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Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aw

Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

rohan1024 6y ago
On my 1080p monitor most of websites still keep white spaces on either side so this makes sense.
- zo1 6y ago
  I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Reading text with 1920px 100% seems to horrible. I prefer narrower width.
razster 6y ago
That’s a great addon. To be honest this would work great in a piece of software my company creates. Our clients can add there own custom tabs, this would help greatly...
matsemann 6y ago
Can't remember why, but I ended up using Sidebery instead of Tree Style Tabs. So that's also a nice alternative.
- klohto 6y ago
  I wasn’t aware of Sidebery, but it looks way better than TST. How is the performance? With TST I notice it doesn’t “hibernate” older tabs (only if you restart FF). EDIT: Damn! I'm blown away by Sidebery. The amount of customization and native looks is awesome. There is only a slight problem when compared to TST: It does not preserve tab grouping when parent tab is closed.
  - eppsilon 6y ago
    There is another extension called Auto Tab Discard that integrates with TST. I'm going to check out Sidebery too though...TST is a little rough at times.
  - dorian-graph 6y ago
    I switched from TST to Sideberry many months ago and have had no performance issues with quite a large number of tabs open.
gnicholas 6y ago
Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible. It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.
- mirimir 6y ago
  Yeah, when I was working on a project that involved interacting with ~25 WebGUIs, TST was a life saver. Especially the "load all tabs" option.
- behnamoh 6y ago
  As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a piece of software is the keyboard shortcuts it supports. More keyboard is usually better. Another feature which I like is tab pinning. It's esp. useful if you're playing/running something in the background (YT music, Jupyter notebooks, etc.) Finally, I tend to use "session buddy", which is another extension that saves the current state of tabs. I can save them and quit Chrome. Later, if I'm looking for a certain tab, I can just search for it in session buddy's saved sessions.
  - slfnflctd 6y ago
    Session Buddy has been very helpful for me also! I can get dozens of tabs out of my face in seconds if I need to really focus on one or three things exclusively. It's not super often that I go back through the tabs I store, but the peace of mind of knowing where they are is wonderful. I used to do this with text files (shudder).
- KingOfCoders 6y ago
  As a tab Horder I also use FF, though it gets very slow with 100 tabs after some time on OS X (iMacPro).
uhryks 6y ago
Vivaldi browser supports it out of the box, and vertical is even the default iirc. It's thank to it I got used to vertical tabs and I cannot go back. While it has the drawback of making tabs hoarding easier, just having some tabs open for documentation, GitHub, test pages, quickly brings me to a point where horizontal tabs' title are irrelevant and I have to guess tabs by their favicon. On top of that, most screens are 16:9 and we're reading almost exclusively vertical websites and horizontal tabs take up vertical screen space.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Last time I tried Vivaldi, the vertical tabs were not 'tree style'. By that, I mean they were all listed directly underneath each other rather than indented to show from where they were open. Take my current Hacker News browsing: https://imgur.com/a/p3w77RJ https://imgur.com/a/p3w77RJ Do they indent like this? This is a really important aspect of tree style tabs because it adds another dimension of information. It also means that I can just minimise that tree of HN tabs down when I'm looking at something else.
  - castillar76 6y ago
    It's my one complaint about Vivaldi's implementation, yep: you can "stack" tabs, but this creates an absurdly tiny target space to click between tabs, and there's no way to create tab trees instead. It would be lovely to be able to create them, because I often create trees of tabs when browsing sites like HN: I pop tabs open behind HN as I see interesting links, and then click down the tree to go through the sites themselves.
infinityplus1 6y ago
I used to use tree style tabs too but it is too slow and laggy. I've trying alternatives and settled on Sideberry as of now. It's way faster albeit a little buggy. Some major bugs have been fixed and I'm very satisfied. I would recommend trying it.
deleted 6y ago
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nikita2206 6y ago
My personal experience was that neither Firefox’s pioneering alternative to what Chrome announces here (tab groups), nor tree style tab extension were convenient enough to use. With tab groups you obviously very quickly neglect trying to group newly created tabs and even if you, it’s not very helpful (except for sand boxing - that’s a nice thing to have). Tree style tabs were just a pain in the ass, it was constantly causing my tabs to jump around when I opened them, it seems like it was trying to reorder my tabs in the horizontal tab bar so that the ordering would mimic the tree leaves while the vertical tab bar was just useless to me, maybe simply because I could not get used this layout. I ended up using stash tab extension, as I often have to concentrate on researching one specific thing and while I do that I don’t need any other unrelated tabs to be open, this allows me to retroactiavely group all opened tabs into different stacks and name each of them and then just stash them away like you’d do with git stash, they don’t take up any memory after that and I can return to the entire stash at some point by clicking a single button that will effectively do a git pop of the stash.
- nneonneo 6y ago
  I just killed the horizontal tab bar after installing Tree Style Tabs (it's a quick trip to edit a profile CSS file and is quite well documented on the TST github page). The tree tabs are really all you need. Tree tabs work just as well with 5 tabs as they do with 50 (or, heck, even 500). I use them as a mix of short-term bookmarks, active browsing contexts, trains of thoughts, etc. It has quite fundamentally changed the way I browse around the Internet, and I can simply never use Chrome or Safari the same way again. I often similarly need to research some particular thing a bunch. With tree tabs, one parent tab contains the main context, and every time I open a new link in a new window it will appear as a child. In the end it's a big tree of tabs with one root tab, with the tree giving a nice hierarchical organization based around where the tabs came from. TST gives you the ability to group multiple tabs together ("stacking" them), and then you can rename the group and collapse it (or, for more permanence, bookmark the entire tree).
colordrops 6y ago
I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs. This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.
- padenot 6y ago
  > Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content. Try focusing the URL bar in Firefox and prefixing your query with '%'. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... shows more prefixes like this. It does not search the content of the page, but is super useful still.
  - andrewaylett 6y ago
    You need a space after the '%', which always confused and annoyed me. But TIL: the special character doesn't need to be a prefix! It only needs to be separated from other characters using a space. Makes much more sense now.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      Apparently you don't! I just tested that on 76.0 (64-bit) on Windows, and it works without a space.
  - TheArcane 6y ago
    The worst part is that % cannot search across containers I'm baffled how firefox hasn't figured this out yet
Non24Throw 6y ago
> I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature
- whymauri 6y ago
  That's a great point. On my end, I do all my tab management by maintaining separate desktops for different broad topics (school, work, personal). Then I'll have different windows (history seminar, security engineering). And then it just becomes a whole mess and I keep very rough "version control" through note-taking apps. I used to compress dozens of tabs into a bookmark folder with a date and topic, but now I just have dozens of those folders collecting dust. I often end up in the same situation you do when I mass-close tabs, except I might have to actively open so many tabs to do so that it actually becomes a strain on my computer. All that said, I'm fully aware this is mostly my fault for being a tab collector/hoarder. Edit: right now, at the end of the semester when I don't have much school work content open, I still have six Chrome windows. Yesterday I culled about 20 arxiv PDFs I had slowly accumulated since last August (lol).
- jaflo 6y ago
  I am not sure if this will work for you, but you can move the tabs next to each other and click on a tab, press shift, then select another one and all tabs in between will be selected. Press Ctrl-W and it will close all of those tabs at once.
alwillis 6y ago
The first browser I used with vertical tabs was OmniWeb, which originally ran on NeXTSTEP back in the day. Fast forward to now; it’s still available for macOS 10.12+ from the Omnigroup: http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb?pk_vid=258c19059951b0d81589438607d85dff http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb?pk_vid=258c19059951...
- aloisdg 6y ago
  Opera did it too mid-2000. Maybe earlier. I dont know. I was too young before to remember.
maciekmm 6y ago
Shameless plug. I made the ContainerTabsSidebar firefox addon[0], which is inspired by the TST. It groups tabs based on firefox privacy containers, which means every container has an isolated cookie store. I'm a tab hoarder and developed it to work for such "use-case". It's very similar to the groups presented, but displays tabs vertically. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tabs-sidebar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tab...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Very cool. I use Container Tabs so I can be logged into multiple AWS accounts simultaneously and this will be cool because they're sort of contexts. I wish I could see whole-desktop contexts but I'll settle for this. I'm going to try out your thing.
- 0mn1 6y ago
  Shameless plug, but Vivaldi does this and so much more natively...since beta however many years ago. Haven't touched firefox since.
  - shock 6y ago
    I'm not aware of Vivaldi having functionality similar to Firefox containers. Please elaborate.
    - deelly 6y ago
      Vivaldi Profiles. Only difference is that in Vivaldi each Profile use separate window (as far as I know).
      - SparkyMcUnicorn 6y ago
        I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as Chrome's profiles functionality. I tried it out for a week, but it's not quite as robust as Firefox container tabs. When I need Chromium, I use Brave.
hansdieter1337 6y ago
I switched to the FF extension “tree tab”. it’s more our less the same, but it has groups (like these chrome groups) you can select on the left side of the tree tab
bosswipe 6y ago
I'm also a Tree style devotee. Besides the organizational super-powers I find it helpful on wide laptop screens where vertical space is at more off a premium than horizontal.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
Agreed. Honestly, I don't think any of the available interfaces are ergonomic enough for a serious tab collector like me. But there's another application in which I also collect hundreds - sometimes thousands - of open pages: Emacs. And there are solutions there that help you manage the load just fine. Here's the UI I'd love to have for my tabs: 1) All tabs are hidden by default. 2) A keyboard shortcut (or a UI button) brings up a list of tabs (tree-style, not flat) that I can do an incremental, fuzzy search on by immediately starting to type. The default selected tab is the one next to the current one, in the order of opening. 3) Another keyboard shortcut brings a keyboard-driven tab management interface, that looks like this (with apologies to mobile users): MRL Name Age Domain Category Full URL --- ---- --- ------ -------- ---------- Coming to Chrome: a new... 30m news.ycombinator.com HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175207 ↳ Emacs: introduction to... 15m youtube.com Video https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k Messenger 2d messenger.com IM https://messenger.com/t/zuck static mesh editor bounds 1d google.com Search https://google.com/search?<lots of line noise> ↳ [HELP] Could someone... 1d reddit.com Reddit https://reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/<stuff> ↳ QJX2FGt.png 1d i.imgur.com Image https://i.imgur.com/QJX2FGt.png < lots of other entries> In that interface, I want to be able to sort and filter by any of the visible column, mark them directly or by a pattern-match on any of the columns, and then issue commands like: unload marked tabs, delete marked tabs, reparent tabs under a different one, show all marked in a new browser window (or transfer to an existing one), bookmark selected tabs, add/remove tabs from "permanent session", download marked tab(s), etc. Or, in Emacs terms, 2) is the equivalent of "switching buffers" with any of the (many) incremental search completion plugins, and 3) is the equivalent of ibuffer (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k). I'm tempted to start working on an extension like this.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Given how Microsoft turned itself around perhaps Edge team can implement something like tree tabs.
tigroferoce 6y ago
The idea is not bad, but I agree that it does not scale well. I try to keep all the tabs related to a specific task/project in a Firefox window and have multiple windows, one per taks/project. However, it quickly becomes tedious to open the set of windows (with relative tabs) and software need for a certain task/project (shameless plug #1, see this previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823). To at least avoid closing windows, but not to have my desktop cluttered, I minimize them (on a Mac), but then I find it difficult to reopen the exact window I might need. To mitigate this issue I (shameless plug #2) did a small app that shows a big cover so that it is easy to find the window when minimized. It still is under development, so lots of bugs and few features. If you want to give comments, its https://cver.vernizzis.it/ https://cver.vernizzis.it/ :-)
AlphaSite 6y ago
My favourite feature in safari is it’s tab garbage collection. Where it just closes unopened tabs after 1 week.
- solarkraft 6y ago
  Without asking? That'd get me pretty confused/mad.
  - jeromegv 6y ago
    Well you need to enable the option. If that fits you, it's pretty convenient. On Mobile tabs just get to accumulate and I don't have time/interest to close them all.
solarkraft 6y ago
There are lots of tree style tab fans in here, I am one of them. Hey, guys! I am curious how you organize other things. Do you think in trees in other places (like using Dynalist or Workflowy for notes)? I think many more concepts are fundamentally hierarchical and should be exposed to the user as such (trees everywhere!). What do you think?
- loopbit 6y ago
  Yep, my todo lists are all trees. Even when I'm writing a document, I first put the table of contents as a tree and then fill in the different sections :) I have one exception, though. Mind-mapping. I will use mind mapping tools for todos and notes. But for real mind mapping I use full blown graphs.
zorbash 6y ago
As a "tab collector" myself and after having tried some vertical tab implementations, I have been wondering why mainstream browsers choose to ignore this problem. I wanted something which would let me quickly query open tabs, search my history and bookmarks and all without touching the mouse. So I released an extension which does exactly that[0] and here's a screenshot[1]. Surfing the web can me more intuitive. Chrome's upcoming tab grouping feature shifts the burden completely to the user and doesn't necessarily save the user any clicks. It looks like the Chrome designers went for a quick win, letting the user nest tabs, so that they will no longer complain about the browser being unusable after 30 tabs or so. I think they're missing the job to be done. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tefter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tefter [1]: https://i.imgur.com/y1HfvI2.png https://i.imgur.com/y1HfvI2.png
awll 6y ago
In my case, I found that the whole concept of managing tabs just becomes moot at some point. The only extension I use to deal with the load of tabs I have open is funnily enough vimium. When you press <shift-T> the omnibar opens and you can search your open tabs and immediately jump to them, all without leaving your keyboard. This is way quicker than manually going through your tab list and searching for the right one.
- teekert 6y ago
  My way of dealing with it is closing the browser and reopening it. It feels like taking a deep breath and starting over, stockpiling useless things...
- LeartS 6y ago
  Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice. If you have 2 tabs or 2000 tabs it doesn't matter, going to a tab it's always a sub-second operation. It is kinda native, at least in firefox: CTRL+L opens the address bar and on there you can search between open tabs. In my opinion it just needs some small UI improvements because at the moment the visual indicators to differentiate between open tab, search, history item, favorite in the results are not clear enough and the results are (or appear) mixed.
  - Kliment 6y ago
    Try this: ctrl-L, type % type space type search term. It restricts the search to open tabs only.
    - LeartS 6y ago
      Didn't know that, great tip!
    - 6y ago
johnnymellor 6y ago
For TST in Chrome I've been very happy with Tabs Outliner (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...). As well as a great tree, you can mix live tabs/windows with frozen ones that don't consume RAM, and this is all reliably persisted across restarts. Tabs Outliner is a separate window, since Chrome extensions can't add sidebars, so rather than using it as a tabbar replacement I tend to have multiple windows with less than 10 tabs, and open Tabs Outliner when I want a coherent overview (e.g. to quickly skim through my tab titles before closing them in bulk).
cabalamat 6y ago
> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much. I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription. Also I note that Google's web page breaks using the down-arrow key to scroll, so that's just another piece of reflexive shittiness Google are forcing on web users.
- nayuki 6y ago
  I noticed the broken down-arrow scrolling too, in both Chrome and Firefox. Shame on Google for this anti-accessibility. Up-arrow, page-up/down still work, which is strangely asymmetric.
aloer 6y ago
I dislike tree style tabs because a typical website is built for consumption by users sitting in the middle in front of it. This is especially annoying when using a laptop and suddenly every website is off center to the way you sit/use keyboard and trackpad because of the tab sidebar. Hiding the sidebar is no option either because a) with most extensions the site would flicker because the tree is not an overlay but takes away real space from the viewport b) and if it is an overlay, learning the spatial tab structure is much harder if its not visible at all times It's interesting that the default Firefox behavior is to use tab overflow if too many are shown in the top tab bar. You need to scroll to get spatial understanding and this is the main reason I am not using Firefox. Chrome OTOH will allow many more tabs to fit (with smaller icons/tab handles) and eventually cuts off the icons if it doesn't fit anymore. At the very least it gives you a better spatial overview of where you put which tab full disclosure: I have currently 37 open chrome windows with 550 tabs on a MacBook with 16gb RAM. This works extremely well because of the The Great Suspender extension. I have not yet found any other way that helps with organizing tabs and is better than OS X spaces + separate windows + a fixed horizontal tab bar. I have great spatial awareness over projects (OS X spaces), time (order of tabs) as well as content separation (chrome windows) Apparently I am what the article calls a tab collector :)
inshadows 6y ago
In old Firefox it was possible to have multiple rows and variable width tabs. So there was no horizontal overflow and tabs could have been wide enough so that title fit into each. I wonder if it's possible to get this back.
- noisem4ker 6y ago
  It is still possible. See https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Theme#user-content-multirow-tabs-and-other-functions https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them... Design-wise, it's still a more sane layout than the single row scrolling on overflow. It's also the solution most other programs and GUI toolkits use, with browsers being the exception I can't explain.
andrewaylett 6y ago
Firefox also has a drop-down at the end of the tab bar that lists all the tabs in the window. I used to use TST, but have fallen away as the native functionality (between the drop-down and the awesome bar) suffices. Currently on 304 tabs over 4 windows :).
unicornporn 6y ago
My personal Tree Style Tab record is over 600 simultaneous tabs. It ran without a hitch and it was still easy to navigate. I would never use a browser without vertical tabs in trees.
_0ffh 6y ago
I've been using the Simple Tab Groups extension [1] in Firefox for some time, and to my taste it's the best option out there. [1] https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups
SeanDav 6y ago
As a fully paid up member of the tab collectors club, I mourn the demise of Tab Mix Plus. Not found anything which beats it, although some of the tree-style tab solutions are not bad.
otakucode 6y ago
Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.
jerrygoyal 6y ago
wish if there's anything similar to TreeTabs in chrome. I'm currently using OneTab
- ntp85 6y ago
  What keeps you from using Firefox, if you don't mind my asking?
  - jerrygoyal 6y ago
    i use it for frontend development (most users use chrome) and also chrome's deep intigration with my android phone (send tab, password manager, sync etc). i know it's a tradeoff for privacy but the whole google ecosystem works together so that's the call I'm willing to take
maverick74 6y ago
Conex ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/ ) works with horizontal tabs strip but has the advantage that it can hide all tabs that don't belong to the current container. Now, if only Firefox would improve the speed of hiding and showing tabs used for container switch................. (btw, does anyone know of a bug report related to this improvement???)
MadafakinBATMAN 6y ago
On an average how many categories and tabs do you have open during heavy web usage?

rohan1024 6y ago

On my 1080p monitor most of websites still keep white spaces on either side so this makes sense.

zo1 6y ago
I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Reading text with 1920px 100% seems to horrible. I prefer narrower width.

razster 6y ago

That’s a great addon. To be honest this would work great in a piece of software my company creates. Our clients can add there own custom tabs, this would help greatly...

matsemann 6y ago

Can't remember why, but I ended up using Sidebery instead of Tree Style Tabs. So that's also a nice alternative.

klohto 6y ago
I wasn’t aware of Sidebery, but it looks way better than TST. How is the performance? With TST I notice it doesn’t “hibernate” older tabs (only if you restart FF). EDIT: Damn! I'm blown away by Sidebery. The amount of customization and native looks is awesome. There is only a slight problem when compared to TST: It does not preserve tab grouping when parent tab is closed.
- eppsilon 6y ago
  There is another extension called Auto Tab Discard that integrates with TST. I'm going to check out Sidebery too though...TST is a little rough at times.
- dorian-graph 6y ago
  I switched from TST to Sideberry many months ago and have had no performance issues with quite a large number of tabs open.

gnicholas 6y ago

Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible. It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.

mirimir 6y ago
Yeah, when I was working on a project that involved interacting with ~25 WebGUIs, TST was a life saver. Especially the "load all tabs" option.
behnamoh 6y ago
As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a piece of software is the keyboard shortcuts it supports. More keyboard is usually better. Another feature which I like is tab pinning. It's esp. useful if you're playing/running something in the background (YT music, Jupyter notebooks, etc.) Finally, I tend to use "session buddy", which is another extension that saves the current state of tabs. I can save them and quit Chrome. Later, if I'm looking for a certain tab, I can just search for it in session buddy's saved sessions.
- slfnflctd 6y ago
  Session Buddy has been very helpful for me also! I can get dozens of tabs out of my face in seconds if I need to really focus on one or three things exclusively. It's not super often that I go back through the tabs I store, but the peace of mind of knowing where they are is wonderful. I used to do this with text files (shudder).
KingOfCoders 6y ago
As a tab Horder I also use FF, though it gets very slow with 100 tabs after some time on OS X (iMacPro).

uhryks 6y ago

Vivaldi browser supports it out of the box, and vertical is even the default iirc. It's thank to it I got used to vertical tabs and I cannot go back. While it has the drawback of making tabs hoarding easier, just having some tabs open for documentation, GitHub, test pages, quickly brings me to a point where horizontal tabs' title are irrelevant and I have to guess tabs by their favicon. On top of that, most screens are 16:9 and we're reading almost exclusively vertical websites and horizontal tabs take up vertical screen space.

aembleton 6y ago
Last time I tried Vivaldi, the vertical tabs were not 'tree style'. By that, I mean they were all listed directly underneath each other rather than indented to show from where they were open. Take my current Hacker News browsing: https://imgur.com/a/p3w77RJ https://imgur.com/a/p3w77RJ Do they indent like this? This is a really important aspect of tree style tabs because it adds another dimension of information. It also means that I can just minimise that tree of HN tabs down when I'm looking at something else.
- castillar76 6y ago
  It's my one complaint about Vivaldi's implementation, yep: you can "stack" tabs, but this creates an absurdly tiny target space to click between tabs, and there's no way to create tab trees instead. It would be lovely to be able to create them, because I often create trees of tabs when browsing sites like HN: I pop tabs open behind HN as I see interesting links, and then click down the tree to go through the sites themselves.

infinityplus1 6y ago

I used to use tree style tabs too but it is too slow and laggy. I've trying alternatives and settled on Sideberry as of now. It's way faster albeit a little buggy. Some major bugs have been fixed and I'm very satisfied. I would recommend trying it.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nikita2206 6y ago

My personal experience was that neither Firefox’s pioneering alternative to what Chrome announces here (tab groups), nor tree style tab extension were convenient enough to use. With tab groups you obviously very quickly neglect trying to group newly created tabs and even if you, it’s not very helpful (except for sand boxing - that’s a nice thing to have). Tree style tabs were just a pain in the ass, it was constantly causing my tabs to jump around when I opened them, it seems like it was trying to reorder my tabs in the horizontal tab bar so that the ordering would mimic the tree leaves while the vertical tab bar was just useless to me, maybe simply because I could not get used this layout. I ended up using stash tab extension, as I often have to concentrate on researching one specific thing and while I do that I don’t need any other unrelated tabs to be open, this allows me to retroactiavely group all opened tabs into different stacks and name each of them and then just stash them away like you’d do with git stash, they don’t take up any memory after that and I can return to the entire stash at some point by clicking a single button that will effectively do a git pop of the stash.

nneonneo 6y ago
I just killed the horizontal tab bar after installing Tree Style Tabs (it's a quick trip to edit a profile CSS file and is quite well documented on the TST github page). The tree tabs are really all you need. Tree tabs work just as well with 5 tabs as they do with 50 (or, heck, even 500). I use them as a mix of short-term bookmarks, active browsing contexts, trains of thoughts, etc. It has quite fundamentally changed the way I browse around the Internet, and I can simply never use Chrome or Safari the same way again. I often similarly need to research some particular thing a bunch. With tree tabs, one parent tab contains the main context, and every time I open a new link in a new window it will appear as a child. In the end it's a big tree of tabs with one root tab, with the tree giving a nice hierarchical organization based around where the tabs came from. TST gives you the ability to group multiple tabs together ("stacking" them), and then you can rename the group and collapse it (or, for more permanence, bookmark the entire tree).

colordrops 6y ago

I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs. This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.

padenot 6y ago
> Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content. Try focusing the URL bar in Firefox and prefixing your query with '%'. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplete-firefox#w_changing-results-on-the-fly https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... shows more prefixes like this. It does not search the content of the page, but is super useful still.
- andrewaylett 6y ago
  You need a space after the '%', which always confused and annoyed me. But TIL: the special character doesn't need to be a prefix! It only needs to be separated from other characters using a space. Makes much more sense now.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Apparently you don't! I just tested that on 76.0 (64-bit) on Windows, and it works without a space.
- TheArcane 6y ago
  The worst part is that % cannot search across containers I'm baffled how firefox hasn't figured this out yet

Non24Throw 6y ago

> I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature

whymauri 6y ago
That's a great point. On my end, I do all my tab management by maintaining separate desktops for different broad topics (school, work, personal). Then I'll have different windows (history seminar, security engineering). And then it just becomes a whole mess and I keep very rough "version control" through note-taking apps. I used to compress dozens of tabs into a bookmark folder with a date and topic, but now I just have dozens of those folders collecting dust. I often end up in the same situation you do when I mass-close tabs, except I might have to actively open so many tabs to do so that it actually becomes a strain on my computer. All that said, I'm fully aware this is mostly my fault for being a tab collector/hoarder. Edit: right now, at the end of the semester when I don't have much school work content open, I still have six Chrome windows. Yesterday I culled about 20 arxiv PDFs I had slowly accumulated since last August (lol).
jaflo 6y ago
I am not sure if this will work for you, but you can move the tabs next to each other and click on a tab, press shift, then select another one and all tabs in between will be selected. Press Ctrl-W and it will close all of those tabs at once.

alwillis 6y ago

The first browser I used with vertical tabs was OmniWeb, which originally ran on NeXTSTEP back in the day. Fast forward to now; it’s still available for macOS 10.12+ from the Omnigroup: http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb?pk_vid=258c19059951b0d81589438607d85dff http://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omniweb?pk_vid=258c19059951...

aloisdg 6y ago
Opera did it too mid-2000. Maybe earlier. I dont know. I was too young before to remember.

maciekmm 6y ago

Shameless plug. I made the ContainerTabsSidebar firefox addon[0], which is inspired by the TST. It groups tabs based on firefox privacy containers, which means every container has an isolated cookie store. I'm a tab hoarder and developed it to work for such "use-case". It's very similar to the groups presented, but displays tabs vertically. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tabs-sidebar/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/container-tab...

renewiltord 6y ago
Very cool. I use Container Tabs so I can be logged into multiple AWS accounts simultaneously and this will be cool because they're sort of contexts. I wish I could see whole-desktop contexts but I'll settle for this. I'm going to try out your thing.
0mn1 6y ago
Shameless plug, but Vivaldi does this and so much more natively...since beta however many years ago. Haven't touched firefox since.
- shock 6y ago
  I'm not aware of Vivaldi having functionality similar to Firefox containers. Please elaborate.
  - deelly 6y ago
    Vivaldi Profiles. Only difference is that in Vivaldi each Profile use separate window (as far as I know).
    - SparkyMcUnicorn 6y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as Chrome's profiles functionality. I tried it out for a week, but it's not quite as robust as Firefox container tabs. When I need Chromium, I use Brave.

hansdieter1337 6y ago

I switched to the FF extension “tree tab”. it’s more our less the same, but it has groups (like these chrome groups) you can select on the left side of the tree tab

bosswipe 6y ago

I'm also a Tree style devotee. Besides the organizational super-powers I find it helpful on wide laptop screens where vertical space is at more off a premium than horizontal.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

Agreed. Honestly, I don't think any of the available interfaces are ergonomic enough for a serious tab collector like me. But there's another application in which I also collect hundreds - sometimes thousands - of open pages: Emacs. And there are solutions there that help you manage the load just fine. Here's the UI I'd love to have for my tabs: 1) All tabs are hidden by default. 2) A keyboard shortcut (or a UI button) brings up a list of tabs (tree-style, not flat) that I can do an incremental, fuzzy search on by immediately starting to type. The default selected tab is the one next to the current one, in the order of opening. 3) Another keyboard shortcut brings a keyboard-driven tab management interface, that looks like this (with apologies to mobile users): MRL Name Age Domain Category Full URL --- ---- --- ------ -------- ---------- Coming to Chrome: a new... 30m news.ycombinator.com HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175207 ↳ Emacs: introduction to... 15m youtube.com Video https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k Messenger 2d messenger.com IM https://messenger.com/t/zuck static mesh editor bounds 1d google.com Search https://google.com/search?<lots of line noise> ↳ [HELP] Could someone... 1d reddit.com Reddit https://reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/<stuff> ↳ QJX2FGt.png 1d i.imgur.com Image https://i.imgur.com/QJX2FGt.png < lots of other entries> In that interface, I want to be able to sort and filter by any of the visible column, mark them directly or by a pattern-match on any of the columns, and then issue commands like: unload marked tabs, delete marked tabs, reparent tabs under a different one, show all marked in a new browser window (or transfer to an existing one), bookmark selected tabs, add/remove tabs from "permanent session", download marked tab(s), etc. Or, in Emacs terms, 2) is the equivalent of "switching buffers" with any of the (many) incremental search completion plugins, and 3) is the equivalent of ibuffer (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k). I'm tempted to start working on an extension like this.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

Given how Microsoft turned itself around perhaps Edge team can implement something like tree tabs.

tigroferoce 6y ago

The idea is not bad, but I agree that it does not scale well. I try to keep all the tabs related to a specific task/project in a Firefox window and have multiple windows, one per taks/project. However, it quickly becomes tedious to open the set of windows (with relative tabs) and software need for a certain task/project (shameless plug #1, see this previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823). To at least avoid closing windows, but not to have my desktop cluttered, I minimize them (on a Mac), but then I find it difficult to reopen the exact window I might need. To mitigate this issue I (shameless plug #2) did a small app that shows a big cover so that it is easy to find the window when minimized. It still is under development, so lots of bugs and few features. If you want to give comments, its https://cver.vernizzis.it/ https://cver.vernizzis.it/ :-)

AlphaSite 6y ago

My favourite feature in safari is it’s tab garbage collection. Where it just closes unopened tabs after 1 week.

solarkraft 6y ago
Without asking? That'd get me pretty confused/mad.
- jeromegv 6y ago
  Well you need to enable the option. If that fits you, it's pretty convenient. On Mobile tabs just get to accumulate and I don't have time/interest to close them all.

solarkraft 6y ago

There are lots of tree style tab fans in here, I am one of them. Hey, guys! I am curious how you organize other things. Do you think in trees in other places (like using Dynalist or Workflowy for notes)? I think many more concepts are fundamentally hierarchical and should be exposed to the user as such (trees everywhere!). What do you think?

loopbit 6y ago
Yep, my todo lists are all trees. Even when I'm writing a document, I first put the table of contents as a tree and then fill in the different sections :) I have one exception, though. Mind-mapping. I will use mind mapping tools for todos and notes. But for real mind mapping I use full blown graphs.

zorbash 6y ago

As a "tab collector" myself and after having tried some vertical tab implementations, I have been wondering why mainstream browsers choose to ignore this problem. I wanted something which would let me quickly query open tabs, search my history and bookmarks and all without touching the mouse. So I released an extension which does exactly that[0] and here's a screenshot[1]. Surfing the web can me more intuitive. Chrome's upcoming tab grouping feature shifts the burden completely to the user and doesn't necessarily save the user any clicks. It looks like the Chrome designers went for a quick win, letting the user nest tabs, so that they will no longer complain about the browser being unusable after 30 tabs or so. I think they're missing the job to be done. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tefter https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tefter [1]: https://i.imgur.com/y1HfvI2.png https://i.imgur.com/y1HfvI2.png

awll 6y ago

In my case, I found that the whole concept of managing tabs just becomes moot at some point. The only extension I use to deal with the load of tabs I have open is funnily enough vimium. When you press <shift-T> the omnibar opens and you can search your open tabs and immediately jump to them, all without leaving your keyboard. This is way quicker than manually going through your tab list and searching for the right one.

teekert 6y ago
My way of dealing with it is closing the browser and reopening it. It feels like taking a deep breath and starting over, stockpiling useless things...
LeartS 6y ago
Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice. If you have 2 tabs or 2000 tabs it doesn't matter, going to a tab it's always a sub-second operation. It is kinda native, at least in firefox: CTRL+L opens the address bar and on there you can search between open tabs. In my opinion it just needs some small UI improvements because at the moment the visual indicators to differentiate between open tab, search, history item, favorite in the results are not clear enough and the results are (or appear) mixed.
- Kliment 6y ago
  Try this: ctrl-L, type % type space type search term. It restricts the search to open tabs only.
  - LeartS 6y ago
    Didn't know that, great tip!
  - 6y ago

johnnymellor 6y ago

For TST in Chrome I've been very happy with Tabs Outliner (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...). As well as a great tree, you can mix live tabs/windows with frozen ones that don't consume RAM, and this is all reliably persisted across restarts. Tabs Outliner is a separate window, since Chrome extensions can't add sidebars, so rather than using it as a tabbar replacement I tend to have multiple windows with less than 10 tabs, and open Tabs Outliner when I want a coherent overview (e.g. to quickly skim through my tab titles before closing them in bulk).

cabalamat 6y ago

> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much. I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription. Also I note that Google's web page breaks using the down-arrow key to scroll, so that's just another piece of reflexive shittiness Google are forcing on web users.

nayuki 6y ago
I noticed the broken down-arrow scrolling too, in both Chrome and Firefox. Shame on Google for this anti-accessibility. Up-arrow, page-up/down still work, which is strangely asymmetric.

aloer 6y ago

I dislike tree style tabs because a typical website is built for consumption by users sitting in the middle in front of it. This is especially annoying when using a laptop and suddenly every website is off center to the way you sit/use keyboard and trackpad because of the tab sidebar. Hiding the sidebar is no option either because a) with most extensions the site would flicker because the tree is not an overlay but takes away real space from the viewport b) and if it is an overlay, learning the spatial tab structure is much harder if its not visible at all times It's interesting that the default Firefox behavior is to use tab overflow if too many are shown in the top tab bar. You need to scroll to get spatial understanding and this is the main reason I am not using Firefox. Chrome OTOH will allow many more tabs to fit (with smaller icons/tab handles) and eventually cuts off the icons if it doesn't fit anymore. At the very least it gives you a better spatial overview of where you put which tab full disclosure: I have currently 37 open chrome windows with 550 tabs on a MacBook with 16gb RAM. This works extremely well because of the The Great Suspender extension. I have not yet found any other way that helps with organizing tabs and is better than OS X spaces + separate windows + a fixed horizontal tab bar. I have great spatial awareness over projects (OS X spaces), time (order of tabs) as well as content separation (chrome windows) Apparently I am what the article calls a tab collector :)

inshadows 6y ago

In old Firefox it was possible to have multiple rows and variable width tabs. So there was no horizontal overflow and tabs could have been wide enough so that title fit into each. I wonder if it's possible to get this back.

noisem4ker 6y ago
It is still possible. See https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Theme#user-content-multirow-tabs-and-other-functions https://github.com/Izheil/Quantum-Nox-Firefox-Dark-Full-Them... Design-wise, it's still a more sane layout than the single row scrolling on overflow. It's also the solution most other programs and GUI toolkits use, with browsers being the exception I can't explain.

andrewaylett 6y ago

Firefox also has a drop-down at the end of the tab bar that lists all the tabs in the window. I used to use TST, but have fallen away as the native functionality (between the drop-down and the awesome bar) suffices. Currently on 304 tabs over 4 windows :).

unicornporn 6y ago

My personal Tree Style Tab record is over 600 simultaneous tabs. It ran without a hitch and it was still easy to navigate. I would never use a browser without vertical tabs in trees.

_0ffh 6y ago

I've been using the Simple Tab Groups extension [1] in Firefox for some time, and to my taste it's the best option out there. [1] https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups

SeanDav 6y ago

As a fully paid up member of the tab collectors club, I mourn the demise of Tab Mix Plus. Not found anything which beats it, although some of the tree-style tab solutions are not bad.

otakucode 6y ago

Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.

jerrygoyal 6y ago

wish if there's anything similar to TreeTabs in chrome. I'm currently using OneTab

ntp85 6y ago
What keeps you from using Firefox, if you don't mind my asking?
- jerrygoyal 6y ago
  i use it for frontend development (most users use chrome) and also chrome's deep intigration with my android phone (send tab, password manager, sync etc). i know it's a tradeoff for privacy but the whole google ecosystem works together so that's the call I'm willing to take

maverick74 6y ago

Conex ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/conex/ ) works with horizontal tabs strip but has the advantage that it can hide all tabs that don't belong to the current container. Now, if only Firefox would improve the speed of hiding and showing tabs used for container switch................. (btw, does anyone know of a bug report related to this improvement???)

MadafakinBATMAN 6y ago

On an average how many categories and tabs do you have open during heavy web usage?