ago
  only time tree style tabs were buggy for me in last 6 months was when i implemented css changes (to remove tabs from above the address bar)
- frosted-flakes 8y ago
  I prefer Tab Center Redux[1] Even though it has fewer features, it's very polished and reliable. Besides, I found tab hierarchies to be very "messy" in practice. I prefer having a large list of tabs with small thumbnails, with a few full-size tabs pinned to the top. [1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...
BeetleB 8y ago
Have you considered OneTab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/)? It lets you put tabs into groups. The groups are really just a collection of links. I've found it useful for not having tons of tabs open. If you have tabs open for a long time you want to get to eventually, simply dump them into OneTab. In practice, I've found that most of the links I dump into OneTab never get read. Which turned out to be quite alright for me - I've wasted enough of my life browsing the web. I now aim to dump all open tabs into OneTab at the end of each day, so I start the new day with a clean slate. If there was any important link, it's always still there in OneTab should I want to access it. It is not open source. Someone seems to have made an open source equivalent (have not tried it): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-onetab...
brownbat 8y ago
I also use tabs as a way to park a series of items for later consideration. It sounds like we really need a stack or queue for links (or we're treating the tab bar as that). But the tab bar eats up resources (UI real estate if not memory). Thinking in terms of queue operations, my ideal UI would let me push tabs or links to a special bookmark folder, the queue folder. You could use menus if you had to, but to avoid menus, there would also be a mock tab permanently open that always displayed the next page in that queue folder. I could bookmark that displayed page to save it more permanently. I could close the page, which would remove it from the queue completely. Or I could send the page to the back of the queue. A queue folder like that would be persistent across sessions, but wouldn't load every single page on every startup. It'd be a bit like grouping all unread tabs by default, but also constantly storing that info in a folder as a backup, and having a really easy way to pop() tabs from that folder.
astazangasta 8y ago
Something I have been intending to write whenever it bubbles up on my list of priorities is a "melting tab" extension, which would let you open a tab with a limited lifespan. The vast majority of tabs I open don't need to live more than a few seconds, until I read the content and move on. If I had a simple mechanism for spawning a short-lived tab, I could consume content this way and have it melt away after a few minutes without any bother on my part. I think this would solve most tab proliferation. If I want to recover the content the page would be in my history anyway.
marcosdumay 8y ago
> Bookmarks are hidden behind menus Alt + View + Toolbars + Bookmarks bar I don't really get why this defaults to hidden.
marmshallow 8y ago
If OpenList [1] on Chrome was ported to Firefox (ahem, someone please do this), you could do this trick: * Use openlist to copy the list of URLs that you currently have open. * Paste the list into something. I use sublime because it will remember your _unsaved_ tabs. * Paste back into a new window later with OpenList to open them all. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/openlist/nkpjembldfckmdchbdiclhfedcngbgnl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/openlist/nkpjembld... This extension is also really helpful for mass URL-manipulation when you're too lazy to write a full script, but want to mash on some API. Someone please make a 1:1 port :D
- Outpox 8y ago
  Just to let you know, per you request I've ported OpenList to the WebExtension format (so that it'll work other browsers as well). It's really a 1:1 port, nothing removed, nothing added. It's available on Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openlist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openlist/ The sources are available on my fork: https://github.com/Outpox/OpenList https://github.com/Outpox/OpenList
  - marmshallow 8y ago
    Holy damn, thanks so much. I didn't expect my cry for help to go anywhere.
atombender 8y ago
I keep lots of tabs open because of "projects". For example, let's say I'm planning a trip. I will have tabs open for Google Flights, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Google Maps and so on. A single window is one "project". It doesn't make sense to have those tabs open all the time -- just when I need them. Yet I have to keep them open because browsers don't have a way to treat a single window as a kind of persistent tab set. The best browsers can do right now is to bookmark multiple tabs as a folder and then later restore them. That's not too useful since there's no way to update this folder the same way. What I'd like is to have windows be "named". I want to save my window as "Puerto Rico trip" and close it. Later I want to open it again and continue where I was. At all times my tabs and history are associated with the same "project". I've been longing for this feature for maybe 10 years now. I started developing it as a Safari extension once, but ran into limitations in the API's support for opening windows.
- youwishboye 8y ago
  similar functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
- tpamula 8y ago
  I actually wrote a plugin that aims on solving similar kind of problem. It lets you name windows and has session persistence. No ability to save/reopen windows, but it's a neat idea. If you're interested it's Window Titler: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler...
  - atombender 8y ago
    Cool, but not sure how that helps. The whole point is being able to close a (named) window without losing its state, then later restoring it.
- maccard 8y ago
  I found a chrome extension a year or so back called workona [0]. It _kind of_ did this, but was fairly limited and I gave up on it. Might be worth taking a look at for your use cases [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/workona-tab-manager-produ/ailcmbgekjpnablpdkmaaccecekgdhlh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/workona-tab-manage...
tpamula 8y ago
Well, I had a go at this problem with Tab Jump List addon. It creates temporary window-specific bookmarks. Might be handy at times, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-jump-list/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-jump-list...
galambo 8y ago
I recommend you try the extension "Auto Tab Discard": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... It uses the native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. This way you can have lots of tabs without slowing the browser down. For other extensions I use: https://galambo.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/firefox-extensions-i-use/ https://galambo.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/firefox-extensions-...
WCityMike 8y ago
A very long time ago, there was a third-party macOS bookmark manager that did "smart" URL sorting, which was so much better than alphabetical sorting. Basically, it was something like sorting by: TLD -> domain -> subdomain -> string For example, www.metafilter.com and ask.metafilter.com would be sorted close to one another, as opposed to the former being in the "w"s and the latter being in the "a"s. Really wish that had become the standard ...

nicoburns 8y ago

I use the Simple Tab Groups plugin for this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... It allows you to move tabs into named groups. Only tabs from the active group are shown in the tab bar, and you can switch between groups using an icon in the toolbar.

saidajigumi 8y ago
As a pre-Quantum Tab Groups user, I find that Simple Tab Groups is considerably more stable and has a slightly better UX than the old support. So A+ for that. I still feel like there's some missing "secret sauce" here, but I haven't had the time to really delve into the problem to suss out what that might be. I do love that tab groups are malleable to the user's concept of organization, not some artificial notion such as grouping by website.
- albru123 8y ago
  Unfortunately Simple Tab Groups (or maybe some internal feature it uses, probably hidden tabs) somehow leak resources and end up eating all the RAM for me. The end of Panorama (or Tab Groups as known nowdays) was a disaster for me, as I don't hesitate having over 3k tabs open.
  - nevster 8y ago
    Is Simple Tab Groups the current best replacement option? I still haven't upgraded from FF56!
    - qiemem 8y ago
      I use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-... and have been really happy with it.
    - Vinnl 8y ago
      There's also Panorama view: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
    - nicoburns 8y ago
      IMO yes, and I've tried a few. It's only really now that the new tab group plugins have reached parity with the FF56 versions, but they have done :)
    - executesorder66 8y ago
      You can also try https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/conex/ https://addons.mozilla.org/af/firefox/addon/conex/ Works similar to tab groups, but each group is in it's own container.
  - nexxer 8y ago
    I've been using https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sync-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sync-tab-grou... for hundreds of tabs. When I open up a tab group with many tabs in it, the extension loads all of them up (snoozed) in a way that takes a little bit of time to complete, but it works well.

CharlesW 8y ago

> I usually keep lot of tabs opened and I known I'm not the only one to use Firefox (or any other browser) like that. I'm surprised nobody's taken a cue from Apple's Stacks[1] to automatically group them by source. [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209101 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209101

Nullabillity 8y ago
Tree Style Tab[0] automatically builds a tree of which tab opened which, and allows you to hide stuff based on that. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- Tallain 8y ago
  I use this add-on and it's great. My overall tab count has only risen a very small amount since I adopted this tool and I feel like I actually "work through" the open tabs in a more timely manner. It helps to see something like "(4)" to denote Child Tabs, and to know I have a bunch of Stuff waiting for me to sort through.
MiddleEndian 8y ago
As long as they don't make it unchangeable. Of all the tab management systems I've tried, none of the automatic sorting mechanisms have worked for me as well as manual tab management. I like overflowing tabs into multiple rows, ctrl-pgup and ctrl-pgdn to go left or right, and ctrl-tab and ctrl-shift-tab (with the ability to hold ctrl and keep tapping to skip to the next tab without counting intermediaries as visited), and I've never gotten that from any browser but Firefox (and I think Opera in the past).

ianbicking 8y ago

One of the Test Pilot attempts in this area was Snooze Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/ The engagement on that experiment wasn't very high, but I later went and read some of the user research and felt like there was some unmet potential: the concept was understandable, the functionality matched at least some real use cases, but it still didn't work, people didn't use it. Obviously Pocket is intended for this purpose as well. It's personally what I use for this purpose, though there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. If you make it easier to save the tab, there will always still be a point when you aren't sure if you want to save it or not... As far as I'm aware Mozilla hasn't done deep-dive research into tabs. Not all of our research is public, but we do post a public index of the research: https://firefoxur.github.io/ https://firefoxur.github.io/

joombaga 8y ago
> there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. It feels like that's the state I'm in with regard to most tabs. It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical. It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.
- ianbicking 8y ago
  One user research task is often to give names to ideas that we don't otherwise know how to describe. Like in bookmark research they distinguish between bookmarks that represent something you saved, vs. bookmarks that represent some navigational shortcut you are creating for yourself. For tabs, I can imagine different ways of thinking about them: 1. An activity you have to complete. Or start. 2. A piece of information you think you may need to be aware of. 3. Something that interests you, but you are leaving for when you are in some particular state of mind (e.g., ready to read something long and involved). 4. Something shared with you, that you feel obliged to respond to. 5. One of a set of things that represents some pending task. 6. Something information you may need to revisit. Or you may have finished it, but it's yet to be "garbage collected". MDN pages usually fall in this category for me – I'll quickly come back a couple times to the page, but I only know I'm "finished" because I don't come back. So it sits there. And for each of these there's the state of "maybe". Maybe I'll need this. Maybe I'll need to be aware of this. Maybe I should reply to my friend about this.

vthriller 8y ago

One of my use cases for long-living tabs is short-living content: pretty often I have a time to take a quick look at it but not to dive deeply nor to stash it (preferably in HTML or something that's just friendlier to grep than quick screenshots). For quite some time I'm reminding myself, among other things, to look into why Ctrl-S in browsers sometimes initiates redownloads that result in pages with comments that differ from what I see in the browser at the same time.

Wowfunhappy 8y ago

I'm kind of amazed desktop browsers don't "pause" tabs when you open more than a set amount (a la mobile browsers). It seems like an obvious enhancement. If a user only has ten tabs open, pausing them would probably be a bad idea in most cases. However, if a user has 100 tabs open, they almost certainly don't need to have the oldest ones running the background.

tdy_err 8y ago
Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me. The Great Suspender uses this approach.
- reificator 8y ago
  > Pausing based on time away from target tab rather than number of other-tabs open seems ideal to me. The two exceptions are audio (including backgrounded video) and messaging/notifications.
  - NoodleIncident 8y ago
    If I want notifications from a tab, I pin it. I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active", and it's always on the tab bar no matter how far you scroll. So for my use case at least, the suspender just has to not suspend any pinned tabs.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - lowercased 8y ago
      > I think that pinned tabs are already a bit more aggressive about keeping that website "active" Just not... around. Routinely, after both clean shutdowns and system crashes, firefox just loses all my pinned tabs. It's the primary thing that keeps me from using firefox as a default all the time. There's weird 'restore last session' and folder searching you can do to try to maybe 'recover' some, sometimes, but... WTH? I'm pinning things - I want them around. If I didn't want them restored on browser launch, I wouldn't 'pin' them. Unless pinning is intended to be transitory, and I just missed the memo?

tempguy9999 8y ago

"you are about to open 2,800 tabs, this may take some time, are you sure you want to continue?" Or a similar message I got a few days ago. Been spending time cleaning them up. Yep, I open a lot of tabs. I'd long ago have run out of memory but I never enable JScript, which seems to be what eats memory (palemoon on windows FYI).

ddoolin 8y ago
I don't know if you meant JavaScript or not, but JScript is an actual thing that is (somewhat) separate from JavaScript, commonly abbreviated as JS.
- gpm 8y ago
  > A lot of people think that JScript and JavaScript are different but similar languages. That's not the case. They are just different names for the same language, and the reason the names are different was to get around trademark issues. Douglas Crockford via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JScript
  - ddoolin 8y ago
    Yes, and the following paragraph goes on to note differences and even calls his statement "not completely true". At one point it may have been more true than it is now.
- tempguy9999 8y ago
  I genuinely did not know that! I've always presumed JS = JScript = JavasSript = ECMAscript. Hmm. In this case I meant the native scripting in palemoon (which is an FX fork I believe).

lostphilosopher 8y ago

Pocket is what I use for this: https://getpocket.com/ https://getpocket.com/ (Unaffiliated, just a user.)

flippant 8y ago
Pocket still isn't open source after being acquired by Mozilla two years ago.

weaksauce 8y ago

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/ also chrome https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiogfkaldbfphfdkpggjemaha https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog... Source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

LandR 8y ago

I use tree style tab along with tab suspender.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

jeremysalwen 8y ago

I use tree style tabs (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...) unfortunately it's a bit buggy sometimes, I think the original wasn't but it was rewritten for the switch to the web extensions api.

lousken 8y ago
only time tree style tabs were buggy for me in last 6 months was when i implemented css changes (to remove tabs from above the address bar)
frosted-flakes 8y ago
I prefer Tab Center Redux[1] Even though it has fewer features, it's very polished and reliable. Besides, I found tab hierarchies to be very "messy" in practice. I prefer having a large list of tabs with small thumbnails, with a few full-size tabs pinned to the top. [1]https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...

BeetleB 8y ago

Have you considered OneTab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/)? It lets you put tabs into groups. The groups are really just a collection of links. I've found it useful for not having tons of tabs open. If you have tabs open for a long time you want to get to eventually, simply dump them into OneTab. In practice, I've found that most of the links I dump into OneTab never get read. Which turned out to be quite alright for me - I've wasted enough of my life browsing the web. I now aim to dump all open tabs into OneTab at the end of each day, so I start the new day with a clean slate. If there was any important link, it's always still there in OneTab should I want to access it. It is not open source. Someone seems to have made an open source equivalent (have not tried it): https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-onetab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/better-onetab...

brownbat 8y ago

I also use tabs as a way to park a series of items for later consideration. It sounds like we really need a stack or queue for links (or we're treating the tab bar as that). But the tab bar eats up resources (UI real estate if not memory). Thinking in terms of queue operations, my ideal UI would let me push tabs or links to a special bookmark folder, the queue folder. You could use menus if you had to, but to avoid menus, there would also be a mock tab permanently open that always displayed the next page in that queue folder. I could bookmark that displayed page to save it more permanently. I could close the page, which would remove it from the queue completely. Or I could send the page to the back of the queue. A queue folder like that would be persistent across sessions, but wouldn't load every single page on every startup. It'd be a bit like grouping all unread tabs by default, but also constantly storing that info in a folder as a backup, and having a really easy way to pop() tabs from that folder.

astazangasta 8y ago

Something I have been intending to write whenever it bubbles up on my list of priorities is a "melting tab" extension, which would let you open a tab with a limited lifespan. The vast majority of tabs I open don't need to live more than a few seconds, until I read the content and move on. If I had a simple mechanism for spawning a short-lived tab, I could consume content this way and have it melt away after a few minutes without any bother on my part. I think this would solve most tab proliferation. If I want to recover the content the page would be in my history anyway.

marcosdumay 8y ago

> Bookmarks are hidden behind menus Alt + View + Toolbars + Bookmarks bar I don't really get why this defaults to hidden.

marmshallow 8y ago

If OpenList [1] on Chrome was ported to Firefox (ahem, someone please do this), you could do this trick: * Use openlist to copy the list of URLs that you currently have open. * Paste the list into something. I use sublime because it will remember your _unsaved_ tabs. * Paste back into a new window later with OpenList to open them all. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/openlist/nkpjembldfckmdchbdiclhfedcngbgnl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/openlist/nkpjembld... This extension is also really helpful for mass URL-manipulation when you're too lazy to write a full script, but want to mash on some API. Someone please make a 1:1 port :D

Outpox 8y ago
Just to let you know, per you request I've ported OpenList to the WebExtension format (so that it'll work other browsers as well). It's really a 1:1 port, nothing removed, nothing added. It's available on Firefox Add-ons: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openlist/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openlist/ The sources are available on my fork: https://github.com/Outpox/OpenList https://github.com/Outpox/OpenList
- marmshallow 8y ago
  Holy damn, thanks so much. I didn't expect my cry for help to go anywhere.

atombender 8y ago

I keep lots of tabs open because of "projects". For example, let's say I'm planning a trip. I will have tabs open for Google Flights, Airbnb, Trip Advisor, Google Maps and so on. A single window is one "project". It doesn't make sense to have those tabs open all the time -- just when I need them. Yet I have to keep them open because browsers don't have a way to treat a single window as a kind of persistent tab set. The best browsers can do right now is to bookmark multiple tabs as a folder and then later restore them. That's not too useful since there's no way to update this folder the same way. What I'd like is to have windows be "named". I want to save my window as "Puerto Rico trip" and close it. Later I want to open it again and continue where I was. At all times my tabs and history are associated with the same "project". I've been longing for this feature for maybe 10 years now. I started developing it as a Safari extension once, but ran into limitations in the API's support for opening windows.

youwishboye 8y ago
similar functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-view...
tpamula 8y ago
I actually wrote a plugin that aims on solving similar kind of problem. It lets you name windows and has session persistence. No ability to save/reopen windows, but it's a neat idea. If you're interested it's Window Titler: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/window-titler...
- atombender 8y ago
  Cool, but not sure how that helps. The whole point is being able to close a (named) window without losing its state, then later restoring it.
maccard 8y ago
I found a chrome extension a year or so back called workona [0]. It _kind of_ did this, but was fairly limited and I gave up on it. Might be worth taking a look at for your use cases [0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/workona-tab-manager-produ/ailcmbgekjpnablpdkmaaccecekgdhlh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/workona-tab-manage...

tpamula 8y ago

Well, I had a go at this problem with Tab Jump List addon. It creates temporary window-specific bookmarks. Might be handy at times, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-jump-list/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-jump-list...

galambo 8y ago

I recommend you try the extension "Auto Tab Discard": https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... It uses the native tab discard method to automatically reduce memory usage of inactive tabs. This way you can have lots of tabs without slowing the browser down. For other extensions I use: https://galambo.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/firefox-extensions-i-use/ https://galambo.wordpress.com/2018/12/25/firefox-extensions-...

WCityMike 8y ago

A very long time ago, there was a third-party macOS bookmark manager that did "smart" URL sorting, which was so much better than alphabetical sorting. Basically, it was something like sorting by: TLD -> domain -> subdomain -> string For example, www.metafilter.com and ask.metafilter.com would be sorted close to one another, as opposed to the former being in the "w"s and the latter being in the "a"s. Really wish that had become the standard ...