35 ms·

On Browser Tabs

121 points by aqader 6y ago

userbinator 6y ago
I'm probably in the minority because I never use tabs much ---- I prefer multiple separate (overlapping) windows that I can size and arrange as desired, because I often use the information from multiple sites simultaneously. I've seen a lot of others who flip back and forth between two tabs many times, trying to compare them, and have never thought they could open two windows and put them next to each other. Of course, I've been using browsers before they had tabs, so it could be experience, but I wonder if the current "single content" model has severely degraded users' ability to compare and contrast different sources of information.
- kroltan 6y ago
  I found myself using separate windows more during my time with a heavily customized Manjaro install, where I used a tiling window manager and had lots of ways of quickly adjusting my window layout with minimal extra information needed. I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible (even if macOS manages to be even worse). There are a few third-party applications to sort of emulate tiling WMs, but they're very clunky and software likes to act "surprised" about it and often have weird behaviours. That, and the requirement of window chrome. That being said, for your specific example of flipping through two tabs, I still find that very useful as a visual diff: get both tabs on the same scroll position and spam Ctrl+Tab and your brain will quickly generate a diff between both. The ideal solution would be actual universal diffing tools, but that's far-fetched.
  - Raphmedia 6y ago
    > I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible Have you tried Microsoft's FancyZones? I find it works well enough to be worth installing on all my windows computers. https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overview https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overv...
    - kroltan 6y ago
      Yes, though I prefer http://windowgrid.net/ http://windowgrid.net/ since I always keep relayouting windows around, at least when I tried, FZ had me going out of my way to change layouts a little bit.
  - userbinator 6y ago
    I've tried tiling and it just doesn't feel right to me --- not being able to resize windows to the right dimensions is frustrating. I guess that's one thing I agreed with Microsoft about; the earliest versions of Windows had a tiling WM. Also, by comparison I meant reading comparison, not visual comparison. But even the latter is easier with separate windows: resize them to the same dimensions, then put them on top of each other and increase the transparency of the top one.
- jevogel 6y ago
  Try the Stack browser. Instead of tabs, you have side-by-side, side-scrollable, resizable panes. It makes it so much easier to interact with multiple sites at once. https://getstack.app/ https://getstack.app/
  - iKlsR 6y ago
    Windows is saying it's ransomware. Odd.
ssivark 6y ago
I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser interface. This is one reason I’m really excited about the Nyxt browser. PS: Part of it might be FOMO, but part of it is also that these links represent certain threads of thought/exploration and are like bookmarks of things to revisit at a later time. Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew, but that’s not a fully satisfactory solution. I think we need tools & interfaces to better (more holistically) accommodate people’s intellectual workflows; what we have today is geared much more towards consumption. As an example: why can’t we easily group tabs into projects and have bidirectional sync between the browser and project related resources (Eg: Some markdown/org file, or sync with Evernote/Notion/Roam, etc) so that whenever I resume working on the project, I get a warm start with the context mapped out (continuing from the previous session). And I want a much tighter relationship between my tabs and my project notes (akin to bibliography of references), including annotations on webpages, etc. If we are to use the web more effectively, the ecosystem surrounding browsers needs to grow up and help us get there.
- teekert 6y ago
  This is quite a staggering amount imo... Why not just avoid painstaking and just start fresh? Is this a form of FOMO? Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs. If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?
  - rhn_mk1 6y ago
    > search engine for your tabs Yes please! I've recently got interested in Recoll, which might not know what a tab is, but does search web history. > you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs Caching is valuable. URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.
teekert 6y ago
I keep my tabs under control and always set FF to start with a fresh session so I loose all tabs every day. Works for me. The new FF for android though forces a new tab to get to my favorite websites and does not allow for a clean session after close, so I now have 47 open, mostly the same 4 websites :s
- kevincox 6y ago
  Currently there is a "clear private data on quit" which you can use. Just uncheck everything but tabs. You have to manually select "Quit" from the menu to trigger it. Beta versions have the option to close tabs after a set inactivity time which I can't wait to land.
  - teekert 6y ago
    Thanx for the tips but I can't wait until hitting the address bar just gives me an overview of my favorite sites again. I don't need any new tabs, I only used them to store thing for later (as in next) reading.
bennyp101 6y ago
For some reason once the tab list reaches the other side of the monitor it makes me feel uneasy, so I close down any tabs that I don't need open. I've never found the need to have more than 8 or so tabs open really - and if I want to compare things, then I just open another browser window and pop it next to it, or on a different monitor. I'm sure there are very good reason for people that have 50+ tabs open - everyones brain works differently after all - but it makes my brain itch!
- II2II 6y ago
  My uneasiness comes from a realization that too many tabs means that I am not prioritizing tasks. Sure enough, a quick review of the tabs results in most of them being closed since what felt important at the moment was not important in retrospect. As for people who have 50+ tabs open, I am left wondering if they are going about things in an effective manner. At least in Firefox, it is easy to select a bunch of tabs and bookmark them for future reference. It is also easy to load up all of those bookmarks at once when needed. It is a lot easier to deal with the eight tabs from Project A and the dozen tabs from Project B independently than it is to deal with all twenty at once. (Granted, this could be made easier. The big drawback with bookmarks is that they are a snapshot in time, rather than the reflection of a dynamic project.)
ezluckyfree 6y ago
Briefly I was looking for an addon that completely disabled tabs, and removed the tab bar. Every action that would normally open a new tab would instead open a new window. Since I use a tiling WM, the idea was that this would make it easier to navigate through my tabs, and also keep my attention from branching so often. If I had something that I found useful enough to keep around, I can move it to another virtual desktop. Unfortunately, I never found such an addon, and I'm still not set on that workflow in general.
- mac01021 6y ago
  I use a Chrome extension called "New Tab, New Window". It doesn't reclaim the screen real estate occupied by the tab bar, but it has the behavior you want.
  - ezluckyfree 6y ago
    oh, cool. thanks!
cassepipe 6y ago
Doesn't Firefox searches through open tabs while you type in the (indeed) awesome bar ? I don't see where the problem is really. Plus the session manager extensions I have tried are not "stiff", they work well.
jjice 6y ago
I've also been known to have an absurd amount of tabs across multiple browser windows. Upgrading to a new machine with quite a bit more RAM didn't help either. About once a day, I'll go through, and without looking, close all my browser windows. If I try to go through and choose which tabs to close individually, I get a hoarder mentality where I can find the use in everything. "Actually, maybe I do want to read that article about raising your own livestock", I'd think to myself knowing full well I live in a city. Worse case scenario, I close something that will take 15 seconds to get back to when I realize I need it.
bntyhntr 6y ago
I've settled on vertical tabs, and use an extension that limits it to the number that fit on my screen without scrolling, which is around 30. I also no longer use bookmarks. I use the browser's autocomplete of sites I've been to before, and failing that either remember the complete url or give up. I used to do a lot of bookmarking and a lot of tabs but I found neither really added value for me. If I don't remember the site, I probably don't need to be there. That said, I don't try to really convince others to do the same (except vertical tabs) cuz I recognize not everyone will find the same value I do in it.
sevencolors 6y ago
I never understood how folks end up with 20+ (100+ !?) tabs just hanging around ALL the time. For me it's so much visual noise. I can see it happening when you're in the midst of research or troubleshooting. But when I'm done or have solved my issue I'll note in my PR where i found solutions or add the useful pages to my bookmark service (raindrop). Then close all the tabs!
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  Me too, I average 6-7 open at a time.
- spurgu 6y ago
  It's not visual noise to me. I currently have: * 7 Brave (personal) windows with ~3-5 tabs each * 6 Chrome (work) windows with ~3-5 tabs each All of these windows relate to different things. For example whenever I check HN I fire up a new window. I might not have 2 hours of time to read/research everything interesting I happen to find so I just leave that window open for later. Whenever troubleshooting I do the same as you, a window can get up to 20 or something tabs, but once the problem is solved those get closed. Or if there are interesting tabs in there that warrant future research, they get grouped in a new window. On Mac I Cmd+tab through apps and Option+tab through windows of a specific app (don't remember what the default combo is). Or I swipe three fingers down to see all app windows. And I also use Tab Switcher[0], which allows me to Cmd+Shift+K to fuzzy search all open tabs. This setup is not optimal, but it's not that messy/problematic for me. [0] http://flowapps.co/tabswitcher/ http://flowapps.co/tabswitcher/
- growt 6y ago
  I'm one of those "tab-addicts". The problem is that I use Tabs for everything: reading list, history, bookmarks. Right now I have 8 pinned tabs for email, calendar, messengers and such things. Then I have a couple of interesting news articles etc. that I left open to read later. I also left open some of my work/research flows (so 3-5 tabs each that belong to the same project topic) that I didn't really finish or was just to lazy to close.
  - 6y ago
catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
I like that the author mentioned “goal-oriented”. Perhaps intent is another way to phrase it. There are few websites we visit with intent, and others are for just “browsing”. I’ve been working on Amna as a way to help with intent driven work. Instead of opening a frenzy of tabs, it makes you write what you’re working on first, and then provides you a browser or multiple browsers to help you. It’s cool because when you have to get back to something, you just click on a task, and everything comes back. E.g right now I’m working on editing a website and sending out a newsletter, those are two completely separate items, and when looked at individually, they only have like 4 tabs each. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthunt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...
beaker52 6y ago
I've noticed that as I've gotten older my tab behaviour has changed. When I was younger, I used to operate an extension that'd kill tabs I hadn't accessed in the last hour. Chrome doesn't really give you the same control over tabs. I've tried firefox but it's noticeably slower in comparison.
dilpreet_singh 6y ago
I really appreciate the author's take on the issue. Internet is such an integral part of our lives, and so many people's computer usage is all about just using a browser. Which is why it's interesting that even after about 25 years of the first browser, we have almost the same interface to accessing the INTERNET. And it definitely can be made better! We should think about solving this problem
fmajid 6y ago
When I am working on a project, e.g. researching a laptop purchase, I will open a new window to act as a container for all those research-related tabs, then when I am done the entire window can be closed. Vivaldi has a notion of tab-within-tabs, but the UI is very subtle and the tabs^2 very small and fiddly to reach with a mouse, thereby violating Fitt's Law.
- wlesieutre 6y ago
  Firefox used to let you have multiple sets of tabs within one window and cycle between them, completely hiding the inactive ones. Effectively it felt like you had several browser windows within the one window, and picked which window was active. Looks like this started way back in Firefox 4, and the UI was a bit all over the place, but I liked using it (mainly by keyboard shortcut): https://www.computerworld.com/article/2514927/firefox-4-beta-4-opens-a-new-panorama.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2514927/firefox-4-beta...
  - bityard 6y ago
    Panorama was a firefox killer feature for me. So slick, so useful. I _really_ enjoyed the ability to switch between different sets of tabs depending on which project I was focusing on at the moment. The Panorama UI made it quick, simple, and painless to do. It seems like most users simply use multiple browser windows, but I've honestly never been able to figure out how that works effectively when you're juggling multiple projects at once: when I'm not working on a particular project, I want it completely gone and (safely) hidden away so that it doesn't distract from my current project. And then of course Firefox killed the Panorama feature. With the rationalization that no one used the feature and that it would be better implemented as an extension. Except that the extension went unmaintained after a few months. And then later, Firefox broke the APIs that made Panorama possible. The net result being that in the past few years, my productivity in the browser plummeted. There are various tab management addons for Firefox but almost all of them have the following downsides: * geared towards manually saving and restoring tabs (I don't want manual anything, I just want to switch between groups of tabs with a couple of clicks) * not actively maintained * buggy (as in, loses tabs for useful content that in some cases took a long time to find) So far the one I've had the most luck with recently is Tiled Tab Groups (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro...). I don't use the UI for it, though, unless I'm creating a new group. I just click on the icon in the toolbar and select the group I want. It's still on probation as far as I'm concerned but it hasn't crashed or lost tabs on me yet.
k__ 6y ago
I always close my tabs as quickly as possible. "Tabs Zero" so to speak. I would value a better reopen closed tab feature. Going further back and allowing me specify which closed tab I want back.
- kevincox 6y ago
  Isn't this just browser history? I close tabs very aggressively (usually hovering around Tabs Zero if you exclude the always open (like calendar and messaging apps) and regularly fish things out of my history.
  - k__ 6y ago
    Yes. I guess, I want a browser history UI that's better integrated with tabs.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Browser history currently does not preserve local history. All modern browsers, on the other hand, will preserve history for the tab when you "undo close". To observe difference, do the following: - Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518507 , click 'parent', close tab, undo close tab, hit back. Where are you? - Load the page that was the 'parent', hit back. Where are you? Each tab is a history tree. The history page, on the other hand, is a linearized chronological list. They are non-equivalent.
kirubakaran 6y ago
Wouldn't be great to save all the open tabs, and not only restore them (there are tons of browser extensions that do that), but also treat them as a collection to share, restore in a different computer etc? I built that feature into Histre : https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ if you're interested.
csours 6y ago
I don't have a big problem with browser tabs, but I have 60 tabs open in Notepad++ and I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind.
dredmorbius 6y ago
Tabbed browsing: a lousy band-aid over poor browser document and state management (2014): ...What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session. I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and/or making noise. That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a permanent quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk. Browser history isn't it either: it's too comprehensive, is insufficiently contextualized, doesn't record relationships between pages (other than, maybe, relative time). On mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page was in the highly constrained display available. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content (though some such as HN do this well). There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with which you're currently working open in front of you. I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration.... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_... My present Firefox tab count is > 1550.
- catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
  want to try amna?? It helps you break things down by task. I’d say it’s still super early, but seems like the right balance of random browsing and collecting items as part of a context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthunt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Interesting. Is there a demo / walkthrough? OK, found & am reading https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/ https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/ My preference would be CLI / terminal centric. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if_the_web_was_filesystemaccessible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...
kevincox 6y ago
Tabs were a mistake. They were a hack to work around window managers that lacked enough features and now we have a "window manager" inside of a window manager. Probably most apps have their own tab interface which works differently from every other app. We should rethink the design, improve the window managers, then remove tabs. I don't think it will ever happen, but it would be nice.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  There was a Compiz extension that permitted window tabbing like this. I did not enjoy its use. I attempted to use it to create "environments". It was less effective than using workspaces because workspaces allowed full windowing.
  - kevincox 6y ago
    KWin does (did?) this as well. I think the biggest problem is that if you open a new "window" it doesn't know that you want it to show as a new tab on the same window. I think that this is largely because X doesn't actually know which window opened the new window. I used the KWin tabs a fair amount, but they didn't fill the same use case as browser tabs. It would be interesting to see this implemented, of course you would also need to seriously patch the browser.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      It might have been KWin and I misremembered.
bityard 6y ago
For anyone else who considered Panorama to be their favorite feature of Firefox before they killed it, the closest replacement for it I've found so far is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro.... It's not at all perfect from a UI standpoint, but it hasn't lost my tabs or crashed the browser yet.
unabst 6y ago
+1 for Cluster. I settled for OneTab like many, until it deleted all my tabs. Happened to many people, and is fatal. Then I used Session Buddy. Only wished it had drag and drop, which is when I found Cluster. Drag and drop is important for when you branch out from the group and for weeding and consolidating tabs. Cluster works great with a big screen too which is what I have. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cluster-window-tab-manage/aadahadfdmiibmdhfmpbeeebejmjnkef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cluster-window-tab... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...
kodablah 6y ago
I made a browser to deal with this [0]. I've basically abandoned work on it, but I still use it as my daily driver (granted I don't push my fresh builds up as much as I used to and there are a couple of bugs). It provides me such a huge benefit because I just swipe my hand to destroy dozens of browser tabs. And all the while I can see the name, have them hierarchical, change their groups, etc. I go on deep GitHub or Wikipedia dives and close or collapse that entire line of thought so easily. Tabs are essentially mind maps. I wish a larger vendor with real time/money would invest in a similar many-tab model. The concept is of course directly taken from the tree-style tab extension in FF, but even that extension has suffered since the move off of XUL, and I can't easily close a ton of tabs just by dragging over the close buttons anymore (among other things). 0 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ https://cretz.github.io/doogie/
onion-soup 6y ago
Chrome exists over a decade yet they still haven't figured out how ctrl+Tab should work.
ajstiles 6y ago
I built the "first tabbed browser", NetCaptor, back in 1997. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th... My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem. I primarily use Brave and effectively start fresh every day. I might get up to 20 open tabs at any given time, and I sometimes use tabs as a sort of Inbox that needs to be cleared. But sometimes, it’s best to declare tab bankruptcy and start over.
- chris_st 6y ago
  Good point. I've lost track of the number of start-ups that proposed some kind of "Search your browser history" functionality, which, to be honest, I've wished for myself. But I don't know of any that have even made it to released-product stage.
  - asdff 6y ago
    What about something with HTTrack as you browse and grep?
    - chris_st 6y ago
      Yeah, that seems like a step in the right direction -- don't think I want all the images, just the text, but I'd guess that's an option. Wonder if you could hook that in through a local proxy...
  - Reelin 6y ago
    Does Memex resemble what you were wishing for? (https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/ https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/)
    - chris_st 6y ago
      Not really -- What I'd like would be something that doesn't require me to annotate, in advance, what I want to find again. I often think, "I know I read something about this a while back!" and then I try to think which website I'd seen it on. The ones I've read about just watch your whole browsing history and let you search that. I also couldn't get it to work when I tried a while ago (which I imagine they've fixed).
conductor 6y ago
How do people manage to manage hundreds or even thousands of open tabs? And most importantly, why? Are they using tabs instead of bookmarks? Usually I have no more than ten. Even when searching/researching something it doesn't get more than twenty - open all the interesting search results on the first search page, usually that's enough to find whatever I'm looking for. If not, tabs are being closed one by one or are being bookmarked with appropriate tags. Repeat for the next page of search results.
- meowface 6y ago
  Because my browser is like my brain and my life: disorganized and full of loose threads. I imagine there's likely a correlation with ADHD, as well.
code_duck 6y ago
It baffles me to hear how many people use tabs - some vast amount open at once. I open and close pages as I read them, and only have what's relevant to me open at any time. To me this is what Reading List and bookmarks are for.
Ayesh 6y ago
Firefox containers, paired with Simple Tab Groups helped me to fix this. I work on multiple projects and it's common to have multiple Github and alike issues, and other pages open. With Simple Tab Groups, you can select to group and only show tabs that belong to just one group. It's easy to move tabs between groups. When the tab group is switched, tabs from the other group are offloaded from memory, effectively making them bookmarks. Pinned tabs (webmail client, a note taking app, and music player in my case) are shown in all tab groups. I know it helped a lot, because I use Chrome on my Android, and I always have ":D" in my tab button because I have more than 100 tabs open.
kasperset 6y ago
Although not a solution for tab problem, apps like Historyhound may help to some extent getting over that losing all the information fear.
weirdmn 6y ago
(am taking BASB course) would be great if all my open tabs could be bucketed into the PARA framework somehow...
forgotmypw17 6y ago
This is why I set my browser to vertical tabs, which makes much more sense, IMO, especially given today's widescreen trend. I can fit up to about 50 tabs per window before they scroll, which is usually more than enough, and I can still read their text. And all I had to do to achieve this was type `:set tabs.position right`...
zyxzevn 6y ago
The many open tabs are related to states between: 1. bookmarking, 2. will look at it any minute/day now. 3. need to read/watch further when I got time. 4. page no longer available on site. 5. music to play in the background. So what a browser mainly needs a a way of bookmarking that also stores some of the state of the page. Like position on page, selection, video/audio-position, saved to local cache.
Const-me 6y ago
I close them often, middle-click on the header or Ctrl+W. I also miss opera's hotkey to close all tabs except the active one. When I'm doing some research where I need lots of them at the same time, I use OneNote or sometimes Word to keep the links, adding a line or 2 of text about that link.
dzhiurgis 6y ago
Latest safari 14 screwed up tabs. Now when you’ve got lots and icons enabled the little text snippet disappears so you’ve got aesthetically looking tab icon. Useless! Must be the worst browser tab experience, especially on iOS. If there’s one company that can unfuck browsers its ironically Microsoft...
dangom 6y ago
Interesting that nobody mentioned not using tabs at all. I adapted the chrome.css of my firefox to hide tabs altogether, so I can get more screen real state. That paired with Vimium allows me to hit T to get a list of all open tabs, which I can then incrementally search. If I want to open a link from history, I hit O instead.
- pkulak 6y ago
  I've done that as well and it's great. Well, if I really need tabs, I use the tabbing that's built into my window manager (Sway). But it makes me really consider if I need it, and then it's easy to pop the "tabs" out, move them to different work spaces, etc. It's such a darn-clean look too. https://i.imgur.com/UvJbEMG.png https://i.imgur.com/UvJbEMG.png
- mmphosis 6y ago
  #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }
- bbbobbb 6y ago
  How do you deal with websites that hijack your vimium shortcuts (gmail.. or event where it does not work - new tab blank page..)
  - dangom 6y ago
    You can deactivate it for sites where it interferes with your workflow. I've become used to switching tabs when it doesn't work, or hitting Cmd+L and searching from the address bar. To be precise, I use a combination of Ctrl+tab, Cmd+L, T and O, in that order of frequency. I don't mind repeated tabs, so sometimes I'll just do a web search for whatever item I wanted again.
sbmthakur 6y ago
I have had around 200 tabs opened in my mobile. This was till I realized that this is just FOMO and is due to lack of focus. I created a strict there should be no more than 5 tabs in the browser at the end of each week. Things have been much better since then.
colordrops 6y ago
How about "history as a service"? Your history is encrypted and synced remotely. Every page/tab you've got open, you can add tags and notes. So even if you close everything, you should be able to find what you visited before based on your custom annotations, even if it was years ago. Then, no fear of closing all the tabs.
Arkdy 6y ago
Their links are dead now, but Tangram browser (2015)* was an Android browser that tried to break up researching on the web into three distinct UI tabs. 1. Seek: If you give it a search term it'll display the results as list of links 2. Sort: Any links or images you click on while in Web goes into a list called the Stack. I think it acts like your working memory in the same way that a traditional window of tabs might, and the act of sending links to the stack may be related to the "seeking circuit". Links in the stack can be clicked on to navigate to, or swiped right to be sent to the Store section. 3. Store: Links here are saved from the stack as you use the app, and you can create folders. * https://imgur.com/gallery/AwBTxlZ https://imgur.com/gallery/AwBTxlZ Here's an imgur post I just made with screenshots of the walk-through and a gif of usage. I don't use it anymore because it's been unsupported for years so I'm assuming that it's not exactly secure, but I loved the idea.
ImaCake 6y ago
A solution that seems to work for me is keep notes instead. If I am interested in something I stick a link and some brief notes in a markdown document and make sure to include as many descriptive words as possible. That way I can grep my notes folder later to look for the note I made. For home I keep a separate file per day. For work I have a monolithic "general_notes.md" which I add stuff to sequentially. Generally work notes need to be found quickly, so one file makes sense. For home I am not so time pressured, so grepping through multiple files is an acceptable solution.
ksec 6y ago
I hope Mac Safari Teams gets to read the link and HN's comments, they ignore the power users and try to dump down Mac Safari to iOS. With Safari 14, Fav icon is now on by default, you would think this is great, except the Tab now shrinks to Icon size once you have a dozen or more. Instead of the old Fav Icon + Text Description in the Tab. i.e How Firefox behaves. They also got rid of Top Site, and instead it is now an iOS Safari design like Start Page. You can tell by their much narrower design compared to your widescreen Mac. One way to save memory if you have a few dozens or hundreds of Tabs, is to unload them by quitting Safari and Start again with previous session. This way all the Tabs are unloaded by default, they are there sitting idle. Basically just a list of Tabs. ( This also works on Chrome and Firefox ) But if you somehow finger swipe or accidentally press the Show Tab Overview, Safari will reload every single tab you have in the background just to create a Thumbnails for your Tab. If you have 1600 Tabs like some here, you will quickly run out of memory and start paging hundreds of GBs of data to your SSD. Basically shortening your SSD's life span. And to those questioning why the large number of Tabs. I mean on one hand HN keeps pushing everything should be SaaS and Web Apps. Project Planning, Email, Social Media.. etc. On the other you have Research Notes, subject I need to research that instantly open a dozen tabs or Amazon / Online Shopping. Or simple daily RSS where I just Command Click all the news item I want to read. You also have sessions you want to read but you dont have the time right now. All we really need is a Show All Tab Page as a list instead of Thumbnails once Tab number goes over certain number, with a Search Field at the top that hopefully search the Title and some Meta Data. I dont want to kill my 2015 MacBook Pro. It may be the last MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard judging by the way things are going.
terrywang 6y ago
Have been having the same problem but now getting less painful as a quick TL;DR style (many articles start to adopt starting with a TL;DR at the top) read (to get the core ideas) and save useful ones with Diigo (replacing del.icio.us? to achieve read it later) worked well, effectively reduced FOMO. > NOTE: Session Buddy for Chrome is handy when suffering from power loss (MBP hang, Linux workstation power cord got kicked off, etc.).

121 points by aqader 6y ago

I'm probably in the minority because I never use tabs much ---- I prefer multiple separate (overlapping) windows that I can size and arrange as desired, because I often use the information from multiple sites simultaneously. I've seen a lot of others who flip back and forth between two tabs many times, trying to compare them, and have never thought they could open two windows and put them next to each other. Of course, I've been using browsers before they had tabs, so it could be experience, but I wonder if the current "single content" model has severely degraded users' ability to compare and contrast different sources of information.

kroltan 6y ago
I found myself using separate windows more during my time with a heavily customized Manjaro install, where I used a tiling window manager and had lots of ways of quickly adjusting my window layout with minimal extra information needed. I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible (even if macOS manages to be even worse). There are a few third-party applications to sort of emulate tiling WMs, but they're very clunky and software likes to act "surprised" about it and often have weird behaviours. That, and the requirement of window chrome. That being said, for your specific example of flipping through two tabs, I still find that very useful as a visual diff: get both tabs on the same scroll position and spam Ctrl+Tab and your brain will quickly generate a diff between both. The ideal solution would be actual universal diffing tools, but that's far-fetched.
- Raphmedia 6y ago
  > I think managing windows in say... Windows is terrible Have you tried Microsoft's FancyZones? I find it works well enough to be worth installing on all my windows computers. https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overview https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys/wiki/FancyZones-Overv...
  - kroltan 6y ago
    Yes, though I prefer http://windowgrid.net/ http://windowgrid.net/ since I always keep relayouting windows around, at least when I tried, FZ had me going out of my way to change layouts a little bit.
- userbinator 6y ago
  I've tried tiling and it just doesn't feel right to me --- not being able to resize windows to the right dimensions is frustrating. I guess that's one thing I agreed with Microsoft about; the earliest versions of Windows had a tiling WM. Also, by comparison I meant reading comparison, not visual comparison. But even the latter is easier with separate windows: resize them to the same dimensions, then put them on top of each other and increase the transparency of the top one.
jevogel 6y ago
Try the Stack browser. Instead of tabs, you have side-by-side, side-scrollable, resizable panes. It makes it so much easier to interact with multiple sites at once. https://getstack.app/ https://getstack.app/
- iKlsR 6y ago
  Windows is saying it's ransomware. Odd.

ssivark 6y ago

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser interface. This is one reason I’m really excited about the Nyxt browser. PS: Part of it might be FOMO, but part of it is also that these links represent certain threads of thought/exploration and are like bookmarks of things to revisit at a later time. Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew, but that’s not a fully satisfactory solution. I think we need tools & interfaces to better (more holistically) accommodate people’s intellectual workflows; what we have today is geared much more towards consumption. As an example: why can’t we easily group tabs into projects and have bidirectional sync between the browser and project related resources (Eg: Some markdown/org file, or sync with Evernote/Notion/Roam, etc) so that whenever I resume working on the project, I get a warm start with the context mapped out (continuing from the previous session). And I want a much tighter relationship between my tabs and my project notes (akin to bibliography of references), including annotations on webpages, etc. If we are to use the web more effectively, the ecosystem surrounding browsers needs to grow up and help us get there.

teekert 6y ago
This is quite a staggering amount imo... Why not just avoid painstaking and just start fresh? Is this a form of FOMO? Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs. If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?
- rhn_mk1 6y ago
  > search engine for your tabs Yes please! I've recently got interested in Recoll, which might not know what a tab is, but does search web history. > you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs Caching is valuable. URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.

teekert 6y ago

I keep my tabs under control and always set FF to start with a fresh session so I loose all tabs every day. Works for me. The new FF for android though forces a new tab to get to my favorite websites and does not allow for a clean session after close, so I now have 47 open, mostly the same 4 websites :s

kevincox 6y ago
Currently there is a "clear private data on quit" which you can use. Just uncheck everything but tabs. You have to manually select "Quit" from the menu to trigger it. Beta versions have the option to close tabs after a set inactivity time which I can't wait to land.
- teekert 6y ago
  Thanx for the tips but I can't wait until hitting the address bar just gives me an overview of my favorite sites again. I don't need any new tabs, I only used them to store thing for later (as in next) reading.

bennyp101 6y ago

For some reason once the tab list reaches the other side of the monitor it makes me feel uneasy, so I close down any tabs that I don't need open. I've never found the need to have more than 8 or so tabs open really - and if I want to compare things, then I just open another browser window and pop it next to it, or on a different monitor. I'm sure there are very good reason for people that have 50+ tabs open - everyones brain works differently after all - but it makes my brain itch!

II2II 6y ago
My uneasiness comes from a realization that too many tabs means that I am not prioritizing tasks. Sure enough, a quick review of the tabs results in most of them being closed since what felt important at the moment was not important in retrospect. As for people who have 50+ tabs open, I am left wondering if they are going about things in an effective manner. At least in Firefox, it is easy to select a bunch of tabs and bookmark them for future reference. It is also easy to load up all of those bookmarks at once when needed. It is a lot easier to deal with the eight tabs from Project A and the dozen tabs from Project B independently than it is to deal with all twenty at once. (Granted, this could be made easier. The big drawback with bookmarks is that they are a snapshot in time, rather than the reflection of a dynamic project.)

ezluckyfree 6y ago

Briefly I was looking for an addon that completely disabled tabs, and removed the tab bar. Every action that would normally open a new tab would instead open a new window. Since I use a tiling WM, the idea was that this would make it easier to navigate through my tabs, and also keep my attention from branching so often. If I had something that I found useful enough to keep around, I can move it to another virtual desktop. Unfortunately, I never found such an addon, and I'm still not set on that workflow in general.

mac01021 6y ago
I use a Chrome extension called "New Tab, New Window". It doesn't reclaim the screen real estate occupied by the tab bar, but it has the behavior you want.
- ezluckyfree 6y ago
  oh, cool. thanks!

cassepipe 6y ago

Doesn't Firefox searches through open tabs while you type in the (indeed) awesome bar ? I don't see where the problem is really. Plus the session manager extensions I have tried are not "stiff", they work well.

jjice 6y ago

I've also been known to have an absurd amount of tabs across multiple browser windows. Upgrading to a new machine with quite a bit more RAM didn't help either. About once a day, I'll go through, and without looking, close all my browser windows. If I try to go through and choose which tabs to close individually, I get a hoarder mentality where I can find the use in everything. "Actually, maybe I do want to read that article about raising your own livestock", I'd think to myself knowing full well I live in a city. Worse case scenario, I close something that will take 15 seconds to get back to when I realize I need it.

bntyhntr 6y ago

I've settled on vertical tabs, and use an extension that limits it to the number that fit on my screen without scrolling, which is around 30. I also no longer use bookmarks. I use the browser's autocomplete of sites I've been to before, and failing that either remember the complete url or give up. I used to do a lot of bookmarking and a lot of tabs but I found neither really added value for me. If I don't remember the site, I probably don't need to be there. That said, I don't try to really convince others to do the same (except vertical tabs) cuz I recognize not everyone will find the same value I do in it.

sevencolors 6y ago

I never understood how folks end up with 20+ (100+ !?) tabs just hanging around ALL the time. For me it's so much visual noise. I can see it happening when you're in the midst of research or troubleshooting. But when I'm done or have solved my issue I'll note in my PR where i found solutions or add the useful pages to my bookmark service (raindrop). Then close all the tabs!

skocznymroczny 6y ago
Me too, I average 6-7 open at a time.
spurgu 6y ago
It's not visual noise to me. I currently have: * 7 Brave (personal) windows with ~3-5 tabs each * 6 Chrome (work) windows with ~3-5 tabs each All of these windows relate to different things. For example whenever I check HN I fire up a new window. I might not have 2 hours of time to read/research everything interesting I happen to find so I just leave that window open for later. Whenever troubleshooting I do the same as you, a window can get up to 20 or something tabs, but once the problem is solved those get closed. Or if there are interesting tabs in there that warrant future research, they get grouped in a new window. On Mac I Cmd+tab through apps and Option+tab through windows of a specific app (don't remember what the default combo is). Or I swipe three fingers down to see all app windows. And I also use Tab Switcher[0], which allows me to Cmd+Shift+K to fuzzy search all open tabs. This setup is not optimal, but it's not that messy/problematic for me. [0] http://flowapps.co/tabswitcher/ http://flowapps.co/tabswitcher/
growt 6y ago
I'm one of those "tab-addicts". The problem is that I use Tabs for everything: reading list, history, bookmarks. Right now I have 8 pinned tabs for email, calendar, messengers and such things. Then I have a couple of interesting news articles etc. that I left open to read later. I also left open some of my work/research flows (so 3-5 tabs each that belong to the same project topic) that I didn't really finish or was just to lazy to close.
- 6y ago

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago

I like that the author mentioned “goal-oriented”. Perhaps intent is another way to phrase it. There are few websites we visit with intent, and others are for just “browsing”. I’ve been working on Amna as a way to help with intent driven work. Instead of opening a frenzy of tabs, it makes you write what you’re working on first, and then provides you a browser or multiple browsers to help you. It’s cool because when you have to get back to something, you just click on a task, and everything comes back. E.g right now I’m working on editing a website and sending out a newsletter, those are two completely separate items, and when looked at individually, they only have like 4 tabs each. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthunt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...

beaker52 6y ago

I've noticed that as I've gotten older my tab behaviour has changed. When I was younger, I used to operate an extension that'd kill tabs I hadn't accessed in the last hour. Chrome doesn't really give you the same control over tabs. I've tried firefox but it's noticeably slower in comparison.

dilpreet_singh 6y ago

I really appreciate the author's take on the issue. Internet is such an integral part of our lives, and so many people's computer usage is all about just using a browser. Which is why it's interesting that even after about 25 years of the first browser, we have almost the same interface to accessing the INTERNET. And it definitely can be made better! We should think about solving this problem

fmajid 6y ago

When I am working on a project, e.g. researching a laptop purchase, I will open a new window to act as a container for all those research-related tabs, then when I am done the entire window can be closed. Vivaldi has a notion of tab-within-tabs, but the UI is very subtle and the tabs^2 very small and fiddly to reach with a mouse, thereby violating Fitt's Law.

wlesieutre 6y ago
Firefox used to let you have multiple sets of tabs within one window and cycle between them, completely hiding the inactive ones. Effectively it felt like you had several browser windows within the one window, and picked which window was active. Looks like this started way back in Firefox 4, and the UI was a bit all over the place, but I liked using it (mainly by keyboard shortcut): https://www.computerworld.com/article/2514927/firefox-4-beta-4-opens-a-new-panorama.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/2514927/firefox-4-beta...
- bityard 6y ago
  Panorama was a firefox killer feature for me. So slick, so useful. I _really_ enjoyed the ability to switch between different sets of tabs depending on which project I was focusing on at the moment. The Panorama UI made it quick, simple, and painless to do. It seems like most users simply use multiple browser windows, but I've honestly never been able to figure out how that works effectively when you're juggling multiple projects at once: when I'm not working on a particular project, I want it completely gone and (safely) hidden away so that it doesn't distract from my current project. And then of course Firefox killed the Panorama feature. With the rationalization that no one used the feature and that it would be better implemented as an extension. Except that the extension went unmaintained after a few months. And then later, Firefox broke the APIs that made Panorama possible. The net result being that in the past few years, my productivity in the browser plummeted. There are various tab management addons for Firefox but almost all of them have the following downsides: * geared towards manually saving and restoring tabs (I don't want manual anything, I just want to switch between groups of tabs with a couple of clicks) * not actively maintained * buggy (as in, loses tabs for useful content that in some cases took a long time to find) So far the one I've had the most luck with recently is Tiled Tab Groups (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro...). I don't use the UI for it, though, unless I'm creating a new group. I just click on the icon in the toolbar and select the group I want. It's still on probation as far as I'm concerned but it hasn't crashed or lost tabs on me yet.

k__ 6y ago

I always close my tabs as quickly as possible. "Tabs Zero" so to speak. I would value a better reopen closed tab feature. Going further back and allowing me specify which closed tab I want back.

kevincox 6y ago
Isn't this just browser history? I close tabs very aggressively (usually hovering around Tabs Zero if you exclude the always open (like calendar and messaging apps) and regularly fish things out of my history.
- k__ 6y ago
  Yes. I guess, I want a browser history UI that's better integrated with tabs.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Browser history currently does not preserve local history. All modern browsers, on the other hand, will preserve history for the tab when you "undo close". To observe difference, do the following: - Go to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24518507 , click 'parent', close tab, undo close tab, hit back. Where are you? - Load the page that was the 'parent', hit back. Where are you? Each tab is a history tree. The history page, on the other hand, is a linearized chronological list. They are non-equivalent.

kirubakaran 6y ago

Wouldn't be great to save all the open tabs, and not only restore them (there are tons of browser extensions that do that), but also treat them as a collection to share, restore in a different computer etc? I built that feature into Histre : https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ if you're interested.

csours 6y ago

I don't have a big problem with browser tabs, but I have 60 tabs open in Notepad++ and I feel like I'm losing my goddamn mind.

dredmorbius 6y ago

Tabbed browsing: a lousy band-aid over poor browser document and state management (2014): ...What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the relationship is between pages in my browser session. I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and/or making noise. That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a permanent quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk. Browser history isn't it either: it's too comprehensive, is insufficiently contextualized, doesn't record relationships between pages (other than, maybe, relative time). On mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page was in the highly constrained display available. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content (though some such as HN do this well). There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with which you're currently working open in front of you. I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration.... https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_... My present Firefox tab count is > 1550.

catchmeifyoucan 6y ago
want to try amna?? It helps you break things down by task. I’d say it’s still super early, but seems like the right balance of random browsing and collecting items as part of a context. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthunt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781&ref=producthun...
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Interesting. Is there a demo / walkthrough? OK, found & am reading https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/ https://getamna.com/blog/post/customer-research/ My preference would be CLI / terminal centric. https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if_the_web_was_filesystemaccessible/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/6bgowu/what_if...

kevincox 6y ago

Tabs were a mistake. They were a hack to work around window managers that lacked enough features and now we have a "window manager" inside of a window manager. Probably most apps have their own tab interface which works differently from every other app. We should rethink the design, improve the window managers, then remove tabs. I don't think it will ever happen, but it would be nice.

renewiltord 6y ago
There was a Compiz extension that permitted window tabbing like this. I did not enjoy its use. I attempted to use it to create "environments". It was less effective than using workspaces because workspaces allowed full windowing.
- kevincox 6y ago
  KWin does (did?) this as well. I think the biggest problem is that if you open a new "window" it doesn't know that you want it to show as a new tab on the same window. I think that this is largely because X doesn't actually know which window opened the new window. I used the KWin tabs a fair amount, but they didn't fill the same use case as browser tabs. It would be interesting to see this implemented, of course you would also need to seriously patch the browser.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    It might have been KWin and I misremembered.

bityard 6y ago

For anyone else who considered Panorama to be their favorite feature of Firefox before they killed it, the closest replacement for it I've found so far is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro.... It's not at all perfect from a UI standpoint, but it hasn't lost my tabs or crashed the browser yet.

unabst 6y ago

+1 for Cluster. I settled for OneTab like many, until it deleted all my tabs. Happened to many people, and is fatal. Then I used Session Buddy. Only wished it had drag and drop, which is when I found Cluster. Drag and drop is important for when you branch out from the group and for weeding and consolidating tabs. Cluster works great with a big screen too which is what I have. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cluster-window-tab-manage/aadahadfdmiibmdhfmpbeeebejmjnkef?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cluster-window-tab... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

kodablah 6y ago

I made a browser to deal with this [0]. I've basically abandoned work on it, but I still use it as my daily driver (granted I don't push my fresh builds up as much as I used to and there are a couple of bugs). It provides me such a huge benefit because I just swipe my hand to destroy dozens of browser tabs. And all the while I can see the name, have them hierarchical, change their groups, etc. I go on deep GitHub or Wikipedia dives and close or collapse that entire line of thought so easily. Tabs are essentially mind maps. I wish a larger vendor with real time/money would invest in a similar many-tab model. The concept is of course directly taken from the tree-style tab extension in FF, but even that extension has suffered since the move off of XUL, and I can't easily close a ton of tabs just by dragging over the close buttons anymore (among other things). 0 - https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ https://cretz.github.io/doogie/

onion-soup 6y ago

Chrome exists over a decade yet they still haven't figured out how ctrl+Tab should work.

ajstiles 6y ago

I built the "first tabbed browser", NetCaptor, back in 1997. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th... My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem. I primarily use Brave and effectively start fresh every day. I might get up to 20 open tabs at any given time, and I sometimes use tabs as a sort of Inbox that needs to be cleared. But sometimes, it’s best to declare tab bankruptcy and start over.

chris_st 6y ago
Good point. I've lost track of the number of start-ups that proposed some kind of "Search your browser history" functionality, which, to be honest, I've wished for myself. But I don't know of any that have even made it to released-product stage.
- asdff 6y ago
  What about something with HTTrack as you browse and grep?
  - chris_st 6y ago
    Yeah, that seems like a step in the right direction -- don't think I want all the images, just the text, but I'd guess that's an option. Wonder if you could hook that in through a local proxy...
- Reelin 6y ago
  Does Memex resemble what you were wishing for? (https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/ https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/)
  - chris_st 6y ago
    Not really -- What I'd like would be something that doesn't require me to annotate, in advance, what I want to find again. I often think, "I know I read something about this a while back!" and then I try to think which website I'd seen it on. The ones I've read about just watch your whole browsing history and let you search that. I also couldn't get it to work when I tried a while ago (which I imagine they've fixed).

conductor 6y ago

How do people manage to manage hundreds or even thousands of open tabs? And most importantly, why? Are they using tabs instead of bookmarks? Usually I have no more than ten. Even when searching/researching something it doesn't get more than twenty - open all the interesting search results on the first search page, usually that's enough to find whatever I'm looking for. If not, tabs are being closed one by one or are being bookmarked with appropriate tags. Repeat for the next page of search results.

meowface 6y ago
Because my browser is like my brain and my life: disorganized and full of loose threads. I imagine there's likely a correlation with ADHD, as well.

code_duck 6y ago

It baffles me to hear how many people use tabs - some vast amount open at once. I open and close pages as I read them, and only have what's relevant to me open at any time. To me this is what Reading List and bookmarks are for.

Ayesh 6y ago

Firefox containers, paired with Simple Tab Groups helped me to fix this. I work on multiple projects and it's common to have multiple Github and alike issues, and other pages open. With Simple Tab Groups, you can select to group and only show tabs that belong to just one group. It's easy to move tabs between groups. When the tab group is switched, tabs from the other group are offloaded from memory, effectively making them bookmarks. Pinned tabs (webmail client, a note taking app, and music player in my case) are shown in all tab groups. I know it helped a lot, because I use Chrome on my Android, and I always have ":D" in my tab button because I have more than 100 tabs open.

kasperset 6y ago

Although not a solution for tab problem, apps like Historyhound may help to some extent getting over that losing all the information fear.

weirdmn 6y ago

(am taking BASB course) would be great if all my open tabs could be bucketed into the PARA framework somehow...

forgotmypw17 6y ago

This is why I set my browser to vertical tabs, which makes much more sense, IMO, especially given today's widescreen trend. I can fit up to about 50 tabs per window before they scroll, which is usually more than enough, and I can still read their text. And all I had to do to achieve this was type `:set tabs.position right`...

zyxzevn 6y ago

The many open tabs are related to states between: 1. bookmarking, 2. will look at it any minute/day now. 3. need to read/watch further when I got time. 4. page no longer available on site. 5. music to play in the background. So what a browser mainly needs a a way of bookmarking that also stores some of the state of the page. Like position on page, selection, video/audio-position, saved to local cache.

Const-me 6y ago

I close them often, middle-click on the header or Ctrl+W. I also miss opera's hotkey to close all tabs except the active one. When I'm doing some research where I need lots of them at the same time, I use OneNote or sometimes Word to keep the links, adding a line or 2 of text about that link.

dzhiurgis 6y ago

Latest safari 14 screwed up tabs. Now when you’ve got lots and icons enabled the little text snippet disappears so you’ve got aesthetically looking tab icon. Useless! Must be the worst browser tab experience, especially on iOS. If there’s one company that can unfuck browsers its ironically Microsoft...

dangom 6y ago

Interesting that nobody mentioned not using tabs at all. I adapted the chrome.css of my firefox to hide tabs altogether, so I can get more screen real state. That paired with Vimium allows me to hit T to get a list of all open tabs, which I can then incrementally search. If I want to open a link from history, I hit O instead.

pkulak 6y ago
I've done that as well and it's great. Well, if I really need tabs, I use the tabbing that's built into my window manager (Sway). But it makes me really consider if I need it, and then it's easy to pop the "tabs" out, move them to different work spaces, etc. It's such a darn-clean look too. https://i.imgur.com/UvJbEMG.png https://i.imgur.com/UvJbEMG.png
mmphosis 6y ago
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }
bbbobbb 6y ago
How do you deal with websites that hijack your vimium shortcuts (gmail.. or event where it does not work - new tab blank page..)
- dangom 6y ago
  You can deactivate it for sites where it interferes with your workflow. I've become used to switching tabs when it doesn't work, or hitting Cmd+L and searching from the address bar. To be precise, I use a combination of Ctrl+tab, Cmd+L, T and O, in that order of frequency. I don't mind repeated tabs, so sometimes I'll just do a web search for whatever item I wanted again.

sbmthakur 6y ago

I have had around 200 tabs opened in my mobile. This was till I realized that this is just FOMO and is due to lack of focus. I created a strict there should be no more than 5 tabs in the browser at the end of each week. Things have been much better since then.

colordrops 6y ago

How about "history as a service"? Your history is encrypted and synced remotely. Every page/tab you've got open, you can add tags and notes. So even if you close everything, you should be able to find what you visited before based on your custom annotations, even if it was years ago. Then, no fear of closing all the tabs.

Arkdy 6y ago

Their links are dead now, but Tangram browser (2015)* was an Android browser that tried to break up researching on the web into three distinct UI tabs. 1. Seek: If you give it a search term it'll display the results as list of links 2. Sort: Any links or images you click on while in Web goes into a list called the Stack. I think it acts like your working memory in the same way that a traditional window of tabs might, and the act of sending links to the stack may be related to the "seeking circuit". Links in the stack can be clicked on to navigate to, or swiped right to be sent to the Store section. 3. Store: Links here are saved from the stack as you use the app, and you can create folders. * https://imgur.com/gallery/AwBTxlZ https://imgur.com/gallery/AwBTxlZ Here's an imgur post I just made with screenshots of the walk-through and a gif of usage. I don't use it anymore because it's been unsupported for years so I'm assuming that it's not exactly secure, but I loved the idea.

ImaCake 6y ago

A solution that seems to work for me is keep notes instead. If I am interested in something I stick a link and some brief notes in a markdown document and make sure to include as many descriptive words as possible. That way I can grep my notes folder later to look for the note I made. For home I keep a separate file per day. For work I have a monolithic "general_notes.md" which I add stuff to sequentially. Generally work notes need to be found quickly, so one file makes sense. For home I am not so time pressured, so grepping through multiple files is an acceptable solution.

ksec 6y ago

I hope Mac Safari Teams gets to read the link and HN's comments, they ignore the power users and try to dump down Mac Safari to iOS. With Safari 14, Fav icon is now on by default, you would think this is great, except the Tab now shrinks to Icon size once you have a dozen or more. Instead of the old Fav Icon + Text Description in the Tab. i.e How Firefox behaves. They also got rid of Top Site, and instead it is now an iOS Safari design like Start Page. You can tell by their much narrower design compared to your widescreen Mac. One way to save memory if you have a few dozens or hundreds of Tabs, is to unload them by quitting Safari and Start again with previous session. This way all the Tabs are unloaded by default, they are there sitting idle. Basically just a list of Tabs. ( This also works on Chrome and Firefox ) But if you somehow finger swipe or accidentally press the Show Tab Overview, Safari will reload every single tab you have in the background just to create a Thumbnails for your Tab. If you have 1600 Tabs like some here, you will quickly run out of memory and start paging hundreds of GBs of data to your SSD. Basically shortening your SSD's life span. And to those questioning why the large number of Tabs. I mean on one hand HN keeps pushing everything should be SaaS and Web Apps. Project Planning, Email, Social Media.. etc. On the other you have Research Notes, subject I need to research that instantly open a dozen tabs or Amazon / Online Shopping. Or simple daily RSS where I just Command Click all the news item I want to read. You also have sessions you want to read but you dont have the time right now. All we really need is a Show All Tab Page as a list instead of Thumbnails once Tab number goes over certain number, with a Search Field at the top that hopefully search the Title and some Meta Data. I dont want to kill my 2015 MacBook Pro. It may be the last MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard judging by the way things are going.

terrywang 6y ago

Have been having the same problem but now getting less painful as a quick TL;DR style (many articles start to adopt starting with a TL;DR at the top) read (to get the core ideas) and save useful ones with Diigo (replacing del.icio.us? to achieve read it later) worked well, effectively reduced FOMO. > NOTE: Session Buddy for Chrome is handy when suffering from power loss (MBP hang, Linux workstation power cord got kicked off, etc.).