13 ms·

Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor

117 points by treve 7y ago

Gibbon1 7y ago
I feel like what I want is really a 'view' rather than bookmarks. Create/label a collection of tabs as a view. When you can name, 'work', 'bills', 'house', hobbyX, hobbyY, hobbyZ. Open a view and it'll open all the bookmarks associated with that view. Edit views by simply dragging and dropping tabs into them. Even better would be to include files and documents as well.
- ksaj 7y ago
  This sounds a little like mind mapping, which definitely would be good for sorting and maintaining these things.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bbx 7y ago
  You can do that by creating a folder with all the bookmarks you want, then right click on that folder and select “Open all bookmarks”.
  - atombender 7y ago
    Except there's no way to sync the state back. Say you open another tab in that window. If you bookmark that window again, you end up with dupes. There's no coupling between a window and the bookmarks folder that spawned it.
- vokep 7y ago
  Sounds sort of like tab groups, a function that was removed from firefox. It can be added as an extension.
  - mgnn 7y ago
    It was an extension until Quantum. Then there was a vacuum for some time. The closest I can find today is this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
    - matthewn 7y ago
      This gets a lot closer to what was removed from Firefox: https://projectdelphai.github.io/panorama-tab-groups/ https://projectdelphai.github.io/panorama-tab-groups/
- moltar 7y ago
  Nah, you are thinking like an engineer. What my wife wants is “papers scattered around the desk” in a digital form.
  - copperx 7y ago
    I have been waiting for the same since PDF got invented. I thought it was going to be an obvious consequence, but I guess it hasn't.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      I was hoping this would happen when tablets were introduced. But apparently, for some reason, the idea of infinite, zoomable canvas for interactive objects and annotable documents is alien to most software developers. All the products I've ever seen either a) allow viewing and/or annotating single documents, and/or b) use a very limited canvas with a zoom limit, and/or c) don't allow to put documents in it in other ways than rendered images.
      - rgoulter 7y ago
        http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2018bDissertation.pdf http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2018bDissertation.pd... FWIW, for those interested, there's some discussion of the "Code Bubbles" environment which allows arranging working sets on a canvas. (IDK if this falls under "limited canvas" or whatever). I think a big part of why this hasn't caught on is that the benefits of a layout which maps to a mental model are _generally_ less than the cost of arranging things.
- chowes 7y ago
  Check out https://workona.com/ https://workona.com/. Been using it for work recently and really enjoying it.
  - captainill 7y ago
    Been really enjoying workona as well. Have found myself recommending to folks on my team. I organize my tabs into their “workspaces” which map to the strategic and tactical projects I’m juggling. Helps me switch btwn contexts
  - wtdata 7y ago
    I actually changed to Chrome only for this. I have been looking for months for something like Workona for Firefox but to no avail. I used Firefox for years and I want to continue using it, but for my way of work (multiple tabs open in several spaces and changing computers often) Workona is just great, nothing comes close.
- hyperpape 7y ago
  This sounds a bit like workona, which is a chrome extension I use. I believe tabs are limited to one category per tab.
  - wtdata 7y ago
    Been desperately searching for something similar for Firefox, but no luck so far.
- curioussavage 7y ago
  I came to share basically the same idea. I know there are extensions but I want some kind of workspace/session support built in so the browser can do stuff like cache tabs in a workspace so I can load a workspace and resume instantly. Switching workspaces should be quick with maybe a UI like ctrl p in sublime text or VsCode or even like the gnome dash. I would pay for a license to use a browser that focuses on being a productivity tool with features like this.
andrewstuart 7y ago
I usually have at least 6 browser windows open with at least 10 or more tabs each. I wish there was a better way to do it. I work on projects for a few days or hours at a time, and maybe only 10 of those tabs are relevant to a given project. I'd like to be able to somehow only have the relevant tabs for my current project or train of thought. Someone suggested I use the people profiles in Chrome which seems a good idea but obviously not good enough cause I'm not doing it.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Many editors have projects where you open a group of documents with associated settings. Browsers have almost everything they need to do this too.
  - kurtisc 7y ago
    Editors can assume a level of RTFM that browsers will not. If it's not discoverable enough for someone unfamiliar, it won't make it in.
    - mixmastamyk 7y ago
      There's a menu with "New Project" and "Close Project." Never had to read a manual, for that part anyway.
- pmoriarty 7y ago
  "I usually have at least 6 browser windows open with at least 10 or more tabs each. I wish there was a better way to do it." Back when Opera was an innovative browser, it had a really useful tab grouping feature which let you achieve the same thing as you describe but without requiring a separate browser instance.
- nicoburns 7y ago
  Firefox's simple tab groups plugin is pretty good for this.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
ChrisSD 7y ago
The trouble with bookmarks is they take conscious effort to create and maintain. The trouble with history is that it's a soup of every random page you've ever visited. The trouble with tabs is they're a collection of web pages you at one time thought you might get back to, roughly sorted by the time in which you first opened them.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  The trouble with tribbles is that they're born pregnant, and can't stop reproducing. Kind of like tabs and bookmarks.
- m463 7y ago
  The way history is always implemented is also not helpful. Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B. History seems to be recorded as A C E D B But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another. This compaction method also seems to happen across days, destroying the list of everything you browsed on tuesday in order.
  - dngray 7y ago
    > Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B. > But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another. That's personally why I have been using Tree Style Tab (for about a decade now) • https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... • https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > History seems to be recorded as A C E D B I'd expect it to be recorded as A B C D B - if it's recorded like you wrote, it becomes completely illogical. I think I'd prefer your A B C D E D B.
  - patrick5415 7y ago
luhn 7y ago
I used to use an extension called Tab Wrangler [1], which would close tabs after being inactive for a period of time. I felt this dealt with the problem of too many tabs surprisingly well—Tabs would quietly disappear as I forgot about them. If I needed a tab back (which was more rare than I would think), Tab Wrangler could show me a list of tabs it had recently closed. I've switched to Firefox a while back and unfortunately cannot find an equivalent, so I'm back to manually wrangling. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...
- YaxelPerez 7y ago
  Seems like it's been ported to firefox already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/
aiyodev 7y ago
This seems like a good place to ask. There was a Firefox extension called (edit: not sure if it was Tab Mix Plus or something else) that was discontinued after Firefox 57. It was super productive and still haven't haven't found anything like it to replace it. To be clear, I'm talking about grouping tabs but I'm not talking about the current Firefox feature called "Tab Groups". You had a row of tabs that showed the web pages open in the current group. And you had a second row of tabs that allowed you to switch between tab groups. You could close a tab group and close all the tabs within the group. Has anybody found an alternative even if it's in a different browser? I dislike having multiple browser windows open.
- sp332 7y ago
  Firefox Panorama? It was built-in for a while then spun off to an extension, Tab Groups, then discontinued. And this kind of feature was made more difficult after the transition to WebExtensions. But it's a popular enough idea that there are still variations, e.g. Simple Tab Groups https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/209/209885.png?modified=1543520966 https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/209/... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/#&gid=1&pid=16 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
- marcinzm 7y ago
  Browsers are moving towards more restricted extensions and don't allow the unlimited UI edits that Firefox used to allow so it's unlikely that an extension would allow that exact functionality. Maybe one of the Chrome/Firefox forks could add it as a base feature. It does bring back memories, I wrote what I think was the first extension that did that type of tab grouping. Was something like 12 years ago and even had the name "Tab Groups."
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- morsch 7y ago
  Tree style tabs (Firefox) works in much the same way, assuming you have a parent tab for each group. I routinely start a research task from one tab, say a search query, open all interesting results in sub tabs and close the parent tab including all children (ie the group) once I'm done (or I collapse the group when I intend to resume later).
pcurve 7y ago
I recently found in surprisingly difficult to explain the concept of browser tabs to my relatively computer unsavvy 72 year old mother. She can do web searches, read online news articles, and watches Youtubes, but browser tabs were a struggle for some reason.
- abacadaba 7y ago
  Perhaps relate it to tabbed folders in a file cabinet?
  - stan_rogers 7y ago
    ...or good old-fashioned recipe cards. Most card files were arranged with tabs, but a box of recipe cards would be more than familiar to anyone my age or older. (You'd pretty much have to have lived out of cans and/or on restaurant meals to have avoided them.)
    - jpindar 7y ago
      Or a rolodex or a card catalog in the library... these are where the idea came from.
- downtide 7y ago
  Perhaps keep them clear of the idea. And stick to Windows. Assuming they can do Window management... I've an 84 year old family member, who still doesn't get tabs. Heck they don't really get the Web. And are kind of stuck in their Web Email client. I got an alarming call one day saying they'd hosed all their emails. But it turned out they'd failed to log into their email account, ended up creating a new one, and then wondered why their inbox was empty.
- skocznymroczny 7y ago
  I try to teach my mother how GUIs work and it's really hard. It's hard enough to teach her that pressing "X" closes the window, but then she opens something like a web browser and it has "X" on every tab, which gets her confused. And worst of all, she can have email client on top of the web browser, which adds additional "X" to think about.
chrisbrandow 7y ago
First tabbed browser = Netcaptor
- taneq 7y ago
  Huh, I always thought Opera was the first tabbed browser but according to wiki, BookLink Technologies' InternetWorks browser was the first, followed by Netcaptor three years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History
  - V-2 7y ago
    Opera popularized them. The notion that it invented them is a very common misconception though.
frio 7y ago
I'd love to see more publicly available research and experiments in changing the desktop metaphor. We see stuff that makes tweaks around the edges (new context menus, unifying file/cloud presentation, tiling window managers) but very little that radically changes the way we actually interact with computers. For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved. As a spitball idea: Cmd-space, type in "research open sourcing my kindle", and get given a browser and some sort of note collector. Collect the various things from the session into my note, refile the entire stack as a project, and move on to the next task. In the future, I can access the actual project and receive a workspace with terminals, an IDE or whatever else I need to Get the Thing Done, archived versions of the sites I opened, etc. Ideally, the environment would be designed to reduce distractability. That still doesn't feel like a complete idea, but every use case the author has for tabs -- "this is a quick session", "I don't want to lose this page", "I need to remember this in a week" -- seem like they'd be very hard for browsers to do well. Instead, a browser more closely integrated with the OS (which might go a way towards fixing Electron resource consumption to boot) and a uniquely designed desktop environment might be better.
- girzel 7y ago
  I like the idea that the job of the OS (or really, the DE) is to respond to why we're using our computers. Each application should have its own job, but the DE's job is to help us achieve our intentions.
- wlib 7y ago
  While it is only a design concept, Mercury OS [1] might interest you. When I first came across it, I was blown away by the idea. It basically makes the user intent first class rather than the application/program. What I mean is that instead of finding a program or application to execute your intention indirectly, you declare your intent to the OS. Then the OS maps your intent to a series of actions which are executed by hooked-in pseudo-functions. It erases the boundary between applications by being almost like an interactive visual version of a declarative programming language. You should read the article rather than trouble yourself with my explanation though... [1] “Introducing Mercury OS” by Jason Yuan https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX
eludwig 7y ago
What I would love is an extension (either FF or Chrome) that allows me to reuse an open, matching tab when I choose a bookmark. For example, I find myself opening a bunch top-level Google News tabs. In a window with 40 tabs, at least 6 or 7 are the top-level Google News page (or NYT homepage). I would love to be able to select my bookmark and have it find an already existing tab that contains an exact match and bring that tab forward. This would reduce (for me) a large amount of tab flotsam. Maybe there is already a way to do this?
- mattnewton 7y ago
  For me, the chrome search bar also searches my open tabs, and I frequently navigate that way. Is that close enough?
  - eludwig 7y ago
    I generally find myself using my favorites menus rather than the url bar. Not sure I could get used to that. Thanks for the suggestion though!
- NaOH 7y ago
  Not sure what platform you're on, but... Using Keyboard Maestro on a Mac, I have keyboard-based shortcuts for opening specific web pages. If I invoke one of those shortcuts for an already-open site, it is brought to the front instead of being opened again in a new tab.
  - eludwig 7y ago
    Hmm..that could work. I do have KM installed. I will check it out.
    - NaOH 7y ago
      I wasn't wholly accurate. An already opened site is brought to the front and reloaded. That could be a critical difference.
ggm 7y ago
If you use a tiling WM, the immediate question which comes up is : can I switch this to a clean single-desk view, or is this neccessarily a tiled plane of n things, and this is one of n? Tabs, are an attempt not to have to switch desktop, or tile the plane. Its a "stack" metaphor, with the least cost exposure of the underlying stack, as a shuffled hand of cards fanned out. Hand of cards, vs one piece of paper per desktop but many desktops, vs I cover the one desk, but all things have to balance the space.
hjk05 7y ago
Trying to solve a problem that isn’t actually a problem. Tabs work fine. “But your using the tabs sort of like bookmarks” is like complaining someone is using a fork/knife combo to eat pasta and wanting to therefore redesign a knife that works more like a spoon.
- AnthonBerg 7y ago
  The article’s premise is mostly an arbitrary value judgement that a high number of tabs is negative in some way (“ridiculous number”). Notice that there is no concrete definition of what the drawback would be. There’s a strong element of rule-seeking and cleaning instinct at play. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ;)
- social_quotient 7y ago
  What if the spoon didn’t exist yet? And people were just using the fork and knife.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    People would invent spoon anyway to eat soups. As for pasta, I never understood the whole spoon & fork thing. I tried it, it's not helpful. I do fine with just a fork, thank you.
    - technothrasher 7y ago
      Yeah, I never understood the pasta spoon thing either. I just don't see how it helps anything when you can simply use the plate as a backstop for the fork to roll the pasta correctly and not have hanging strands. Apparently in Italy, the spoon rolling technique is only used by children.
Jordanpomeroy 7y ago
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find that my usage of the web is more like a mind map. In other words, a tree or a directed graph. I open a tab to accomplish something. From there, I reach out in some primordial/human-brain breadth first search of links in order to accomplish my goal, branching off of branches and coming back up to some parent only to branch again. For people like me, a linear set of tabs is indeed the wrong abstraction for the way I use the web.
- raihansaputra 7y ago
  Do you use any extensions to get the browser to fit your usage?
  - grumdan 7y ago
    Tree Style Tab for Firefox is incredibly helpful to me for this kind of usage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Here's "iLoci", an iPhone app I developed in 2008 that integrated the web browser component and url bookmarks into a mind map or "memory palace" based on the "Method of Loci", that lets you arrange links, pictures, text and other interactive content into an easily editable 2D navigable maps (the gestural equivalent of a network of pie menus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci This "MediaGraph" Unity3D app I developed in 2012 also explores the same idea, for arranging and navigating your music collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc
aequitas 7y ago
I really hope this concept takes off: https://refresh.study/ https://refresh.study/
- Narushia 7y ago
  Wow, this is a cool concept. Efficient tab management especially is a feature that should be baked into browsers, there should be no need to install an extension for that.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  I'd skip the context sensitivity part. The browser is not a high grade AI that knows what you're doing nor should it attempt to be one.
  - woodrowbarlow 7y ago
    you mean the different "spaces" in the video for work, thesis, etc.? i don't think that's AI driven, it looks like the user manually puts a tab into a space and tabs open in the current space by default.
- OJFord 7y ago
  That's pretty much what I initially thought/hoped Firefox 'containers' were. But it's not, with those you can have X open tabs in Y different containers all in the same window.
mikojan 7y ago
Why would users who do not even understand bookmarks understand anything beyond just keeping dozens of tabs they think they might need
dmoreno 7y ago
As a side note looks like Adobe has a patent(!) on tabs... And it expires today! https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528 https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Hurray!!! Indeed it is! >2019-06-14 Application status is Expired - Lifetime Wow, thank you for catching that and pointing it out, so I can celebrate just in time! How did you happen to coincidentally run across that fact today? ;) (I have always believed was illegitimate and invalidated by a lot of prior art, but I didn't realize that its death date was imminent.)
  - akovaski 7y ago
    Google patents always shows the current date for that line. It actually expired back in 2014. https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      Oh, Google... You mean I should have started rejoicing five years ago??! Well better late than never. At least I don't have to have my Cotton Gin Patent Expiration Party on the same day as my Tabbed Windows Patent Expiration Party.
- EForEndeavour 7y ago
  Have all tabbed applications and browsers been paying royalties to Adobe? If not, have they technically been in violation of the patent this whole time? What were the real-world implications of this patent?
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Adobe's illegitimate tabbed window patent was intended to fuck over Macromedia. And then later they bought Macromedia. Adobe sues Macromedia over infringement of their patented tabbed palettes (August 10, 2000): https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-infringement-of-their-patented-tabbed-palettes https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-i... >"Adobe filed a lawsuit against Macromedia® alleging infringement of our intellectual property, specifically our patented tabbed palette, which is a key user interface element and method invented by Adobe and incorporated into our products." >"Adobe's tabbed palette patent is Adobe's method of displaying and working with multiple sets of information in the same area of the computer screen. The patented invention allows users to customize how the functions in the product are organized on the workspace. This invention was a significant leap forward for customers' productivity and personalization of the interface." In 1989 the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck supported tabbed nested windows that users could drag around separately on the screen or group together on a visual representation of the PostScript stack, use "direct stack manipulation" to push and pop and rearrange the PostScript stack by dragging, and use pie menus to switch the side of the tab, pull-out to adjust layout parameters, issue commands, etc. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct... Ironic that it was part of a visual interface to Adobe's own PostScript programming language (in Sun's NeWS window system implemented by James Gosling), so they had to pretend not to know about it, in order to fraudulently obtain their tabbed window patent through willful blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness I know for certain that at least one high level person at Adobe was aware of it, since I corresponded with Glenn Reid at Adobe about PostScript quite often before during and after its development, and credited his PostScript book and his work on Distillery in the references of that paper. >Adobe Systems; Reid, Glenn C.: PostScript Language Program Design (The Green Book); 1988; Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, Mass. >Reid, Glenn: The Distillery (program); available from ps-file-server@adobe.com There's not much incentive for a company to pay Adobe licensing fees for such an obviously invalid, fraudulent patent. But it costs a huge amount of money and time to challenge a bad patent like that and clean up the hot mess of bullshit that Adobe dumped on the world of user interface design, far beyond my means or the means of most non-giga-corporations.
Traster 7y ago
Man, okay so clearly we all agree there's a problem and it sounds like we all have different ideas for a solution. One of my pet ideas - that I'm yet to see a real implementation of - is a Hacker News comments section style history. Each new session would start a new comments section. Each new manually opened tab would be a top level 'comment' (with timestamp). Each pageload would be a paragraph in that 'comment'. Each new tab opened via a link would be a 'reply' to that comment quoting the 'paragraph' it was opened from. That seems like a good metaphor to me because it solves the traceability of "How did I get to this page". It doesn't solve the UI of tabs though, though maybe it makes it less necessary to keep tabs open.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Tabs Outliner seems to match some of these ideas. I've had it installed some years ago, but didn't end up using it that much. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
  - vxNsr 7y ago
    I use it, but not often enough to make a real dent, my issue is that it isn't integrated into the browser, it's a feature that with some UI tweaks could really make everyone a poweruser, the concept itself is powerful but the un-extensibility of chrome (and browsers in general) holds it back from being a true first party app.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Agreed. And it's one of the reasons why I dislike the trend of the browsers being increasingly locked down and non-modifiable. Soon, even to recreate this plugin you'll have to run a parallel fork of a browser.
saketmehta 7y ago
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Edge. As far as tab management is concerned, it is superior to both Chrome and Firefox.
- downtide 7y ago
  Can you add a brief explainer?
  - rgoulter 7y ago
    I've used Edge for the last couple of weeks. There's a button on the top-left which collects the current tabs in the window and puts them aside. They can be restored later. Personally, I've only used this by accident. But I could see it being useful for "I know I want to come back to these tabs later (e.g. tomorrow), but I want to close the browser / do other things now".
    - downtide 7y ago
      That sounds like a way to save a browser session that comprises of tabs. Perhaps a better UI. Many browsers have had the ability to group/tabs/bookmarks. But it's usually quite clunky.
- jmkni 7y ago
  Will tabs still work the same way in new ChromEdge?
downtide 7y ago
The history here, is that Opera introduced tabs, and they were cheaper in terms of resources. Tabs in Windows were cheaper than many windows. Then tabs became a sort of replacement for Bookmarks, because bookmark UIs are so so bad. That's my take on it. Gnome 3, started out suggesting that it would be a semantic desktop, allowing groupings associations of activities. That fell by the wayside, so the best thing left is to use something like virtual desktops to separate projects/workflows. But then you are pushed into multiple windows likely with multiple tabs. I use multiple browsers on multiple devices, and bookmarking isn't that nice. I see why people end up using browser syncing and end up in vendor traps. On desktop, I can easily copy paste urls. Perhaps into my own mini-shared db for read it later style groupings. On mobile copying URLS is hell for me. Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. It would need to be more than 'recently used/accessed'. I have tried running Firefox with the bookmark manager open and the history, but it has been really poor performance wise, and it's just not a nice interface. Looking at my tabs today, I have a small grouping of shopping tabs, of things I might be interested in ordering. From about three weeks back. I know if I throw these into bookmarks, and even tag them, they'll still be lost. I should probably have dealt with that there and then. I tend to build up tabs in Firefox, once I hit the width of the browser with tabs and they scroll it becomes UI hell for me. So I try to confine to about 12, but that's easier said than done. And as said I run multiple browsers, at least four on mobile and four on desktop. Throw tabs into the mix and it gets ugly. But if this was reduced to something like a simple list of URLs, with some grouping shared between machines that I could relaunch easily, probably in the same browser I was using previously they'd feel much more manageable. And less crufty. Going back to the shopping example, that's task focused. And it might be accompanied by a few notes written in another app, and I might want to share that with my partner via email etc. Associations have to beyond one piece of software.
- 292355744930110 7y ago
  > Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. Sounds like you are describing surf[0] and tabbed[1] from suckless. [0] https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ [1] https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Tabs are not bookmarks. I can tell you exactly what made me use tabs instead of bookmaking sites: opening a bookmark means making a new connection, new round-trip, loading, parsing and rendering a full page. Having a page open in a tab means it's already there, in exactly the state you left it in. It will still be there if the Internet goes down. It will still be there after it comes back up. It will be there tomorrow, it will be there next week, after hibernating and waking up your computer a dozen times in between. It will be there even if the page is already removed on the server. The difference between a tab and a bookmark is like between a book on your desk vs. in a public library. In the latter case, when you need it, you have to go there and fetch it - not only taking time, but also possibly failing, as it might not be there anymore. Is it a perfect interface? Not really. What I'd really like would be this, + in addition a bookmark feature that actually freezes and snapshots the page I'm on - to get the same behaviour as tabs, only persistent. It shouldn't be hard for browsers to do, given that IME at least some browsers displayed this behaviour at some point when restoring pages after browser crash.
- dijit 7y ago
  I think this really hits the nail of why I am a tab-collector. If we could store “state” as part of the bookmark instead of just a URL that would go a long way. But additionally, discoverability of bookmarks is also lacking, flipping through tabs is fast and easy but in order to do that with bookmarks you have to know what the domain and title of a page is/was. If you could “preview” a bookmark then it might help a fair bit.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    It baffles me that bookmarks and history browsing in current browsers is still so terrible. In some cases it feels like it has gotten worse compared to a decade ago. Browser history certainly has, because for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.
    - baking 7y ago
      I used to put bookmarks in folders. Now, in Firefox, it takes about six clicks to access those folders, so I stopped using them.
jasode 7y ago
>One thing that kind of interests me is that every now and then I spot someone with a ridiculous number of tabs open. [...] Maybe commenting on their poor organizational skills, I often hover above 50+ tabs open. Every week or so, I catch up enough on the backlog to close some tabs and reduce it to less than 10. But I soon head down another rabbit hole of internet research and it's back up to 50+ open tabs again. The bookmarks UI has extra friction because is a separate area that I don't want to "manage" and that effort isn't worth it unless the webpage is promoted in my mind to "reference status". Having dozens of open tabs is just an easier and a more seamless experience. I often cycle through open tabs with Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn similar to cycling through active windows with Alt-Tab. Bookmarks UI don't have a "cycle" mode. Another problem with booksmarks is that the bookmark_links are not open. The booksmarks manager UI only show the title of the webpage but not what full page rendering is. Titles are often meaningless. Of course, I could manually type in a better title when saving the bookmark... or... just simply not close the tab and consider it part of a "queue" to read later in a few hours or days. It's lazier and easier. Plus the full page already completely rendered visually reminds me why I wanted to read it later. Bookmarks UI obscure the _why_. For the webpages I consider as reference material, I do bookmark those. E.g. weather page for a specific zipcode or a specific Youtube channel. Examples of webpages being categorized into different mental organization buckets: level 1: throwaway content: a trail of leaving a bunch of active tabs open is easier to get to than the friction of navigating the bookmarks UI level 2: reference material that changes: bookmarks for things like weather page, current US Treasury yields, etc. Bookmarks are also useful for syncing/import/export across devices since bookmarking services sync at the level of "bookmarks" and not "open tabs". level 3: reference material archived: webpage saved locally as .MHTML or .PNG -- to ensure I have a copy even if the url is lost from digital rot. Others might use Evernote or Zotero to archive webpages. I do agree that Chrome squishing the tabs into tiny vertical slices makes it harder to use. I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a dock on the side. This would work well for widescreen monitors since many webpages would show useless whitespace on the sides when the browser is full screen.
- legooolas 7y ago
  > I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a docked on the side. Vertical tabs extensions exist on Firefox, and are one of the major reasons I have stuck with Firefox for a long while. edit -- I use this one : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs-reloaded/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
spython 7y ago
I just have to link to my blog post on browser tabs: Open tabs are cognitive spaces - https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ I think the next step would be to try and solve context switching between the spaces, making it less of a conscious task.
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Oh, just what we need on Hacker News: another Spaces -vs- Tabs War! ;) Xerox PARC harmoniously researched both spaces AND tabs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_2 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw
huffmsa 7y ago
I think it's equivalent to having books open to a page and set to the side of a work area. Whereas a browser bookmark is like it's analog cousin, a mark stuck in the book and returned to the shelf. Tabs allow for better singular focus than stacked windows. I use desktop workspaces/multiple desktops in much the same way I use tabs. If I have multiple monitors, I'll put a group of related applications together in a workspace, but rarely will I put more than a single application on a monitor. Eg editor on one screen, terminal on the next and a browser (UI work) or DB interface on the 3rd. Which is the same way I organize my kitchen when cooking. Recipe on one side, prep in the middle, output on the other.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Tabs on the left and right edges of the windows work much better than top or bottom tabs, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more tabs, and actually read their labels. Users should be able to decide which edge and position each tab is attached to, and move them around and group them as desired. These are the tabbed windows I developed for the multi-window version of UniPress Emacs 2.20 in 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... Users could move the tabs to any edge of the windows in the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck, in 1989: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct... Figure 3 shows the class dictionary of Object, and the instance dictionary of the NeWS root menu: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.g... Figure 7 shows some digit editors, step editors, shift editors, a boolean editor, and a canvas editor: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.g... The tabbed window manager for The NeWS Toolkit let users drag tabs to any position along any side of the window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 Previous HN postings about tabbed windows: Side tabs are great, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more of them on the screen, to manage more windows. (2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726 "As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio." Tabs are at least three decades old now, and they weren't originally restricted to just one edge of the window (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730
- m_mueller 7y ago
  Opera had side tabs (as far as I remember you could freely choose one edge to display them on). I really miss the old Opera browsing days, it had great functionality such as more keyboard-oriented browsing. E.g. you could bind a key to "fast forward" through pages of a site - it parsed out the paging links to simulate clicks, worked in most forums back in the day.
ximm 7y ago
I used to have many tabs open myself. Not so much for different tasks, but more for "i don't have time for that now, I will read it later". Now I use a firefox extension called "Bookmark Stack" for that. I can easily add the current page to a stack and later restore it. Since it is a stack, the most recent entries are always displayed first. Since these are bookmarks, syncinc is also easy. I wrote that extensions myself, but there are others like it. Since using it, I rarely have more than 10 open tabs. That may not suite every workflow, but it definitely helped me.
- alanbernstein 7y ago
  This sounds like a good idea, I'll give it a try. Do you find your stack growing consistently? That's what I'd expect for myself.
  - ximm 7y ago
    Yes, the stack is growing (currently somewhere around 200). However, I think in terms of resources it's better to have a lot of bookmarks than to have a lot of open tabs. Also there is almost some kind of gamification to try to reduce the number.
- Shorel 7y ago
  I just send every long article to Pocket. Then I read it in my Kobo. Total win/win in my book.
Mirioron 7y ago
>I don’t think I would remove the tab altogether, but just show me the last few things, treat them as emphemeral and provide an option to explore my current and previous session(s). I would never use a browser that did this. I have many tabs open. I've even started using several (!) browser windows and profiles to have more. Being able to easily go back to previous stuff I've opened is really nice, even if it takes me a year. If I had to use bookmarks instead, then they'd probably stay there. I have many bookmarks that are about 10-15 years old. I don't think I'm ever getting back to those, because they aren't a constant reminder like browser tabs are.
faitswulff 7y ago
An aside, but on firefox you can use the URL bar to search your open tabs by prepending your query with % This works across windows as well. The other one I use even more is ^ which searched browser history. Quite handy.
spenrose 7y ago
There's an old joke about four-wheel drive on cars: instead of getting stuck right when you go off road, it ensures that you'll get pretty far into the woods before getting stuck. IHMO that metaphor applies here. Like the Web, Google, and even the WIMP interface before them, tabs were invented to manage information overload but "succeeded" only in pushing the problem out a layer: "The most sophisticated and efficient users of Google today find that “trying to navigate the growing deluge of data [just within their scientific field] has become a second job.” The United States’ library of scientific papers for health and medicine adds new ones at a rate of two a minute, year round. Like Memex and the Web, Google has solved the problem of published work burying itself unread by pushing it out to a vastly wider layer, one we will perhaps never manage to tame. We have not escaped [Vannevar] Bush’s quandary: Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought [find that] truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. … publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/ http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/
kirubakaran 7y ago
This is exactly what I'm working on solving! https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ Automatic bookmarks based on the signals you generate from browsing, history laid out as a tree, tabs remembered with temporal grouping so you don't have to keep them around. Notes and tags, with everything searchable, shareable, and easy to publish. Next up, unification of them all.
ggregoire 7y ago
Browser tabs are the wrong metaphor when used with only 1 window. If you keep unrelated tabs in different windows it makes way more sense and the number of tabs stays relatively low. An obvious use case is to have a window for your work and another one for your personal stuff. You can also open a new window when you start googling stuff about a specific topic (let’s stay “how to do x in Python”). Then, when you got your answer, you just have to close the window with all its tabs.
jules 7y ago
People use tabs as bookmarks and as history and back button. Users want bookmarks and history and the back button, but apparently the tab feature is better at this than the actual features. Maybe browsers should embrace this instead of fighting it. Make tabs better suited as history and bookmarks. Users reflexively middle click and then go to that tab because they don't want to lose the page. The problem is that you lose the pages that you visited in the first place. Maybe the default behaviour of a link shouldn't be to navigate away from the current page and hide the current page behind the back button (where you'll eventually struggle to get back to it) or in history (which also isn't easy to get back to). Maybe the default behaviour of clicking a link should be to open a new tab, so to speak, but to focus it while attaching it as a child to the tab it came from, thus creating a tree of history. Closing a tab just means hiding that part of history. Viewing history is just unhiding those closed tabs. Bookmarking is just reorganising that tree of tabs.
Shorel 7y ago
I remember when Opera (around version 4 or 5) was known as "The Tabbed Browser".
rgoulter 7y ago
I'd think part of the challenge of coming up with the UX of "the right metaphor" is the discoverability and intuitiveness of the solution. Tabs are really obvious. You can do a bunch of stuff with tabs and there UI is so apparent that it doesn't get explained. Apparently the usability threshold for people with 100s of tabs open is (a modern browser's) bookmarking. Any superior solution would need to be more obvious than bookmarks and easier to use than bookmarks.
lordlimecat 7y ago
I'm not clear why the author thinks that his dislike of others usage patterns means that there's a problem in need of solving. If his friends and family are happy with using tabs that way, this seems like a very poor reason for browser vendors to change things up to show them the light of his workflow.
Pete_D 7y ago
I daydream sometimes about having a browser where tabs behave more like buffers in vim or emacs - that is, with no tab bar or particular ordering on open pages, but with them just hidden in the background, with some kind of about:pages interface (like emacs ibuffer-mode) where I could sort/filter them and bring individual ones back to the foreground. (Split panel view would be nice, while we're at it.)

117 points by treve 7y ago

I feel like what I want is really a 'view' rather than bookmarks. Create/label a collection of tabs as a view. When you can name, 'work', 'bills', 'house', hobbyX, hobbyY, hobbyZ. Open a view and it'll open all the bookmarks associated with that view. Edit views by simply dragging and dropping tabs into them. Even better would be to include files and documents as well.

ksaj 7y ago
This sounds a little like mind mapping, which definitely would be good for sorting and maintaining these things.
deleted 7y ago
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bbx 7y ago
You can do that by creating a folder with all the bookmarks you want, then right click on that folder and select “Open all bookmarks”.
- atombender 7y ago
  Except there's no way to sync the state back. Say you open another tab in that window. If you bookmark that window again, you end up with dupes. There's no coupling between a window and the bookmarks folder that spawned it.
vokep 7y ago
Sounds sort of like tab groups, a function that was removed from firefox. It can be added as an extension.
- mgnn 7y ago
  It was an extension until Quantum. Then there was a vacuum for some time. The closest I can find today is this one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
  - matthewn 7y ago
    This gets a lot closer to what was removed from Firefox: https://projectdelphai.github.io/panorama-tab-groups/ https://projectdelphai.github.io/panorama-tab-groups/
moltar 7y ago
Nah, you are thinking like an engineer. What my wife wants is “papers scattered around the desk” in a digital form.
- copperx 7y ago
  I have been waiting for the same since PDF got invented. I thought it was going to be an obvious consequence, but I guess it hasn't.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    I was hoping this would happen when tablets were introduced. But apparently, for some reason, the idea of infinite, zoomable canvas for interactive objects and annotable documents is alien to most software developers. All the products I've ever seen either a) allow viewing and/or annotating single documents, and/or b) use a very limited canvas with a zoom limit, and/or c) don't allow to put documents in it in other ways than rendered images.
    - rgoulter 7y ago
      http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2018bDissertation.pdf http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/pubs/Henley2018bDissertation.pd... FWIW, for those interested, there's some discussion of the "Code Bubbles" environment which allows arranging working sets on a canvas. (IDK if this falls under "limited canvas" or whatever). I think a big part of why this hasn't caught on is that the benefits of a layout which maps to a mental model are _generally_ less than the cost of arranging things.
chowes 7y ago
Check out https://workona.com/ https://workona.com/. Been using it for work recently and really enjoying it.
- captainill 7y ago
  Been really enjoying workona as well. Have found myself recommending to folks on my team. I organize my tabs into their “workspaces” which map to the strategic and tactical projects I’m juggling. Helps me switch btwn contexts
- wtdata 7y ago
  I actually changed to Chrome only for this. I have been looking for months for something like Workona for Firefox but to no avail. I used Firefox for years and I want to continue using it, but for my way of work (multiple tabs open in several spaces and changing computers often) Workona is just great, nothing comes close.
hyperpape 7y ago
This sounds a bit like workona, which is a chrome extension I use. I believe tabs are limited to one category per tab.
- wtdata 7y ago
  Been desperately searching for something similar for Firefox, but no luck so far.
curioussavage 7y ago
I came to share basically the same idea. I know there are extensions but I want some kind of workspace/session support built in so the browser can do stuff like cache tabs in a workspace so I can load a workspace and resume instantly. Switching workspaces should be quick with maybe a UI like ctrl p in sublime text or VsCode or even like the gnome dash. I would pay for a license to use a browser that focuses on being a productivity tool with features like this.

andrewstuart 7y ago

I usually have at least 6 browser windows open with at least 10 or more tabs each. I wish there was a better way to do it. I work on projects for a few days or hours at a time, and maybe only 10 of those tabs are relevant to a given project. I'd like to be able to somehow only have the relevant tabs for my current project or train of thought. Someone suggested I use the people profiles in Chrome which seems a good idea but obviously not good enough cause I'm not doing it.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Many editors have projects where you open a group of documents with associated settings. Browsers have almost everything they need to do this too.
- kurtisc 7y ago
  Editors can assume a level of RTFM that browsers will not. If it's not discoverable enough for someone unfamiliar, it won't make it in.
  - mixmastamyk 7y ago
    There's a menu with "New Project" and "Close Project." Never had to read a manual, for that part anyway.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"I usually have at least 6 browser windows open with at least 10 or more tabs each. I wish there was a better way to do it." Back when Opera was an innovative browser, it had a really useful tab grouping feature which let you achieve the same thing as you describe but without requiring a separate browser instance.
nicoburns 7y ago
Firefox's simple tab groups plugin is pretty good for this.
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ChrisSD 7y ago

The trouble with bookmarks is they take conscious effort to create and maintain. The trouble with history is that it's a soup of every random page you've ever visited. The trouble with tabs is they're a collection of web pages you at one time thought you might get back to, roughly sorted by the time in which you first opened them.

DonHopkins 7y ago
The trouble with tribbles is that they're born pregnant, and can't stop reproducing. Kind of like tabs and bookmarks.
m463 7y ago
The way history is always implemented is also not helpful. Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B. History seems to be recorded as A C E D B But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another. This compaction method also seems to happen across days, destroying the list of everything you browsed on tuesday in order.
- dngray 7y ago
  > Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B. > But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well. It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another. That's personally why I have been using Tree Style Tab (for about a decade now) • https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... • https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > History seems to be recorded as A C E D B I'd expect it to be recorded as A B C D B - if it's recorded like you wrote, it becomes completely illogical. I think I'd prefer your A B C D E D B.
- patrick5415 7y ago

luhn 7y ago

I used to use an extension called Tab Wrangler [1], which would close tabs after being inactive for a period of time. I felt this dealt with the problem of too many tabs surprisingly well—Tabs would quietly disappear as I forgot about them. If I needed a tab back (which was more rare than I would think), Tab Wrangler could show me a list of tabs it had recently closed. I've switched to Firefox a while back and unfortunately cannot find an equivalent, so I'm back to manually wrangling. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...

YaxelPerez 7y ago
Seems like it's been ported to firefox already: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/

aiyodev 7y ago

This seems like a good place to ask. There was a Firefox extension called (edit: not sure if it was Tab Mix Plus or something else) that was discontinued after Firefox 57. It was super productive and still haven't haven't found anything like it to replace it. To be clear, I'm talking about grouping tabs but I'm not talking about the current Firefox feature called "Tab Groups". You had a row of tabs that showed the web pages open in the current group. And you had a second row of tabs that allowed you to switch between tab groups. You could close a tab group and close all the tabs within the group. Has anybody found an alternative even if it's in a different browser? I dislike having multiple browser windows open.

sp332 7y ago
Firefox Panorama? It was built-in for a while then spun off to an extension, Tab Groups, then discontinued. And this kind of feature was made more difficult after the transition to WebExtensions. But it's a popular enough idea that there are still variations, e.g. Simple Tab Groups https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/209/209885.png?modified=1543520966 https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/209/... https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/#&gid=1&pid=16 https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
marcinzm 7y ago
Browsers are moving towards more restricted extensions and don't allow the unlimited UI edits that Firefox used to allow so it's unlikely that an extension would allow that exact functionality. Maybe one of the Chrome/Firefox forks could add it as a base feature. It does bring back memories, I wrote what I think was the first extension that did that type of tab grouping. Was something like 12 years ago and even had the name "Tab Groups."
deleted 7y ago
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morsch 7y ago
Tree style tabs (Firefox) works in much the same way, assuming you have a parent tab for each group. I routinely start a research task from one tab, say a search query, open all interesting results in sub tabs and close the parent tab including all children (ie the group) once I'm done (or I collapse the group when I intend to resume later).

pcurve 7y ago

I recently found in surprisingly difficult to explain the concept of browser tabs to my relatively computer unsavvy 72 year old mother. She can do web searches, read online news articles, and watches Youtubes, but browser tabs were a struggle for some reason.

abacadaba 7y ago
Perhaps relate it to tabbed folders in a file cabinet?
- stan_rogers 7y ago
  ...or good old-fashioned recipe cards. Most card files were arranged with tabs, but a box of recipe cards would be more than familiar to anyone my age or older. (You'd pretty much have to have lived out of cans and/or on restaurant meals to have avoided them.)
  - jpindar 7y ago
    Or a rolodex or a card catalog in the library... these are where the idea came from.
downtide 7y ago
Perhaps keep them clear of the idea. And stick to Windows. Assuming they can do Window management... I've an 84 year old family member, who still doesn't get tabs. Heck they don't really get the Web. And are kind of stuck in their Web Email client. I got an alarming call one day saying they'd hosed all their emails. But it turned out they'd failed to log into their email account, ended up creating a new one, and then wondered why their inbox was empty.
skocznymroczny 7y ago
I try to teach my mother how GUIs work and it's really hard. It's hard enough to teach her that pressing "X" closes the window, but then she opens something like a web browser and it has "X" on every tab, which gets her confused. And worst of all, she can have email client on top of the web browser, which adds additional "X" to think about.

chrisbrandow 7y ago

First tabbed browser = Netcaptor

taneq 7y ago
Huh, I always thought Opera was the first tabbed browser but according to wiki, BookLink Technologies' InternetWorks browser was the first, followed by Netcaptor three years later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History
- V-2 7y ago
  Opera popularized them. The notion that it invented them is a very common misconception though.

frio 7y ago

I'd love to see more publicly available research and experiments in changing the desktop metaphor. We see stuff that makes tweaks around the edges (new context menus, unifying file/cloud presentation, tiling window managers) but very little that radically changes the way we actually interact with computers. For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can easily assemble until that task is achieved. As a spitball idea: Cmd-space, type in "research open sourcing my kindle", and get given a browser and some sort of note collector. Collect the various things from the session into my note, refile the entire stack as a project, and move on to the next task. In the future, I can access the actual project and receive a workspace with terminals, an IDE or whatever else I need to Get the Thing Done, archived versions of the sites I opened, etc. Ideally, the environment would be designed to reduce distractability. That still doesn't feel like a complete idea, but every use case the author has for tabs -- "this is a quick session", "I don't want to lose this page", "I need to remember this in a week" -- seem like they'd be very hard for browsers to do well. Instead, a browser more closely integrated with the OS (which might go a way towards fixing Electron resource consumption to boot) and a uniquely designed desktop environment might be better.

girzel 7y ago
I like the idea that the job of the OS (or really, the DE) is to respond to why we're using our computers. Each application should have its own job, but the DE's job is to help us achieve our intentions.
wlib 7y ago
While it is only a design concept, Mercury OS [1] might interest you. When I first came across it, I was blown away by the idea. It basically makes the user intent first class rather than the application/program. What I mean is that instead of finding a program or application to execute your intention indirectly, you declare your intent to the OS. Then the OS maps your intent to a series of actions which are executed by hooked-in pseudo-functions. It erases the boundary between applications by being almost like an interactive visual version of a declarative programming language. You should read the article rather than trouble yourself with my explanation though... [1] “Introducing Mercury OS” by Jason Yuan https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX

eludwig 7y ago

What I would love is an extension (either FF or Chrome) that allows me to reuse an open, matching tab when I choose a bookmark. For example, I find myself opening a bunch top-level Google News tabs. In a window with 40 tabs, at least 6 or 7 are the top-level Google News page (or NYT homepage). I would love to be able to select my bookmark and have it find an already existing tab that contains an exact match and bring that tab forward. This would reduce (for me) a large amount of tab flotsam. Maybe there is already a way to do this?

mattnewton 7y ago
For me, the chrome search bar also searches my open tabs, and I frequently navigate that way. Is that close enough?
- eludwig 7y ago
  I generally find myself using my favorites menus rather than the url bar. Not sure I could get used to that. Thanks for the suggestion though!
NaOH 7y ago
Not sure what platform you're on, but... Using Keyboard Maestro on a Mac, I have keyboard-based shortcuts for opening specific web pages. If I invoke one of those shortcuts for an already-open site, it is brought to the front instead of being opened again in a new tab.
- eludwig 7y ago
  Hmm..that could work. I do have KM installed. I will check it out.
  - NaOH 7y ago
    I wasn't wholly accurate. An already opened site is brought to the front and reloaded. That could be a critical difference.

ggm 7y ago

If you use a tiling WM, the immediate question which comes up is : can I switch this to a clean single-desk view, or is this neccessarily a tiled plane of n things, and this is one of n? Tabs, are an attempt not to have to switch desktop, or tile the plane. Its a "stack" metaphor, with the least cost exposure of the underlying stack, as a shuffled hand of cards fanned out. Hand of cards, vs one piece of paper per desktop but many desktops, vs I cover the one desk, but all things have to balance the space.

hjk05 7y ago

Trying to solve a problem that isn’t actually a problem. Tabs work fine. “But your using the tabs sort of like bookmarks” is like complaining someone is using a fork/knife combo to eat pasta and wanting to therefore redesign a knife that works more like a spoon.

AnthonBerg 7y ago
The article’s premise is mostly an arbitrary value judgement that a high number of tabs is negative in some way (“ridiculous number”). Notice that there is no concrete definition of what the drawback would be. There’s a strong element of rule-seeking and cleaning instinct at play. Not that there’s anything wrong with that ;)
social_quotient 7y ago
What if the spoon didn’t exist yet? And people were just using the fork and knife.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  People would invent spoon anyway to eat soups. As for pasta, I never understood the whole spoon & fork thing. I tried it, it's not helpful. I do fine with just a fork, thank you.
  - technothrasher 7y ago
    Yeah, I never understood the pasta spoon thing either. I just don't see how it helps anything when you can simply use the plate as a backstop for the fork to roll the pasta correctly and not have hanging strands. Apparently in Italy, the spoon rolling technique is only used by children.

Jordanpomeroy 7y ago

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find that my usage of the web is more like a mind map. In other words, a tree or a directed graph. I open a tab to accomplish something. From there, I reach out in some primordial/human-brain breadth first search of links in order to accomplish my goal, branching off of branches and coming back up to some parent only to branch again. For people like me, a linear set of tabs is indeed the wrong abstraction for the way I use the web.

raihansaputra 7y ago
Do you use any extensions to get the browser to fit your usage?
- grumdan 7y ago
  Tree Style Tab for Firefox is incredibly helpful to me for this kind of usage: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
DonHopkins 7y ago
Here's "iLoci", an iPhone app I developed in 2008 that integrated the web browser component and url bookmarks into a mind map or "memory palace" based on the "Method of Loci", that lets you arrange links, pictures, text and other interactive content into an easily editable 2D navigable maps (the gestural equivalent of a network of pie menus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03ddG3jWF98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci This "MediaGraph" Unity3D app I developed in 2012 also explores the same idea, for arranging and navigating your music collection: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KfeHNIXYUc

aequitas 7y ago

I really hope this concept takes off: https://refresh.study/ https://refresh.study/

Narushia 7y ago
Wow, this is a cool concept. Efficient tab management especially is a feature that should be baked into browsers, there should be no need to install an extension for that.
AstralStorm 7y ago
I'd skip the context sensitivity part. The browser is not a high grade AI that knows what you're doing nor should it attempt to be one.
- woodrowbarlow 7y ago
  you mean the different "spaces" in the video for work, thesis, etc.? i don't think that's AI driven, it looks like the user manually puts a tab into a space and tabs open in the current space by default.
OJFord 7y ago
That's pretty much what I initially thought/hoped Firefox 'containers' were. But it's not, with those you can have X open tabs in Y different containers all in the same window.

mikojan 7y ago

Why would users who do not even understand bookmarks understand anything beyond just keeping dozens of tabs they think they might need

dmoreno 7y ago

As a side note looks like Adobe has a patent(!) on tabs... And it expires today! https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528 https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528

DonHopkins 7y ago
Hurray!!! Indeed it is! >2019-06-14 Application status is Expired - Lifetime Wow, thank you for catching that and pointing it out, so I can celebrate just in time! How did you happen to coincidentally run across that fact today? ;) (I have always believed was illegitimate and invalidated by a lot of prior art, but I didn't realize that its death date was imminent.)
- akovaski 7y ago
  Google patents always shows the current date for that line. It actually expired back in 2014. https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Oh, Google... You mean I should have started rejoicing five years ago??! Well better late than never. At least I don't have to have my Cotton Gin Patent Expiration Party on the same day as my Tabbed Windows Patent Expiration Party.
EForEndeavour 7y ago
Have all tabbed applications and browsers been paying royalties to Adobe? If not, have they technically been in violation of the patent this whole time? What were the real-world implications of this patent?
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Adobe's illegitimate tabbed window patent was intended to fuck over Macromedia. And then later they bought Macromedia. Adobe sues Macromedia over infringement of their patented tabbed palettes (August 10, 2000): https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-infringement-of-their-patented-tabbed-palettes https://www.metafilter.com/2805/Adobe-sues-Macromedia-over-i... >"Adobe filed a lawsuit against Macromedia® alleging infringement of our intellectual property, specifically our patented tabbed palette, which is a key user interface element and method invented by Adobe and incorporated into our products." >"Adobe's tabbed palette patent is Adobe's method of displaying and working with multiple sets of information in the same area of the computer screen. The patented invention allows users to customize how the functions in the product are organized on the workspace. This invention was a significant leap forward for customers' productivity and personalization of the interface." In 1989 the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck supported tabbed nested windows that users could drag around separately on the screen or group together on a visual representation of the PostScript stack, use "direct stack manipulation" to push and pop and rearrange the PostScript stack by dragging, and use pie menus to switch the side of the tab, pull-out to adjust layout parameters, issue commands, etc. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct... Ironic that it was part of a visual interface to Adobe's own PostScript programming language (in Sun's NeWS window system implemented by James Gosling), so they had to pretend not to know about it, in order to fraudulently obtain their tabbed window patent through willful blindness. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willful_blindness I know for certain that at least one high level person at Adobe was aware of it, since I corresponded with Glenn Reid at Adobe about PostScript quite often before during and after its development, and credited his PostScript book and his work on Distillery in the references of that paper. >Adobe Systems; Reid, Glenn C.: PostScript Language Program Design (The Green Book); 1988; Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, Mass. >Reid, Glenn: The Distillery (program); available from ps-file-server@adobe.com There's not much incentive for a company to pay Adobe licensing fees for such an obviously invalid, fraudulent patent. But it costs a huge amount of money and time to challenge a bad patent like that and clean up the hot mess of bullshit that Adobe dumped on the world of user interface design, far beyond my means or the means of most non-giga-corporations.

Traster 7y ago

Man, okay so clearly we all agree there's a problem and it sounds like we all have different ideas for a solution. One of my pet ideas - that I'm yet to see a real implementation of - is a Hacker News comments section style history. Each new session would start a new comments section. Each new manually opened tab would be a top level 'comment' (with timestamp). Each pageload would be a paragraph in that 'comment'. Each new tab opened via a link would be a 'reply' to that comment quoting the 'paragraph' it was opened from. That seems like a good metaphor to me because it solves the traceability of "How did I get to this page". It doesn't solve the UI of tabs though, though maybe it makes it less necessary to keep tabs open.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Tabs Outliner seems to match some of these ideas. I've had it installed some years ago, but didn't end up using it that much. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
- vxNsr 7y ago
  I use it, but not often enough to make a real dent, my issue is that it isn't integrated into the browser, it's a feature that with some UI tweaks could really make everyone a poweruser, the concept itself is powerful but the un-extensibility of chrome (and browsers in general) holds it back from being a true first party app.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Agreed. And it's one of the reasons why I dislike the trend of the browsers being increasingly locked down and non-modifiable. Soon, even to recreate this plugin you'll have to run a parallel fork of a browser.

saketmehta 7y ago

I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Edge. As far as tab management is concerned, it is superior to both Chrome and Firefox.

downtide 7y ago
Can you add a brief explainer?
- rgoulter 7y ago
  I've used Edge for the last couple of weeks. There's a button on the top-left which collects the current tabs in the window and puts them aside. They can be restored later. Personally, I've only used this by accident. But I could see it being useful for "I know I want to come back to these tabs later (e.g. tomorrow), but I want to close the browser / do other things now".
  - downtide 7y ago
    That sounds like a way to save a browser session that comprises of tabs. Perhaps a better UI. Many browsers have had the ability to group/tabs/bookmarks. But it's usually quite clunky.
jmkni 7y ago
Will tabs still work the same way in new ChromEdge?

downtide 7y ago

The history here, is that Opera introduced tabs, and they were cheaper in terms of resources. Tabs in Windows were cheaper than many windows. Then tabs became a sort of replacement for Bookmarks, because bookmark UIs are so so bad. That's my take on it. Gnome 3, started out suggesting that it would be a semantic desktop, allowing groupings associations of activities. That fell by the wayside, so the best thing left is to use something like virtual desktops to separate projects/workflows. But then you are pushed into multiple windows likely with multiple tabs. I use multiple browsers on multiple devices, and bookmarking isn't that nice. I see why people end up using browser syncing and end up in vendor traps. On desktop, I can easily copy paste urls. Perhaps into my own mini-shared db for read it later style groupings. On mobile copying URLS is hell for me. Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. It would need to be more than 'recently used/accessed'. I have tried running Firefox with the bookmark manager open and the history, but it has been really poor performance wise, and it's just not a nice interface. Looking at my tabs today, I have a small grouping of shopping tabs, of things I might be interested in ordering. From about three weeks back. I know if I throw these into bookmarks, and even tag them, they'll still be lost. I should probably have dealt with that there and then. I tend to build up tabs in Firefox, once I hit the width of the browser with tabs and they scroll it becomes UI hell for me. So I try to confine to about 12, but that's easier said than done. And as said I run multiple browsers, at least four on mobile and four on desktop. Throw tabs into the mix and it gets ugly. But if this was reduced to something like a simple list of URLs, with some grouping shared between machines that I could relaunch easily, probably in the same browser I was using previously they'd feel much more manageable. And less crufty. Going back to the shopping example, that's task focused. And it might be accompanied by a few notes written in another app, and I might want to share that with my partner via email etc. Associations have to beyond one piece of software.

292355744930110 7y ago
> Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of your desktop. Sounds like you are describing surf[0] and tabbed[1] from suckless. [0] https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ [1] https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/ https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Tabs are not bookmarks. I can tell you exactly what made me use tabs instead of bookmaking sites: opening a bookmark means making a new connection, new round-trip, loading, parsing and rendering a full page. Having a page open in a tab means it's already there, in exactly the state you left it in. It will still be there if the Internet goes down. It will still be there after it comes back up. It will be there tomorrow, it will be there next week, after hibernating and waking up your computer a dozen times in between. It will be there even if the page is already removed on the server. The difference between a tab and a bookmark is like between a book on your desk vs. in a public library. In the latter case, when you need it, you have to go there and fetch it - not only taking time, but also possibly failing, as it might not be there anymore. Is it a perfect interface? Not really. What I'd really like would be this, + in addition a bookmark feature that actually freezes and snapshots the page I'm on - to get the same behaviour as tabs, only persistent. It shouldn't be hard for browsers to do, given that IME at least some browsers displayed this behaviour at some point when restoring pages after browser crash.

dijit 7y ago
I think this really hits the nail of why I am a tab-collector. If we could store “state” as part of the bookmark instead of just a URL that would go a long way. But additionally, discoverability of bookmarks is also lacking, flipping through tabs is fast and easy but in order to do that with bookmarks you have to know what the domain and title of a page is/was. If you could “preview” a bookmark then it might help a fair bit.
- Mirioron 7y ago
  It baffles me that bookmarks and history browsing in current browsers is still so terrible. In some cases it feels like it has gotten worse compared to a decade ago. Browser history certainly has, because for some stupid reason Chrome deletes your old history. I have no idea why it does it, but it's certainly not to save space.
  - baking 7y ago
    I used to put bookmarks in folders. Now, in Firefox, it takes about six clicks to access those folders, so I stopped using them.

jasode 7y ago

>One thing that kind of interests me is that every now and then I spot someone with a ridiculous number of tabs open. [...] Maybe commenting on their poor organizational skills, I often hover above 50+ tabs open. Every week or so, I catch up enough on the backlog to close some tabs and reduce it to less than 10. But I soon head down another rabbit hole of internet research and it's back up to 50+ open tabs again. The bookmarks UI has extra friction because is a separate area that I don't want to "manage" and that effort isn't worth it unless the webpage is promoted in my mind to "reference status". Having dozens of open tabs is just an easier and a more seamless experience. I often cycle through open tabs with Ctrl+PgUp and Ctrl+PgDn similar to cycling through active windows with Alt-Tab. Bookmarks UI don't have a "cycle" mode. Another problem with booksmarks is that the bookmark_links are not open. The booksmarks manager UI only show the title of the webpage but not what full page rendering is. Titles are often meaningless. Of course, I could manually type in a better title when saving the bookmark... or... just simply not close the tab and consider it part of a "queue" to read later in a few hours or days. It's lazier and easier. Plus the full page already completely rendered visually reminds me why I wanted to read it later. Bookmarks UI obscure the _why_. For the webpages I consider as reference material, I do bookmark those. E.g. weather page for a specific zipcode or a specific Youtube channel. Examples of webpages being categorized into different mental organization buckets: level 1: throwaway content: a trail of leaving a bunch of active tabs open is easier to get to than the friction of navigating the bookmarks UI level 2: reference material that changes: bookmarks for things like weather page, current US Treasury yields, etc. Bookmarks are also useful for syncing/import/export across devices since bookmarking services sync at the level of "bookmarks" and not "open tabs". level 3: reference material archived: webpage saved locally as .MHTML or .PNG -- to ensure I have a copy even if the url is lost from digital rot. Others might use Evernote or Zotero to archive webpages. I do agree that Chrome squishing the tabs into tiny vertical slices makes it harder to use. I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a dock on the side. This would work well for widescreen monitors since many webpages would show useless whitespace on the sides when the browser is full screen.

legooolas 7y ago
> I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a docked on the side. Vertical tabs extensions exist on Firefox, and are one of the major reasons I have stuck with Firefox for a long while. edit -- I use this one : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs-reloaded/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...

spython 7y ago

I just have to link to my blog post on browser tabs: Open tabs are cognitive spaces - https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ I think the next step would be to try and solve context switching between the spaces, making it less of a conscious task.

DonHopkins 7y ago
Oh, just what we need on Hacker News: another Spaces -vs- Tabs War! ;) Xerox PARC harmoniously researched both spaces AND tabs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_2 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw

huffmsa 7y ago

I think it's equivalent to having books open to a page and set to the side of a work area. Whereas a browser bookmark is like it's analog cousin, a mark stuck in the book and returned to the shelf. Tabs allow for better singular focus than stacked windows. I use desktop workspaces/multiple desktops in much the same way I use tabs. If I have multiple monitors, I'll put a group of related applications together in a workspace, but rarely will I put more than a single application on a monitor. Eg editor on one screen, terminal on the next and a browser (UI work) or DB interface on the 3rd. Which is the same way I organize my kitchen when cooking. Recipe on one side, prep in the middle, output on the other.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Tabs on the left and right edges of the windows work much better than top or bottom tabs, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more tabs, and actually read their labels. Users should be able to decide which edge and position each tab is attached to, and move them around and group them as desired. These are the tabbed windows I developed for the multi-window version of UniPress Emacs 2.20 in 1988: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... Users could move the tabs to any edge of the windows in the NeWS PSIBER Space Deck, in 1989: https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-oct... Figure 3 shows the class dictionary of Object, and the instance dictionary of the NeWS root menu: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.g... Figure 7 shows some digit editors, step editors, shift editors, a boolean editor, and a canvas editor: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.gif https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.g... The tabbed window manager for The NeWS Toolkit let users drag tabs to any position along any side of the window: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4 Previous HN postings about tabbed windows: Side tabs are great, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more of them on the screen, to manage more windows. (2014): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726 "As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio." Tabs are at least three decades old now, and they weren't originally restricted to just one edge of the window (2018): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730

m_mueller 7y ago
Opera had side tabs (as far as I remember you could freely choose one edge to display them on). I really miss the old Opera browsing days, it had great functionality such as more keyboard-oriented browsing. E.g. you could bind a key to "fast forward" through pages of a site - it parsed out the paging links to simulate clicks, worked in most forums back in the day.

ximm 7y ago

I used to have many tabs open myself. Not so much for different tasks, but more for "i don't have time for that now, I will read it later". Now I use a firefox extension called "Bookmark Stack" for that. I can easily add the current page to a stack and later restore it. Since it is a stack, the most recent entries are always displayed first. Since these are bookmarks, syncinc is also easy. I wrote that extensions myself, but there are others like it. Since using it, I rarely have more than 10 open tabs. That may not suite every workflow, but it definitely helped me.

alanbernstein 7y ago
This sounds like a good idea, I'll give it a try. Do you find your stack growing consistently? That's what I'd expect for myself.
- ximm 7y ago
  Yes, the stack is growing (currently somewhere around 200). However, I think in terms of resources it's better to have a lot of bookmarks than to have a lot of open tabs. Also there is almost some kind of gamification to try to reduce the number.
Shorel 7y ago
I just send every long article to Pocket. Then I read it in my Kobo. Total win/win in my book.

Mirioron 7y ago

>I don’t think I would remove the tab altogether, but just show me the last few things, treat them as emphemeral and provide an option to explore my current and previous session(s). I would never use a browser that did this. I have many tabs open. I've even started using several (!) browser windows and profiles to have more. Being able to easily go back to previous stuff I've opened is really nice, even if it takes me a year. If I had to use bookmarks instead, then they'd probably stay there. I have many bookmarks that are about 10-15 years old. I don't think I'm ever getting back to those, because they aren't a constant reminder like browser tabs are.

faitswulff 7y ago

An aside, but on firefox you can use the URL bar to search your open tabs by prepending your query with % This works across windows as well. The other one I use even more is ^ which searched browser history. Quite handy.

spenrose 7y ago

There's an old joke about four-wheel drive on cars: instead of getting stuck right when you go off road, it ensures that you'll get pretty far into the woods before getting stuck. IHMO that metaphor applies here. Like the Web, Google, and even the WIMP interface before them, tabs were invented to manage information overload but "succeeded" only in pushing the problem out a layer: "The most sophisticated and efficient users of Google today find that “trying to navigate the growing deluge of data [just within their scientific field] has become a second job.” The United States’ library of scientific papers for health and medicine adds new ones at a rate of two a minute, year round. Like Memex and the Web, Google has solved the problem of published work burying itself unread by pushing it out to a vastly wider layer, one we will perhaps never manage to tame. We have not escaped [Vannevar] Bush’s quandary: Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought [find that] truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential. … publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record." http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/ http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/

kirubakaran 7y ago

This is exactly what I'm working on solving! https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ Automatic bookmarks based on the signals you generate from browsing, history laid out as a tree, tabs remembered with temporal grouping so you don't have to keep them around. Notes and tags, with everything searchable, shareable, and easy to publish. Next up, unification of them all.

ggregoire 7y ago

Browser tabs are the wrong metaphor when used with only 1 window. If you keep unrelated tabs in different windows it makes way more sense and the number of tabs stays relatively low. An obvious use case is to have a window for your work and another one for your personal stuff. You can also open a new window when you start googling stuff about a specific topic (let’s stay “how to do x in Python”). Then, when you got your answer, you just have to close the window with all its tabs.

jules 7y ago

People use tabs as bookmarks and as history and back button. Users want bookmarks and history and the back button, but apparently the tab feature is better at this than the actual features. Maybe browsers should embrace this instead of fighting it. Make tabs better suited as history and bookmarks. Users reflexively middle click and then go to that tab because they don't want to lose the page. The problem is that you lose the pages that you visited in the first place. Maybe the default behaviour of a link shouldn't be to navigate away from the current page and hide the current page behind the back button (where you'll eventually struggle to get back to it) or in history (which also isn't easy to get back to). Maybe the default behaviour of clicking a link should be to open a new tab, so to speak, but to focus it while attaching it as a child to the tab it came from, thus creating a tree of history. Closing a tab just means hiding that part of history. Viewing history is just unhiding those closed tabs. Bookmarking is just reorganising that tree of tabs.

Shorel 7y ago

I remember when Opera (around version 4 or 5) was known as "The Tabbed Browser".

rgoulter 7y ago

I'd think part of the challenge of coming up with the UX of "the right metaphor" is the discoverability and intuitiveness of the solution. Tabs are really obvious. You can do a bunch of stuff with tabs and there UI is so apparent that it doesn't get explained. Apparently the usability threshold for people with 100s of tabs open is (a modern browser's) bookmarking. Any superior solution would need to be more obvious than bookmarks and easier to use than bookmarks.

lordlimecat 7y ago

I'm not clear why the author thinks that his dislike of others usage patterns means that there's a problem in need of solving. If his friends and family are happy with using tabs that way, this seems like a very poor reason for browser vendors to change things up to show them the light of his workflow.

Pete_D 7y ago

I daydream sometimes about having a browser where tabs behave more like buffers in vim or emacs - that is, with no tab bar or particular ordering on open pages, but with them just hidden in the background, with some kind of about:pages interface (like emacs ibuffer-mode) where I could sort/filter them and bring individual ones back to the foreground. (Split panel view would be nice, while we're at it.)