14 ms·

Vivaldi 3.6 Introduces Two-Level Tab Stacks

110 points by philonoist 6y ago

dsissitka 6y ago
Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210128111931/https://vivaldi.com/whats-new-in-vivaldi-3-6/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210128111931/https://vivaldi.c...
mattowen_uk 6y ago
Main link currently down... also discussed on The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-browser-stacked-tabs-hoarding https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-brow...
notretarded 6y ago
I remember this as a Firefox plugin back in the early 2000's. Why is this news?
- 1f60c 6y ago
  Because Firefox != Vivaldi
talesfromearth 6y ago
I want to give other browsers a try, especially Vivaldi with its many settings to fiddle. But Firefox's multi-account containers add-on is a godsend since I have to switch between multiple accounts for work.
- D13Fd 6y ago
  I committed to switching to Vivaldi back in 2019 or so. I installed it on all of my machines (including Mac and PC). But I found it to be unstable and prone to crashes and weird issues, even though the features were nice. I eventually gave up in frustration and switched to Firefox, which I've found to be rock solid by comparison. I personally am not planning to give Vivaldi another shot any time soon after that mess.
  - eirki 6y ago
    Alternate anectdata: I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago and have had no problems with crashes.
hellojason 6y ago
I’ve been using 2 hidden features in Chrome and Edge called Tab Groups and Minimize Tab Groups, which let you assign a bunch of tabs to a group and minimize them down to a size the length of text that you named that group. Color coding too. Game changer. You can enable them in the chrome://flags and edge://flags.
- chabad360 6y ago
  Chrome has that too, but last I checked, they do not persist if you close the browser. Is edge any different?
  - nilsandrey 6y ago
    In Edge it does persist for me. Seems to doesn't persists between updates.
- pcardoso 6y ago
  Colored tabs are such an underrated feature. I loved them on OS/2.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    I think a lot of tech companies would benefit from having a team that does nothing but install and run old software and operating systems to mine them for good features that have been forgotten.
- jjp 6y ago
  Is there a way to persist the name, color across sessions. I'd love to be able to open all the bookmarks in a folder and then have them assigned to the same group/color. Then that way I can recreate one of a handful of different multi-tab environments at the start of each session.
- rakoo 6y ago
  Color coding comes for free with containers in Firefox. I agree it makes things much easier.
h_anna_h 6y ago
Does anyone know if anything similar exists for firefox? I remember trying some such addons a while ago but they were all extremely laggy.
- idoubtit 6y ago
  Tree Style Tabs has more features and is arguably better. In the year following the core changes in Firefox (Chrome extensions, threaded tabs) I had many bugs (high cpu load, broken tree, no restoring at startup...) but I haven't seen a bug in the past year. Configuration was not easy though, and It don't know if it still requires fidgeting with Firefox's files in order to remove the default tab bar.
- epage 6y ago
  There is the more powerful version, Tree Style Tabs. Been using it for years and can't switch browsers because of it :). I've seen people talk about Sideberry but I've never tried it.
  - pityJuke 6y ago
    I've personally found Sideberry a more performant and less buggy version of TST as of late.
- quietbritishjim 6y ago
  Tree Style Tab [1] is a generalisation of this to arbitrary levels of nesting. It also goes down the side of the browser window, which is a far better use of space. I'd say it's the number 1 reason I (still) use Firefox. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - h_anna_h 6y ago
    I used it before but I am not a huge fan of it, I do not remember the exact reason however so I might try it again. So far I have been using tab manager plus but it does not let you group tabs together (unless if you create new windows). I miss the old firefox panorama.
2Gkashmiri 6y ago
forgive my ignorance, but why are these browsers based on chromium only? cant they build on firefox codebase just like palemoon and basilisk, waterfox, seamonkey, iceweasel? if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?
- mdre 6y ago
  I asked this once, and people told me it had something to do with firefox being a PITA to compile, among other things
- epage 6y ago
  They'd basically have to fork Firefox. There isn't a clear distinction between the engine and the browser. They had an embedding API at one point but dropped it because the design made it hard to evolve both. This is on top of people wanting quick market share which requires compatibility with the "big player" :(
  - 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
    uh,, arent these big players usually just reskinned chromiums only? whats giving them an advantage in terms of market share?
    - nicoburns 6y ago
      The point is that reskinning Firefox is pretty difficult because there's no stable API between the "skin" and underlying engine. Firefox used to have an option for embedding Gecko, but it's no longer maintained.
- acct776 6y ago
  "'Oh, Firefox bad' thing"? You mean the fact that their security is atrocious in comparison?
- lmkg 6y ago
  Vivaldi had a blog post recently that touched on this tangentially. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/ > At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and the most widely used – that was important to us. Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium. I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet. If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision might be different.
saint_angels 6y ago
Does adding more visible tabs solves the problem of having too many tabs? If not, what is it for?
leephillips 6y ago
“The solution to too many tabs is here – a second Tab Bar.” Why stop at two? If you think that this is the feature that you have been waiting for, maybe consider the possibility that browser tabs are not the ideal way to store and organize information.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  there is a tab tree extension for firefox that is kinda popular. I like the concept (often I want to follow a bunch of links out of the same page without losing my place), but I found the sidebar implementation clunky.
- wejick 6y ago
  I beg to differ, tabs itself is information. Even though it's just "ephemeral", it's something ripe for any additional management tools. With all the tab chaos and context switching needs, this will be really helpful.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Most of your tabs are probably things that you intend to read later, or want to keep around to refer to, or something like that. Each one takes up a big chunk of RAM, and either a few or a lot of CPU cycles, depending on your browser and what’s running on the page. Each one takes up some screen real estate and makes it harder to navigate among the tabs that you’re actively using. If your browser crashes you may lose some tabs and the information that they represent. You can’t use this information easily if you switch to another browser. If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any software, or write your own, to manage this information. But how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well, just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new front page story about another system to do just that. I wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.
- sieste 6y ago
  "The solution to too many tabs is here – MORE TABS!"
enriquto 6y ago
Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be merged into a single interface. The difference between them is just quantitative.
- currysausage 6y ago
  Reminds me of this Firefox concept: http://web.archive.org/web/20090801232011/informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090801232011/informationarchite...
  - rakoo 6y ago
    I feel like there's some paradigm we haven't reached yet. As the parent said, bookmarks and history are just 2 different views of the same underlying data and tabs provide an isolation of the context If we go back to the root of what the web is, we have a graph where nodes are documents and edges are a user clicking on a link at a given time, and the user wants to keep a few of the documents in the current context. So not only is there's a graph, which is not easy to represent and navigate, but the edges depend on time. Maybe some VR thing can help us see something new here
    - generalizations 6y ago
      We could generalize further and say that's what the entire window manager of an OS represents. Though, there's a difference between 'currently loaded' and just the address, and for less-than-high-end computers, that difference can mean a lot. That graph also contains a lot of noise - e.g. documents that aren't needed. I wonder if VR would help, by letting us see more, or if that better paradigm could also be implemented on 2D screens. There's already various graph visualization tools. But the tricky part would be wrapping that up into something useful - like a tree graph vs. tree style tabs. And if this would be more than 1-dimensional, like TST, then it would likely have to be a full page.
- lmkg 6y ago
  I believe this as well. That's the reason why I have a triple-digit number tabs open, and haven't bookmarked a site in twenty years. I much prefer having only a single interface to manage, which for me is tabs. I suspect many others with a similar tab-count are the same.
mlajtos 6y ago
If you are interested in tab stacks or tiling, check out https://github.com/mlajtos/mosaic https://github.com/mlajtos/mosaic
rafaelvasco 6y ago
Been using Workona on Edge. Helps a lot.
onychomys 6y ago
The real solution Vivaldi offers to the tabpocalypse has been here for ages: tabs on the side instead of on top! We all have widescreen monitors now, so losing 50 or 100 pixels on the horizontal plane isn't really a big problem. And the tabs then become scrollable downwards, while still keeping their readability. It took me a couple of days to get used to them over on the sidebar, but I could never go back.
- patwolf 6y ago
  I've been trying out the side tabs for a week now and cannot get used to it. So many sites I use have left hand menus, e.g. JIRA, AWS, that is seems like cognitive overload to see both menus butted up against each other. With top tabs there's at least the URL bar to provide some spatial separation between the two.
  - toyg 6y ago
    Just push it to the right then...? If it's doable, that is. That's where I keep my system taskbar.
    - onychomys 6y ago
      Yeah, I do mine on the right, and keep the browser on my right-hand monitor, so the list of tabs is way at one side of my view. It's worked really well for me.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        Yeah, in Firefox I've been really happy with Tree-Style Tabs on the right hand side.
      - IlliOnato 6y ago
        Exactly what I am doing. Tabs on the right on the right-hand monitor on Mac (which has window controls on the left). They never get in the way, basically I only see them when I am going to use them.
tzuyu 6y ago
That has to be the best feature of vivaldi. Default browser for two years.
marcinzm 6y ago
I wrote a Firefox extension for exactly this almost 20 years ago back in their XUL iteration of extensions. Everything old is new again I guess. Brings back memories.
- BugWatch 6y ago
  Crazy Browser, IE browser shell I used 20 years ago, had this same capability (actually, "more powerful", since it was not limited to two). If I were them, frankly I'd be ashamed a bit (or a lot) of bragging about it in 2020.... but that's just me, I guess. (Nowdays [more like many a year], a Firefox user with even heavier TreeStyleTab addiction. Now, if only Mozilla would finally get its session API in order...)
namero999 6y ago
Opera has, since a while, the concept of workspace. A vertical icon bar is created at the edge of the screen, which basically acts as if there were multiple windows where to group tabs by topic. For instance, personal, work, media, research, topic x, y, z. The only improvement I see would be to optionally isolate the workspace from one another (so as to have different sessions on the same websites).
- wejick 6y ago
  They have it since before Blink migration, I still remember when they announced this feature. The implementation a bit different because back then screen resolution is not as good as today, now we can easily afford literally 2 tab rows.
  - namero999 6y ago
    I like the fact that it's on the side, with widescreen monitors I prefer to sacrifice 30px of lateral space. They also integrate the most common instant messengers in there, which means less open tabs. Since last release, Spotify is docked too.
- Tesl 6y ago
  I use Opera for this feature alone, makes a huge difference!
pjmlp 6y ago
It is called bookmarks, I really don't get the tabpocalypse.
- alpaca128 6y ago
  No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store bookmarks but also being good at finding them again. In contrast a hierarchical tab structure can act both as the stuff I'm currently working on as well as a way to store all things I find interesting in named groups. If you didn't manually tag all your bookmarks, ideally with a consistent naming scheme, finding certain sites again can be quite a task. But I know what tab group a certain website that I last used 2 years ago and can't remember the name/url of has to be in. It's basically the web version of a file manager. Why would I spend time to organise bookmarks in some folder structure if the structure already exists in the tab bar, always up to date?
  - asiando 6y ago
    > No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store bookmarks but also being good at finding them again. And tabs solve this problem how? In most browsers they aren’t even searchable. The only advantage over a folder of bookmarks is that you can close one with a shortcuts, whereas bookmarks require several clicks.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Because tabs get lost when browser crashes and don't allow for searching.
    - alpaca128 6y ago
      You are wrong on both claims. Firefox usually still preserves the session despite crashes, and even if it doesn't you can still restore it again via "recently closed windows". Although I only had to do that once, after a certain bug-riddled Windows 10 update. I have at least 300 tabs opened constantly in two Firefox windows, and I never lost a session. And Firefox automatically searches all tabs in addition to bookmarks whenever you type in the address bar, and lets you jump to that tab directly.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ksec 6y ago
Whenever we have a discussions on Browser and topic of too many Tabs comes up, there are always a small portion of HN user suggest to me and those who uses lots of tabs are using the browser Wrong, ADHD or having mental problem. And should seek changing workflow or treatment. I currently have a relatively small number of Tabs opened, 150. I guess to those who only have a few tabs open at max think of us as crazy or alien.
aloer 6y ago
I am one of those that keeps everything in tabs (currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook) And tabs are imho the perfect abstraction. This is misguided effort. The issue is with the way multiple browser windows are managed. When I have many tabs I must have a way to manage many windows as well. Visually! Whether these can and should be improved on a browser level I can’t say. MacOS is already very very good at this and much better than anything else I extensively use app expose and spaces to visually and spatially find what I need and structure my environment by projects and topics. I have everything I need exactly where I left it, together with all other applications and information that was related to it Adding more management features should not be the responsibility of the browser. That’s why I‘ve never been a fan of any of the popular tab management extensions or browser features
- AbraKdabra 6y ago
  > currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook bruh
- devcriollo 6y ago
  why do you have so many tabs open? if i need to see something then i save it to bookmarks or session buddy. How long will it take you to see the content of that amount of tabs if you are ever going to do it?
  - aloer 6y ago
    But why do you save it in bookmarks? With tabs it’s right there where I left it. Same scroll state, same visual content. Why go through the hassle of bookmarking if tabs are already built in and work well? With bookmarks you lose so much important context. Our minds just don’t work well on lists of links As I said it’s important the OS works the same way. I always have on the left most space my utility window for example with messengers and mail tabs open I always have localhost for development for each project on the left most tab followed by the most common docs and tickets I need throughout the project. And then over time I build up tabs to the right. And naturally the ones in the far right are the latest ones so when I come back to the project that often helps recalling what was done last And if it becomes too much and the tabs are still relevant then I just extract the middle part between localhost+docs on the one side and the latest research on the right and out it in its own window in the background So essentially I use all the dimensions there are: - within the tabs there is an order - within the space there is an order (left half, right half on 34” wide screen) - in depth there is an order (windows all the way to the back are the oldest and will be culled from time to time) - and then there is the spaces themselves which are mainly for different projects
alpaca128 6y ago
So this is basically Firefox' Tree Style Tabs but less powerful and embedded in a slower UI? The one and only reason I stopped using Vivaldi every time I tried it is the performance. But it becomes more and more obvious the developers simply have different priorities.
- generalizations 6y ago
  I wish, but it isn't. There was a request a few years ago for tree style tabs to be implemented in Vivaldi, but I think the dev didn't like the conflict with their own tab layout implementation. Seems to me there's a subset of power users on Firefox just waiting for any other browser to implement tree style tabs.
- drcongo 6y ago
  I have to keep a Chrome-like browser around just for things like MS Teams that supposedly won't run in anything else, I have Vivaldi and Brave. I hate Brave for the crypto nonsense it shoves in my face among other things, but Vivaldi is so unbelievably slow that I'm forced to use Brave. It boggles my mind that anyone would release something that slow and then never work on that problem
- ajtjp 6y ago
  I'm curious what area of Vivaldi is perceived as slow. I use Vivaldi at home (on a 9-year-old desktop), and Firefox at work, and the only things that come to mind are tab opening/closing could be better, and some very CSS-heavy animations such as the NYT's map of coronavirus's spread from Wuhan are much better on Gecko than Blink. But day to day, I have no complaints about performance from either. Then again, I also use uBlock Origin... perhaps Vivaldi is slow without it. I'll also admit that theoretically I'd expect Vivaldi's UI to be slower due to being based on web technologies instead of native, but I can't say I can perceive a difference except in edge cases.
  - rasz 6y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951928 Tab handling was at least x1000 slower than Chrome last time I tested. It got dramatically slower in the last few snapshots and the official 3.6 Stable build. Its not just tabs, address bar handling is totally broken, opening new tab and starting to type quickly will result in eaten letters. Opening new tab, clicking CTRL-F and starting to type will again open with ~1 second delay and lost letters. Then we get into broken javascript causality https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ open in normal browser and Vivaldi, Vivaldi address bar handling code is overriding scrollTop with delayed location.hash update.
podiki 6y ago
Talking about tabs can only remind me of how bad I am (was??) at hoarding them [0]. Years and years worth. All the best organization systems in the world can't save you from clicking more and more. It was at least a little terrifying whenever I close Firefox and it says I'm closing 5 windows with 768 tabs (which it will restore, but I worry)... [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-confessions-of-a-tab-hoarder https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co...
- generalizations 6y ago
  Usually restores. I've pulled similar stunts, and once in about every 20-100 restores it'll just fail. FYI.
  - philsnow 6y ago
    I periodically (or when I'm about to upgrade either) grab all the tabs from chrome/firefox and save them out to files / org-mode, with things like this https://gist.github.com/philsnow/780b131608878d93e9a8ad379359471b https://gist.github.com/philsnow/780b131608878d93e9a8ad37935...
- fn1 6y ago
  Why not close them? YAGNI
fn1 6y ago
I never understood how people not close (or bookmark) tabs. When I'm heavily working i have 20-30 tabs open. But after the work is done, i'll close what I don't need and bookmark the rest. Then again I also tend not to have more than 5 mails in my inbox.
okareaman 6y ago
I downloaded 3.6 because I read it has a very customizable interface. I wanted to add a feature, only to find out it already has it. Example; when I am browsing Twitter I want the bookmarks bar across the top to only have my Twitter folders. I can do this in Vivaldi by right clicking on my Twitter folder and selecting "Set As Bookmark Bar Folder." Nice.
unicornporn 6y ago
So, honest question... Why would one chose Vivaldi over Firefox (with Tree Style Tab)?
- remram 6y ago
  Speed I guess? I have trouble putting your question in the context of this thread.
  - generalizations 6y ago
    Context, to me, seems to be that firefox + tree style tabs is a better implementation of what vivaldi is showing here.
    - remram 6y ago
      Whatever reason people had to use Vivaldi before they had the feature at all will still be valid.
  - rasz 6y ago
    Vivaldi is slow, definitely not speed.
- ajtjp 6y ago
  Background: I used Opera Presto as my main browser from 2007-2014, and Vivaldi since 2016 (2015 being a mix of Opera, Firefox, and Vivaldi). I've used Firefox as my main browser at work for most of the past four years. One big factor for me is the customizability without having to rely on extensions. I trust Vivaldi (and von Tetzchner), and don't have to worry about whether I trust extension makers. The customization options in Vivaldi tend to work pretty darn well too, which can be more hit-and-miss with third party ones in Firefox. Single-key shortcuts are also a big win for Vivaldi for me. I got used to these in Opera and they're great for efficiency while web browsing. Maybe I can get them with an extension for Firefox, but it's enabling one check box in Vivaldi. It's similar to why some people like vim plugins for browsers, but with less vim expertise required. I've also seen Firefox remove a lot of features over the years. XUL extensions being the big one, but there are others. Firefox Hello. Firefox Panorama, just as I was starting to take a liking to it. Vivaldi has a philosophy of adding features that let you customize the browser to how you like it, and if only 0.2% of users use that feature but it makes them really happy, that's fine. Firefox will remove features if not enough users adopt it. Thus my trust that Firefox is going to keep features that I like has been lowered over the years, making me more hesitant to try new Firefox features, and generally more hesitant about Firefox. Although I'm considering switching part of my home browsing back to Firefox because of its ability to not autoplay videos. Too many sites have those nowadays (and too often, self-hosted and not as third-party ads that are easily blocked), and Blink-based browsers can't stop them, and I'm getting pretty tired of having to pause/hide videos all the time so I can focus on reading articles.
IlliOnato 6y ago
Tabs on the side is the real reason I am using Vivaldi as my primary browser. Tab stacks are useful, too, although I typically only use them when doing research of some kind. Just installed the new version with two-level tab stacks, seems pretty cool so far, but not yet sure how useful they will be in day-to-day browsing.
Hamuko 6y ago
As someone with like 150+ tabs open in Firefox, I should probably be happy about this, but I'm not. Feels like they're encouraging my sick obsession with tabs when I should in fact be put on rehab.
- Zancarius 6y ago
  As someone with currently 3500 tabs open and regularly hits 6000, I can only say: Amateur! (Kidding. I just never close anything until I get annoyed because I like to use them as active working memory for a period of about a month or longer.)
Tomis02 6y ago
Does anyone else remember how, in old Opera, tabs could overflow into multiple lines? Good days.
- ajtjp 6y ago
  I remember seeing that in some browser, but was it Opera? I remember having 100 tabs and miniscule tab titles in Opera, but can't recall that option. I still use 12.18 on occasion, and fired up 11.52 but can't find any such option in its tab settings. It looks like Firefox and Tab Mix Plus offered it back in the day; I'm thinking that might be where I remember it from.
rasz 6y ago
How slow is Vivaldi: Download fresh Vivaldi Stable - 3.6 (2165.34). Open non existent domain to land on a very light "this page doesnt exist" ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error page. Start Cloning Tabs by Shift clicking in the Tab bar, then Right clicking and selecting Clone. First you clone one tab into two, then two into four, etc. At cloning 64 Tabs to 128 opening every new Tab will be taking ~1 second per Tab. Cloning up to 256 open tabs will take you anywhere between 5-15 minutes!!! At this point switching between Tabs will FREEZE UI for 8 seconds. Let me repeat - EIGHT second freeze while switching between empty error page Tabs. At all times Vivaldi UI will be freezing with one maxed out thread of 16 thread 4GHz CPU, other 15 threads resting at minimal load. Right clicking on the first open tab and selecting "close Tabs to the Right" will close 255 Tabs at once - this will FREEZE UI for ~1.5 minutes. >100 seconds of frozen UI while browser is closing 255 empty html only Tabs. Again one CPU thread maxed out, rest idle. Welcome to a browser made using React framework.
- bzb6 6y ago
  It’s honestly terrible, I’ve mentioned this before, there’s absolutely no way I’ll ever use a browser this slow. I abandoned Firefox back in the day for much less.
- Smithalicious 6y ago
  I hate going "works on my machine" but I have >100 tabs open at all times and switching tabs is instant for me, and your CPU beats mine.
  - rasz 6y ago
    There is a difference between 100 and 200 tabs, plus which Vivaldi version are you on? Builds up to 3.6.2160.3 work fine with ~400 tabs, and by fine I mean ~1 second Tab switching. Instant is very subjective. You will probably also call going fullscreen on YT instant, yet here it is measured https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M
- countviolencia 6y ago
  I used from 2016 till 2019. While I love the features, it is too damn slow and makes browsing the Internet feel tedious.
anongoesprivate 6y ago
what is their business model? ,i'm not able to find anything related to it. Firefox runs on donation, google runs on tracking, vivaldi seems not have both based on their about page

110 points by philonoist 6y ago

Mirror: https://web.archive.org/web/20210128111931/https://vivaldi.com/whats-new-in-vivaldi-3-6/ https://web.archive.org/web/20210128111931/https://vivaldi.c...

mattowen_uk 6y ago

Main link currently down... also discussed on The Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-browser-stacked-tabs-hoarding https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-brow...

notretarded 6y ago

I remember this as a Firefox plugin back in the early 2000's. Why is this news?

1f60c 6y ago
Because Firefox != Vivaldi

talesfromearth 6y ago

I want to give other browsers a try, especially Vivaldi with its many settings to fiddle. But Firefox's multi-account containers add-on is a godsend since I have to switch between multiple accounts for work.

D13Fd 6y ago
I committed to switching to Vivaldi back in 2019 or so. I installed it on all of my machines (including Mac and PC). But I found it to be unstable and prone to crashes and weird issues, even though the features were nice. I eventually gave up in frustration and switched to Firefox, which I've found to be rock solid by comparison. I personally am not planning to give Vivaldi another shot any time soon after that mess.
- eirki 6y ago
  Alternate anectdata: I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago and have had no problems with crashes.

hellojason 6y ago

I’ve been using 2 hidden features in Chrome and Edge called Tab Groups and Minimize Tab Groups, which let you assign a bunch of tabs to a group and minimize them down to a size the length of text that you named that group. Color coding too. Game changer. You can enable them in the chrome://flags and edge://flags.

chabad360 6y ago
Chrome has that too, but last I checked, they do not persist if you close the browser. Is edge any different?
- nilsandrey 6y ago
  In Edge it does persist for me. Seems to doesn't persists between updates.
pcardoso 6y ago
Colored tabs are such an underrated feature. I loved them on OS/2.
- reaperducer 6y ago
  I think a lot of tech companies would benefit from having a team that does nothing but install and run old software and operating systems to mine them for good features that have been forgotten.
jjp 6y ago
Is there a way to persist the name, color across sessions. I'd love to be able to open all the bookmarks in a folder and then have them assigned to the same group/color. Then that way I can recreate one of a handful of different multi-tab environments at the start of each session.
rakoo 6y ago
Color coding comes for free with containers in Firefox. I agree it makes things much easier.

h_anna_h 6y ago

Does anyone know if anything similar exists for firefox? I remember trying some such addons a while ago but they were all extremely laggy.

idoubtit 6y ago
Tree Style Tabs has more features and is arguably better. In the year following the core changes in Firefox (Chrome extensions, threaded tabs) I had many bugs (high cpu load, broken tree, no restoring at startup...) but I haven't seen a bug in the past year. Configuration was not easy though, and It don't know if it still requires fidgeting with Firefox's files in order to remove the default tab bar.
epage 6y ago
There is the more powerful version, Tree Style Tabs. Been using it for years and can't switch browsers because of it :). I've seen people talk about Sideberry but I've never tried it.
- pityJuke 6y ago
  I've personally found Sideberry a more performant and less buggy version of TST as of late.
quietbritishjim 6y ago
Tree Style Tab [1] is a generalisation of this to arbitrary levels of nesting. It also goes down the side of the browser window, which is a far better use of space. I'd say it's the number 1 reason I (still) use Firefox. [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- h_anna_h 6y ago
  I used it before but I am not a huge fan of it, I do not remember the exact reason however so I might try it again. So far I have been using tab manager plus but it does not let you group tabs together (unless if you create new windows). I miss the old firefox panorama.

2Gkashmiri 6y ago

forgive my ignorance, but why are these browsers based on chromium only? cant they build on firefox codebase just like palemoon and basilisk, waterfox, seamonkey, iceweasel? if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?

mdre 6y ago
I asked this once, and people told me it had something to do with firefox being a PITA to compile, among other things
epage 6y ago
They'd basically have to fork Firefox. There isn't a clear distinction between the engine and the browser. They had an embedding API at one point but dropped it because the design made it hard to evolve both. This is on top of people wanting quick market share which requires compatibility with the "big player" :(
- 2Gkashmiri 6y ago
  uh,, arent these big players usually just reskinned chromiums only? whats giving them an advantage in terms of market share?
  - nicoburns 6y ago
    The point is that reskinning Firefox is pretty difficult because there's no stable API between the "skin" and underlying engine. Firefox used to have an option for embedding Gecko, but it's no longer maintained.
acct776 6y ago
"'Oh, Firefox bad' thing"? You mean the fact that their security is atrocious in comparison?
lmkg 6y ago
Vivaldi had a blog post recently that touched on this tangentially. https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/ https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/ > At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and the most widely used – that was important to us. Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium. I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet. If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision might be different.

saint_angels 6y ago

Does adding more visible tabs solves the problem of having too many tabs? If not, what is it for?

leephillips 6y ago

“The solution to too many tabs is here – a second Tab Bar.” Why stop at two? If you think that this is the feature that you have been waiting for, maybe consider the possibility that browser tabs are not the ideal way to store and organize information.

leetcrew 6y ago
there is a tab tree extension for firefox that is kinda popular. I like the concept (often I want to follow a bunch of links out of the same page without losing my place), but I found the sidebar implementation clunky.
wejick 6y ago
I beg to differ, tabs itself is information. Even though it's just "ephemeral", it's something ripe for any additional management tools. With all the tab chaos and context switching needs, this will be really helpful.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Most of your tabs are probably things that you intend to read later, or want to keep around to refer to, or something like that. Each one takes up a big chunk of RAM, and either a few or a lot of CPU cycles, depending on your browser and what’s running on the page. Each one takes up some screen real estate and makes it harder to navigate among the tabs that you’re actively using. If your browser crashes you may lose some tabs and the information that they represent. You can’t use this information easily if you switch to another browser. If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any software, or write your own, to manage this information. But how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well, just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new front page story about another system to do just that. I wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.
sieste 6y ago
"The solution to too many tabs is here – MORE TABS!"

enriquto 6y ago

Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be merged into a single interface. The difference between them is just quantitative.

currysausage 6y ago
Reminds me of this Firefox concept: http://web.archive.org/web/20090801232011/informationarchitects.jp/designing-firefox-32/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090801232011/informationarchite...
- rakoo 6y ago
  I feel like there's some paradigm we haven't reached yet. As the parent said, bookmarks and history are just 2 different views of the same underlying data and tabs provide an isolation of the context If we go back to the root of what the web is, we have a graph where nodes are documents and edges are a user clicking on a link at a given time, and the user wants to keep a few of the documents in the current context. So not only is there's a graph, which is not easy to represent and navigate, but the edges depend on time. Maybe some VR thing can help us see something new here
  - generalizations 6y ago
    We could generalize further and say that's what the entire window manager of an OS represents. Though, there's a difference between 'currently loaded' and just the address, and for less-than-high-end computers, that difference can mean a lot. That graph also contains a lot of noise - e.g. documents that aren't needed. I wonder if VR would help, by letting us see more, or if that better paradigm could also be implemented on 2D screens. There's already various graph visualization tools. But the tricky part would be wrapping that up into something useful - like a tree graph vs. tree style tabs. And if this would be more than 1-dimensional, like TST, then it would likely have to be a full page.
lmkg 6y ago
I believe this as well. That's the reason why I have a triple-digit number tabs open, and haven't bookmarked a site in twenty years. I much prefer having only a single interface to manage, which for me is tabs. I suspect many others with a similar tab-count are the same.

mlajtos 6y ago

If you are interested in tab stacks or tiling, check out https://github.com/mlajtos/mosaic https://github.com/mlajtos/mosaic

rafaelvasco 6y ago

Been using Workona on Edge. Helps a lot.

onychomys 6y ago

The real solution Vivaldi offers to the tabpocalypse has been here for ages: tabs on the side instead of on top! We all have widescreen monitors now, so losing 50 or 100 pixels on the horizontal plane isn't really a big problem. And the tabs then become scrollable downwards, while still keeping their readability. It took me a couple of days to get used to them over on the sidebar, but I could never go back.

patwolf 6y ago
I've been trying out the side tabs for a week now and cannot get used to it. So many sites I use have left hand menus, e.g. JIRA, AWS, that is seems like cognitive overload to see both menus butted up against each other. With top tabs there's at least the URL bar to provide some spatial separation between the two.
- toyg 6y ago
  Just push it to the right then...? If it's doable, that is. That's where I keep my system taskbar.
  - onychomys 6y ago
    Yeah, I do mine on the right, and keep the browser on my right-hand monitor, so the list of tabs is way at one side of my view. It's worked really well for me.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      Yeah, in Firefox I've been really happy with Tree-Style Tabs on the right hand side.
    - IlliOnato 6y ago
      Exactly what I am doing. Tabs on the right on the right-hand monitor on Mac (which has window controls on the left). They never get in the way, basically I only see them when I am going to use them.

tzuyu 6y ago

That has to be the best feature of vivaldi. Default browser for two years.

marcinzm 6y ago

I wrote a Firefox extension for exactly this almost 20 years ago back in their XUL iteration of extensions. Everything old is new again I guess. Brings back memories.

BugWatch 6y ago
Crazy Browser, IE browser shell I used 20 years ago, had this same capability (actually, "more powerful", since it was not limited to two). If I were them, frankly I'd be ashamed a bit (or a lot) of bragging about it in 2020.... but that's just me, I guess. (Nowdays [more like many a year], a Firefox user with even heavier TreeStyleTab addiction. Now, if only Mozilla would finally get its session API in order...)

namero999 6y ago

Opera has, since a while, the concept of workspace. A vertical icon bar is created at the edge of the screen, which basically acts as if there were multiple windows where to group tabs by topic. For instance, personal, work, media, research, topic x, y, z. The only improvement I see would be to optionally isolate the workspace from one another (so as to have different sessions on the same websites).

wejick 6y ago
They have it since before Blink migration, I still remember when they announced this feature. The implementation a bit different because back then screen resolution is not as good as today, now we can easily afford literally 2 tab rows.
- namero999 6y ago
  I like the fact that it's on the side, with widescreen monitors I prefer to sacrifice 30px of lateral space. They also integrate the most common instant messengers in there, which means less open tabs. Since last release, Spotify is docked too.
Tesl 6y ago
I use Opera for this feature alone, makes a huge difference!

pjmlp 6y ago

It is called bookmarks, I really don't get the tabpocalypse.

alpaca128 6y ago
No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store bookmarks but also being good at finding them again. In contrast a hierarchical tab structure can act both as the stuff I'm currently working on as well as a way to store all things I find interesting in named groups. If you didn't manually tag all your bookmarks, ideally with a consistent naming scheme, finding certain sites again can be quite a task. But I know what tab group a certain website that I last used 2 years ago and can't remember the name/url of has to be in. It's basically the web version of a file manager. Why would I spend time to organise bookmarks in some folder structure if the structure already exists in the tab bar, always up to date?
- asiando 6y ago
  > No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store bookmarks but also being good at finding them again. And tabs solve this problem how? In most browsers they aren’t even searchable. The only advantage over a folder of bookmarks is that you can close one with a shortcuts, whereas bookmarks require several clicks.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Because tabs get lost when browser crashes and don't allow for searching.
  - alpaca128 6y ago
    You are wrong on both claims. Firefox usually still preserves the session despite crashes, and even if it doesn't you can still restore it again via "recently closed windows". Although I only had to do that once, after a certain bug-riddled Windows 10 update. I have at least 300 tabs opened constantly in two Firefox windows, and I never lost a session. And Firefox automatically searches all tabs in addition to bookmarks whenever you type in the address bar, and lets you jump to that tab directly.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ksec 6y ago

Whenever we have a discussions on Browser and topic of too many Tabs comes up, there are always a small portion of HN user suggest to me and those who uses lots of tabs are using the browser Wrong, ADHD or having mental problem. And should seek changing workflow or treatment. I currently have a relatively small number of Tabs opened, 150. I guess to those who only have a few tabs open at max think of us as crazy or alien.

aloer 6y ago

I am one of those that keeps everything in tabs (currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook) And tabs are imho the perfect abstraction. This is misguided effort. The issue is with the way multiple browser windows are managed. When I have many tabs I must have a way to manage many windows as well. Visually! Whether these can and should be improved on a browser level I can’t say. MacOS is already very very good at this and much better than anything else I extensively use app expose and spaces to visually and spatially find what I need and structure my environment by projects and topics. I have everything I need exactly where I left it, together with all other applications and information that was related to it Adding more management features should not be the responsibility of the browser. That’s why I‘ve never been a fan of any of the popular tab management extensions or browser features

AbraKdabra 6y ago
> currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook bruh
devcriollo 6y ago
why do you have so many tabs open? if i need to see something then i save it to bookmarks or session buddy. How long will it take you to see the content of that amount of tabs if you are ever going to do it?
- aloer 6y ago
  But why do you save it in bookmarks? With tabs it’s right there where I left it. Same scroll state, same visual content. Why go through the hassle of bookmarking if tabs are already built in and work well? With bookmarks you lose so much important context. Our minds just don’t work well on lists of links As I said it’s important the OS works the same way. I always have on the left most space my utility window for example with messengers and mail tabs open I always have localhost for development for each project on the left most tab followed by the most common docs and tickets I need throughout the project. And then over time I build up tabs to the right. And naturally the ones in the far right are the latest ones so when I come back to the project that often helps recalling what was done last And if it becomes too much and the tabs are still relevant then I just extract the middle part between localhost+docs on the one side and the latest research on the right and out it in its own window in the background So essentially I use all the dimensions there are: - within the tabs there is an order - within the space there is an order (left half, right half on 34” wide screen) - in depth there is an order (windows all the way to the back are the oldest and will be culled from time to time) - and then there is the spaces themselves which are mainly for different projects

alpaca128 6y ago

So this is basically Firefox' Tree Style Tabs but less powerful and embedded in a slower UI? The one and only reason I stopped using Vivaldi every time I tried it is the performance. But it becomes more and more obvious the developers simply have different priorities.

generalizations 6y ago
I wish, but it isn't. There was a request a few years ago for tree style tabs to be implemented in Vivaldi, but I think the dev didn't like the conflict with their own tab layout implementation. Seems to me there's a subset of power users on Firefox just waiting for any other browser to implement tree style tabs.
drcongo 6y ago
I have to keep a Chrome-like browser around just for things like MS Teams that supposedly won't run in anything else, I have Vivaldi and Brave. I hate Brave for the crypto nonsense it shoves in my face among other things, but Vivaldi is so unbelievably slow that I'm forced to use Brave. It boggles my mind that anyone would release something that slow and then never work on that problem
ajtjp 6y ago
I'm curious what area of Vivaldi is perceived as slow. I use Vivaldi at home (on a 9-year-old desktop), and Firefox at work, and the only things that come to mind are tab opening/closing could be better, and some very CSS-heavy animations such as the NYT's map of coronavirus's spread from Wuhan are much better on Gecko than Blink. But day to day, I have no complaints about performance from either. Then again, I also use uBlock Origin... perhaps Vivaldi is slow without it. I'll also admit that theoretically I'd expect Vivaldi's UI to be slower due to being based on web technologies instead of native, but I can't say I can perceive a difference except in edge cases.
- rasz 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951928 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25951928 Tab handling was at least x1000 slower than Chrome last time I tested. It got dramatically slower in the last few snapshots and the official 3.6 Stable build. Its not just tabs, address bar handling is totally broken, opening new tab and starting to type quickly will result in eaten letters. Opening new tab, clicking CTRL-F and starting to type will again open with ~1 second delay and lost letters. Then we get into broken javascript causality https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ open in normal browser and Vivaldi, Vivaldi address bar handling code is overriding scrollTop with delayed location.hash update.

podiki 6y ago

Talking about tabs can only remind me of how bad I am (was??) at hoarding them [0]. Years and years worth. All the best organization systems in the world can't save you from clicking more and more. It was at least a little terrifying whenever I close Firefox and it says I'm closing 5 windows with 768 tabs (which it will restore, but I worry)... [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-confessions-of-a-tab-hoarder https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-co...

generalizations 6y ago
Usually restores. I've pulled similar stunts, and once in about every 20-100 restores it'll just fail. FYI.
- philsnow 6y ago
  I periodically (or when I'm about to upgrade either) grab all the tabs from chrome/firefox and save them out to files / org-mode, with things like this https://gist.github.com/philsnow/780b131608878d93e9a8ad379359471b https://gist.github.com/philsnow/780b131608878d93e9a8ad37935...
fn1 6y ago
Why not close them? YAGNI

fn1 6y ago

I never understood how people not close (or bookmark) tabs. When I'm heavily working i have 20-30 tabs open. But after the work is done, i'll close what I don't need and bookmark the rest. Then again I also tend not to have more than 5 mails in my inbox.

okareaman 6y ago

I downloaded 3.6 because I read it has a very customizable interface. I wanted to add a feature, only to find out it already has it. Example; when I am browsing Twitter I want the bookmarks bar across the top to only have my Twitter folders. I can do this in Vivaldi by right clicking on my Twitter folder and selecting "Set As Bookmark Bar Folder." Nice.

unicornporn 6y ago

So, honest question... Why would one chose Vivaldi over Firefox (with Tree Style Tab)?

remram 6y ago
Speed I guess? I have trouble putting your question in the context of this thread.
- generalizations 6y ago
  Context, to me, seems to be that firefox + tree style tabs is a better implementation of what vivaldi is showing here.
  - remram 6y ago
    Whatever reason people had to use Vivaldi before they had the feature at all will still be valid.
- rasz 6y ago
  Vivaldi is slow, definitely not speed.
ajtjp 6y ago
Background: I used Opera Presto as my main browser from 2007-2014, and Vivaldi since 2016 (2015 being a mix of Opera, Firefox, and Vivaldi). I've used Firefox as my main browser at work for most of the past four years. One big factor for me is the customizability without having to rely on extensions. I trust Vivaldi (and von Tetzchner), and don't have to worry about whether I trust extension makers. The customization options in Vivaldi tend to work pretty darn well too, which can be more hit-and-miss with third party ones in Firefox. Single-key shortcuts are also a big win for Vivaldi for me. I got used to these in Opera and they're great for efficiency while web browsing. Maybe I can get them with an extension for Firefox, but it's enabling one check box in Vivaldi. It's similar to why some people like vim plugins for browsers, but with less vim expertise required. I've also seen Firefox remove a lot of features over the years. XUL extensions being the big one, but there are others. Firefox Hello. Firefox Panorama, just as I was starting to take a liking to it. Vivaldi has a philosophy of adding features that let you customize the browser to how you like it, and if only 0.2% of users use that feature but it makes them really happy, that's fine. Firefox will remove features if not enough users adopt it. Thus my trust that Firefox is going to keep features that I like has been lowered over the years, making me more hesitant to try new Firefox features, and generally more hesitant about Firefox. Although I'm considering switching part of my home browsing back to Firefox because of its ability to not autoplay videos. Too many sites have those nowadays (and too often, self-hosted and not as third-party ads that are easily blocked), and Blink-based browsers can't stop them, and I'm getting pretty tired of having to pause/hide videos all the time so I can focus on reading articles.

IlliOnato 6y ago

Tabs on the side is the real reason I am using Vivaldi as my primary browser. Tab stacks are useful, too, although I typically only use them when doing research of some kind. Just installed the new version with two-level tab stacks, seems pretty cool so far, but not yet sure how useful they will be in day-to-day browsing.

Hamuko 6y ago

As someone with like 150+ tabs open in Firefox, I should probably be happy about this, but I'm not. Feels like they're encouraging my sick obsession with tabs when I should in fact be put on rehab.

Zancarius 6y ago
As someone with currently 3500 tabs open and regularly hits 6000, I can only say: Amateur! (Kidding. I just never close anything until I get annoyed because I like to use them as active working memory for a period of about a month or longer.)

Tomis02 6y ago

Does anyone else remember how, in old Opera, tabs could overflow into multiple lines? Good days.

ajtjp 6y ago
I remember seeing that in some browser, but was it Opera? I remember having 100 tabs and miniscule tab titles in Opera, but can't recall that option. I still use 12.18 on occasion, and fired up 11.52 but can't find any such option in its tab settings. It looks like Firefox and Tab Mix Plus offered it back in the day; I'm thinking that might be where I remember it from.

rasz 6y ago

How slow is Vivaldi: Download fresh Vivaldi Stable - 3.6 (2165.34). Open non existent domain to land on a very light "this page doesnt exist" ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error page. Start Cloning Tabs by Shift clicking in the Tab bar, then Right clicking and selecting Clone. First you clone one tab into two, then two into four, etc. At cloning 64 Tabs to 128 opening every new Tab will be taking ~1 second per Tab. Cloning up to 256 open tabs will take you anywhere between 5-15 minutes!!! At this point switching between Tabs will FREEZE UI for 8 seconds. Let me repeat - EIGHT second freeze while switching between empty error page Tabs. At all times Vivaldi UI will be freezing with one maxed out thread of 16 thread 4GHz CPU, other 15 threads resting at minimal load. Right clicking on the first open tab and selecting "close Tabs to the Right" will close 255 Tabs at once - this will FREEZE UI for ~1.5 minutes. >100 seconds of frozen UI while browser is closing 255 empty html only Tabs. Again one CPU thread maxed out, rest idle. Welcome to a browser made using React framework.

bzb6 6y ago
It’s honestly terrible, I’ve mentioned this before, there’s absolutely no way I’ll ever use a browser this slow. I abandoned Firefox back in the day for much less.
Smithalicious 6y ago
I hate going "works on my machine" but I have >100 tabs open at all times and switching tabs is instant for me, and your CPU beats mine.
- rasz 6y ago
  There is a difference between 100 and 200 tabs, plus which Vivaldi version are you on? Builds up to 3.6.2160.3 work fine with ~400 tabs, and by fine I mean ~1 second Tab switching. Instant is very subjective. You will probably also call going fullscreen on YT instant, yet here it is measured https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M
countviolencia 6y ago
I used from 2016 till 2019. While I love the features, it is too damn slow and makes browsing the Internet feel tedious.

anongoesprivate 6y ago

what is their business model? ,i'm not able to find anything related to it. Firefox runs on donation, google runs on tracking, vivaldi seems not have both based on their about page