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> from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose

by fouric 6y ago

> from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose context of the previous ones... Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once... > i think browsers could be doing much more than just tabs and bookmarks to help people organize, because right now it seems like the equivalent of a desk with lots of papers strewn around where someone grabs yet another blank peice to start writing on... Yes, I completely agree. I'm working on a piece of software that goes several levels beyond what browsers currently offer for information organization, and (per the topic) it optimizes for CPU consumption at the expense of memory, for the reasons I gave in my comment. However, for the browsers that we have now, bookmarks are much better for organization than tabs. You can tag them, name them, and put them into folders - none of which you can do with tabs.

andrekandre 6y ago
> Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once... as an example, someone asks "hey can you update the appstore screenshots" and while i may still have appstore open on anothet tab, ill open a mew one just for that task, then later somone asks, hey whats up with jira ticket 1234, now i already have 3 tickets open in jira, and i dont wanna disturb those, somill open another tab, same with online docs like confluence, or web searches on google... at some poont the overwhelming number of tabs themselves get to be too much, so clearing context to yet-another-tab, is a way of coping i think... i see this all the time in group meetings btw > I'm working on a piece of software that goes several levels beyond what browsers currently offer for information organization, and (per the topic) that sounds cool. one idea ive had for a while is that sites (like confluence ot jira, or gdocs) are basically apps, so they should be treated as such and automatically grouped together (im windows or tabs) just like native apps...
kinleyd 6y ago
Yes, I think a better way to quickly save and organize bookmarks, addressing needs for both immediate use and for long-term reference would be a good way forward.
nieve 6y ago
> However, for the browsers that we have now, bookmarks are much better for organization than tabs By "browsers we have now" you clearly mean "Chrome, the only browser I care about". Firefox can handle literally thousands of tabs with lower memory than Chrome using one or two dozen due to different trade-offs. Very few people ever use that many, but the presumption that no better should be done on the memory front because your favorite doesn't manage it isn't supported by the facts. Bookmarks aren't used in the same way as tabs by most people and it's telling that your workflow so easily conflates them that you're making criticisms based the rest of us using them differently. I get the impression that what you want bookmarks for would be better done with tab groups for most people? There are certainly a decent number of happy OneTab users out there who're probably closer to your preferred interface than the rest of us, but even on Firefox its userbase is minuscule.
- fouric 6y ago
  > By "browsers we have now" you clearly mean "Chrome, the only browser I care about". False. I use Firefox for all of my browsing, hate Chrome, and only use Chrome as a whole-browser sandbox for Google products. > Firefox can handle literally thousands of tabs with lower memory than Chrome using one or two dozen due to different trade-offs. Yes, and I'm arguing that that's a tradeoff and that's a good thing based on the intent of tabs. > the presumption that no better should be done on the memory front because your favorite doesn't manage it Neither did I say that no better should be done, nor do I actually believe that. Presumptuous today, aren't we. > isn't supported by the facts. The facts are that tabs are intended to be a working set and are optimized for that. If you don't use them as such, you're going against the design of the tool and expecting it to do well, which is insane. It's equivalent to using files on a filesystem like RAM (expecting extremely quick access and no wear over time) and then complaining when they're slow and your SSD wears out in a few weeks. > Bookmarks aren't used in the same way as tabs by most people and it's telling that your workflow so easily conflates them that you're making criticisms based the rest of us using them differently. Correct, because they aren't different. Bookmarks are intended to be used for saving and organizing things for the long term. Tabs are intended to be used for actively working on a task. They're two different things. Thinking that the case where you reasonably want to work on a task that requires dozens of tabs to be open, all at once, all on the same topic, and you switch between all of them very frequently is a common case is completely unsupported by evidence, and logically incoherent. This has nothing to do with my workflow, and everything to do with the design intent of the tool, and proper use of the tool. Again, see the example about using disk as working memory. > I get the impression that what you want bookmarks for would be better done with tab groups for most people? Again, this is something that bookmarks are much, much better optimized for than tabs. Bookmarks can exist in folders - which are probably like tab groups, but first-class, and much better supported - and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be tagged, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be exported to a file, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be renamed, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks are straight-up better at their job then tabs are. This is not "better done with tab groups for most people" - this is "worse than tab groups for everyone". To summarize: working memory is not the same as long-term storage (in the human brain, in operating systems, in physical desks, in the browser, and everywhere). Tabs are for working memory, and optimized for that. Bookmarks are for long-term storage, and optimized for that. Bookmarks are objectively better than tabs for long-term storage in non-performance metrics (can be organized using folders and tags, can be exported/imported, can be renamed) and performance metrics, and you and everyone else who insist on using tabs like bookmarks are (1) doing yourselves a disservice by using the tool wrong and suboptimally and (2) doing everyone else a disservice by demanding that the tool literally be made less optimal to fit your incorrect use of it.
icebraining 6y ago
I find bookmarks literally useless nowadays. For example, currently I'm researching bicycles for my mother. I'm on an online shop, and I just open potential candidates on new tabs, which means they start loading in the background while I keep browsing. And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. When I switch to another task, I can just collapse this tree, and when I get back, the listing will be exactly where I left it, which is particularly useful if the site uses JS search without updating the URL. Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Bookmarks could be useful for a long-term reference storage (months/years instead of days/weeks), but then chances are a bunch of those links will have rotted, so I need to use something that mirrors the content instead (I used Pinboard previously, now I just use the SingleFile addon to store it as a file).
- fouric 6y ago
  > And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. Bookmarks can be categorized with folders and tags - which, together, are much more flexible than tab groups. A tab can only exist in one group/tree at a time, but a bookmark can have infinitely many tags and exist in a tree-like structure (which is what you described) using bookmarks and be relabeled so it's easier for you to find using full-text search. > Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Yes, because bookmarks are meant to be long-term storage, tabs are meant to be working memory, and transient web page state like whether a radio button is checked or not is not intended to be long-term. Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. > if the site uses JS search without updating the URL Then you can just keep that search tab open if you absolutely have to interrupt yourself and go to another task. Bookmarks will do just fine for all the stuff you found. It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them.
  - icebraining 6y ago
dorgo 6y ago
>Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once... I clicked an internal link in this thread (in firefox) and after it loaded (1s) I clicked the back button. 0.7 seconds later I was back but not at the same position. So I had to scroll to find the position to continue to read. I can save 0.7s load time + 5s or 10s of search by opening a new tab instead. Disadvantages of single tab usage (off the top of my head): - additional load time - formular inputs should be preserved, but I wouldn't count on it. - highlighted text is not highlighted any more - server can send me another version (or nonthing 404). So I lose the content alltogether. -
- fouric 6y ago
  That's not an actual example, though. That's an action you took. I was asking for a concrete example of a task (e.g. doing your online banking) that reasonably requires more than a dozen tabs (metaphorically - change that to fit your RAM usage, the actual number matters less than "unbounded" which is what many people use, or the number that would consume all the RAM on your device).
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Tabs and windows are a very convenient UI for maintaining state. Browsers aren't used just to complete one "task" at a time. The "job to be done" isn't "do online banking" or "buy a bike", it's "organize active information". Across virtual dssktops you might have a "finance" window during tax season with several different sites, a window for each ongoing project with dozens of references queued for each, a window for comms (email, chat, social, etc) with half a dozen tabs, a window for news with all the day's threads in tabs, a window of "TODO" tabs with things to buy, a window for gaming, etc.

by fouric 6y ago

andrekandre 6y ago

> Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once... as an example, someone asks "hey can you update the appstore screenshots" and while i may still have appstore open on anothet tab, ill open a mew one just for that task, then later somone asks, hey whats up with jira ticket 1234, now i already have 3 tickets open in jira, and i dont wanna disturb those, somill open another tab, same with online docs like confluence, or web searches on google... at some poont the overwhelming number of tabs themselves get to be too much, so clearing context to yet-another-tab, is a way of coping i think... i see this all the time in group meetings btw > I'm working on a piece of software that goes several levels beyond what browsers currently offer for information organization, and (per the topic) that sounds cool. one idea ive had for a while is that sites (like confluence ot jira, or gdocs) are basically apps, so they should be treated as such and automatically grouped together (im windows or tabs) just like native apps...

kinleyd 6y ago

Yes, I think a better way to quickly save and organize bookmarks, addressing needs for both immediate use and for long-term reference would be a good way forward.

nieve 6y ago

> However, for the browsers that we have now, bookmarks are much better for organization than tabs By "browsers we have now" you clearly mean "Chrome, the only browser I care about". Firefox can handle literally thousands of tabs with lower memory than Chrome using one or two dozen due to different trade-offs. Very few people ever use that many, but the presumption that no better should be done on the memory front because your favorite doesn't manage it isn't supported by the facts. Bookmarks aren't used in the same way as tabs by most people and it's telling that your workflow so easily conflates them that you're making criticisms based the rest of us using them differently. I get the impression that what you want bookmarks for would be better done with tab groups for most people? There are certainly a decent number of happy OneTab users out there who're probably closer to your preferred interface than the rest of us, but even on Firefox its userbase is minuscule.

fouric 6y ago
> By "browsers we have now" you clearly mean "Chrome, the only browser I care about". False. I use Firefox for all of my browsing, hate Chrome, and only use Chrome as a whole-browser sandbox for Google products. > Firefox can handle literally thousands of tabs with lower memory than Chrome using one or two dozen due to different trade-offs. Yes, and I'm arguing that that's a tradeoff and that's a good thing based on the intent of tabs. > the presumption that no better should be done on the memory front because your favorite doesn't manage it Neither did I say that no better should be done, nor do I actually believe that. Presumptuous today, aren't we. > isn't supported by the facts. The facts are that tabs are intended to be a working set and are optimized for that. If you don't use them as such, you're going against the design of the tool and expecting it to do well, which is insane. It's equivalent to using files on a filesystem like RAM (expecting extremely quick access and no wear over time) and then complaining when they're slow and your SSD wears out in a few weeks. > Bookmarks aren't used in the same way as tabs by most people and it's telling that your workflow so easily conflates them that you're making criticisms based the rest of us using them differently. Correct, because they aren't different. Bookmarks are intended to be used for saving and organizing things for the long term. Tabs are intended to be used for actively working on a task. They're two different things. Thinking that the case where you reasonably want to work on a task that requires dozens of tabs to be open, all at once, all on the same topic, and you switch between all of them very frequently is a common case is completely unsupported by evidence, and logically incoherent. This has nothing to do with my workflow, and everything to do with the design intent of the tool, and proper use of the tool. Again, see the example about using disk as working memory. > I get the impression that what you want bookmarks for would be better done with tab groups for most people? Again, this is something that bookmarks are much, much better optimized for than tabs. Bookmarks can exist in folders - which are probably like tab groups, but first-class, and much better supported - and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be tagged, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be exported to a file, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks can be renamed, and tabs cannot. Bookmarks are straight-up better at their job then tabs are. This is not "better done with tab groups for most people" - this is "worse than tab groups for everyone". To summarize: working memory is not the same as long-term storage (in the human brain, in operating systems, in physical desks, in the browser, and everywhere). Tabs are for working memory, and optimized for that. Bookmarks are for long-term storage, and optimized for that. Bookmarks are objectively better than tabs for long-term storage in non-performance metrics (can be organized using folders and tags, can be exported/imported, can be renamed) and performance metrics, and you and everyone else who insist on using tabs like bookmarks are (1) doing yourselves a disservice by using the tool wrong and suboptimally and (2) doing everyone else a disservice by demanding that the tool literally be made less optimal to fit your incorrect use of it.

icebraining 6y ago

I find bookmarks literally useless nowadays. For example, currently I'm researching bicycles for my mother. I'm on an online shop, and I just open potential candidates on new tabs, which means they start loading in the background while I keep browsing. And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. When I switch to another task, I can just collapse this tree, and when I get back, the listing will be exactly where I left it, which is particularly useful if the site uses JS search without updating the URL. Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Bookmarks could be useful for a long-term reference storage (months/years instead of days/weeks), but then chances are a bunch of those links will have rotted, so I need to use something that mirrors the content instead (I used Pinboard previously, now I just use the SingleFile addon to store it as a file).

fouric 6y ago
> And using Tree-Style Tabs, this makes them all "children" of the listing tab, which would be lost information if I bookmarked them instead. Bookmarks can be categorized with folders and tags - which, together, are much more flexible than tab groups. A tab can only exist in one group/tree at a time, but a bookmark can have infinitely many tags and exist in a tree-like structure (which is what you described) using bookmarks and be relabeled so it's easier for you to find using full-text search. > Bookmarks lose all the memory except for the URL and page title. Yes, because bookmarks are meant to be long-term storage, tabs are meant to be working memory, and transient web page state like whether a radio button is checked or not is not intended to be long-term. Web page state is supposed to either be stored server-side or client-side using cookies or HTML5 local storage - which persist after the tab is closed. > if the site uses JS search without updating the URL Then you can just keep that search tab open if you absolutely have to interrupt yourself and go to another task. Bookmarks will do just fine for all the stuff you found. It's extremely unlikely that you're going to have more than a few of these tasks that all absolutely require page state that isn't present in the URL or through local storage and you're accumulating them faster than you can complete them.
- icebraining 6y ago

dorgo 6y ago

>Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once... I clicked an internal link in this thread (in firefox) and after it loaded (1s) I clicked the back button. 0.7 seconds later I was back but not at the same position. So I had to scroll to find the position to continue to read. I can save 0.7s load time + 5s or 10s of search by opening a new tab instead. Disadvantages of single tab usage (off the top of my head): - additional load time - formular inputs should be preserved, but I wouldn't count on it. - highlighted text is not highlighted any more - server can send me another version (or nonthing 404). So I lose the content alltogether. -

fouric 6y ago
That's not an actual example, though. That's an action you took. I was asking for a concrete example of a task (e.g. doing your online banking) that reasonably requires more than a dozen tabs (metaphorically - change that to fit your RAM usage, the actual number matters less than "unbounded" which is what many people use, or the number that would consume all the RAM on your device).
- nitrogen 6y ago
  Tabs and windows are a very convenient UI for maintaining state. Browsers aren't used just to complete one "task" at a time. The "job to be done" isn't "do online banking" or "buy a bike", it's "organize active information". Across virtual dssktops you might have a "finance" window during tax season with several different sites, a window for each ongoing project with dozens of references queued for each, a window for comms (email, chat, social, etc) with half a dozen tabs, a window for news with all the day's threads in tabs, a window of "TODO" tabs with things to buy, a window for gaming, etc.