9 ms·

When the Tab Comes Due: Challenges in the Cost Structure of Browser Tab Usage

71 points by lnyan 5y ago

siculars 5y ago
As someone who reboots periodically just to clear dozens of windows with a hundred tabs or more, can affirm that this is the modern bane of my work existence. +1 to making this better. Please.
- jraph 5y ago
  You could run something like killall firefox / killall chromium instead of a full reboot, no?
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  I would like to understand why to be honest. As my sibling pointed out already, reboots aren't necessary, even if you really need to kill all those windows. I haven't rebooted my work laptop in about half a year now for example. I would also like to understand how you get to that state in the first place. I see colleagues at work with so many tabs they don't know what is what all the time and they spend so much time trying to find the right tab it's unbelievable. They need to show something to us that requires switching between maybe two or three tabs and they always mess it up. Half the time in these meetings is spent on findings tabs and/or scrolling wildly within them. Personally I have exactly 2 Windows open and I never get to more tabs than where I can still see from the tab title what is what. I also know what's where, meaning Gmail is open in the first tab of the first window, calendar in Tre second, timesheet in the third. Second window has sprint board and monitors as first and following tabs and is generally used for 'work'. When unneeded work tabs get closed. For example if I review a PR, the tab stays open until I'm done with that PR and then it's closed. Your situation might be completely different from theirs but your post reminded me of this. Can you explain how you get there and why?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    The paper identified some reasons in Table 1 and Section 6. O1: Reminders and Resumption O2: Revisiting References O3: Avoid Costly Re-finding O4: Sunk Costs and Aspirations O5: External Mental Model O6: Uncertain Relevance
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
      I 'get' that I just don't get it ;) O1 sure I leave stuff open to remind me too. Like the PR I didn't finish reviewing. But once I'm done I close the tab. O2/O3 I get that but I don't need a tab open. I use Firefox and no bookmarks. I just type what I remember to find something specific. Let's say I need to revisit a google doc about a certain topic. I'll type "docs <topic title part>" and most likely it'll be one of the top 3 results shown from my browsing history. I find _everything_ that way and I just don't get why I'd need to leave the tab open or sort things into bookmarks with categories and such. O4 I am particularly talking about work so I wonder how this would play a role but who knows. O5/O6 this seems largely to correspond to O1 if you ask me. I do sometimes find duplicate tabs open and close them or I find reminder tabs that I no longer need because something else reminded me of them but I did that task in a new tab, which is since closed. The point is that if I have only maybe 20 tabs total open it's easy to clean up. I would agree that having 500 open would just be overwhelming. Then again I'm known to go over our 'backlog' and just close 500 tickets in an hour long session because our product managers can't apparently keep the backlog at a reasonable size.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        Framing everything in terms of the specific way you do things is unlikely to lead to understanding people whose needs or minds differ from yours.
        tharkun__ 5y ago
        I get that people's minds work differently. I don't get why they don't use the tools that are there to help them. They just have to be used. As an example I get that some people just have to categorize things. That's ok. But why then use these insanely nested bookmark folder trees to try and find stuff and failing? If it doesn't work, try something else. I didn't figure out the current (as you say very specific) way of doing things overnight. It's a constantly evolving thing. I get that someone might not know for example that some of this is possible and thus can't bring themselves to close tabs for fear of not finding it again. Once you know though how powerful and easy the search is, is there just a psychological barrier some people can just never break through? Can you provide any insight into that?
superkuh 5y ago
The thing is, if you use a web browser instead of a javascript engine designed for delivering DRM media (ie, chrome, modern FF), you can open as many tabs as you want without consequence. The problem is not tabs. The problem is multi-process and treating the browser like an operating system. I regularly operate with 1000+ tabs on less than 3 GB of ram. This works because I disable javascript and look at web sites instead of run applications. I have extensions to full text search and switch between them and each tab stores it's path on the web, unlike bookmarks. And I've been saving my sessions every month since Opera 5 introduced tabs (I use a FF fork now). That covers 2003-2021. Tabs are great. Modern browsers are bad.
- SkyMarshal 5y ago
  What do you mean by “each tab stores it's path on the web”?
  - pseudalopex 5y ago
    The back and forward buttons work.
- Guest42 5y ago
  Are the 1000+ tabs related? Is this for research (or workflow, or just preferred routine...)?
  - c22 5y ago
    I'm not the OP, but I maintain many windows--one for each line of inquiry/project and a few special windows for e.g. webmail. Each of these windows may contain 1-20 tabs and I regularly push around 500 open tabs. Like the OP, I make this possible by default disabling javascript.
    - artificial 5y ago
      The Great Suspender (fork) along with saving sessions is essential for high quantities. Browsers save tab context, you can go forward and backward unlike bookmarks. Super cool for sleuthing sessions.
parhamn 5y ago
We (https://synth.app https://synth.app) do something similar to tab suspender with some slight modifications. My browser CPU/memory usage has dropped significantly and it’s really noticeable. One thing we learned is hot-swapping screenshots while you load in the background (on pages you haven’t interacted with) works wonders. Basically I go back to a tab, see the info where I left off while our browser hot swaps it with the loaded page. Often just hovering on the “sleeping” tab list to see the last captured shot to grab the snippet of info or to realize that isn’t the tab you needed is sufficient. I’m not sure if suspender does this.
- terhechte 5y ago
  This actually sounds like a great browser, looking forward to trying it out!
  - parhamn 5y ago
    Thanks! Looking forward to you trying it!
gumby 5y ago
> Tabs have become integral to Web browsing yet have changed little since their introduction nearly 20 years ago. I used OmniWeb on the Mac which had tabs and tab groups more than 20 years ago. It was so liberating when the official alternative on the Mac was the dreadful IE. Still has tab features I miss today.
tbrockman 5y ago
Shameless plug, I actually built a little Chrome extension (works in latest Brave too last I checked) that aims to help you manage your tab growth. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prune/gblddboefgbljpngfhgekbpoigikbenh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prune/gblddboefgbl... It keeps track of the last time you looked at a tab, and depending how you set it up can either group tabs into a collapsed group, or close them automatically once they reach a set threshold. It also stops you from opening duplicates, focusing originals instead (based on exact URI match).
- lyjackal 5y ago
  I would love something like this, but for Firefox. Does anyone have any recommendations?
  - atomicfiredoll 5y ago
    I'd also be curious about the auto grouping. I'm currently using Auto Tab Discard, which has a "Permanently delete (remove) old discarded tabs if they are inactive for (in hours)" and I'm manually grouping things with Panorama View. I don't know if it's built in to Firefox or one of the addons, but I've noticed it will already suggest an existing tab when I type the name/site in to the address bar.
  - bentcorner 5y ago
    I'm a fan of tree-style tabs for firefox. Child descendants can be collapsed and you can re-arrange the hierarchy as you open/close tabs. It's a little finicky with drag/drop but is very powerful. Edge has vertical tabs which is space saving but lacks a hierarchy which is important to me.
  - tbrockman 5y ago
    Yeah, originally it did work on Firefox, but since migrating to manifest v3 and adding the tab grouping feature (API not available in Firefox), it is unfortunately no longer compatible. If I can in the future I'll definitely try to make something available for Firefox users.
- 5y ago
atomicfiredoll 5y ago
I really wish that Firefox hadn't mitigated Panorama View to existence as an add-on. In the world of constant multitasking and switching between various interests, it really helps me create a mental map. Panarama also seemed to help me bridge the gap between leaving tabs open and relegating the content to the forgotten arcana of my favorites list--something that probably deserves a rethink itself when it comes to keeping important items surfaced. That said, Panorama has it's shortcomings. I would have loved to see it evolve tools around automatically sorting and pruning groups or migrating them to favorites easier.
- hashhar 5y ago
  You'll love this then. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... Much more powerful than panorama especially if you use container tabs.
  - clairity 5y ago
    i ended up with tabby a few months back when a similar topic came up and it was recommended here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-tab-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-...
lewisjoe 5y ago
One more shameless plug, I actually built a chrome extension that helps you close tabs you want to read later and deliver them to your inbox. Helps you close tabs confidently, knowing it's not lost forever. https://closetab.email https://closetab.email https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/closetabemail/lkgcnpldaonnbdnkiimgdjkecopjnbeb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/closetabemail/lkgc...
- alin23 5y ago
  This is exactly what I needed! Thank you for making it and especially for talking about it publicly! I think shameless plugs should be viewed as more positive. It's much better to find out about a product or tool in a relevant context and from the author itself instead of an Ad or blog post.
anthony_romeo 5y ago
Real talk on tabs -- Tabs were always just a way for the browser to mitigate how horribly window managers handled multiple open windows at the time. IMO the OS/Distro/WM itself should be managing a global tab interface for all apps to use, rather than having app-makers needlessly reinvent the wheel over-and-over again.
- johnchristopher 5y ago
  Interesting read: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th... Tabs didn't appear in Netscape before 2002. I recall reading somewhere on the web that devs from Netscape didn't like the idea but don't quote me on that.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  It'd be neat to have a "container window" within which you could put arbitrary applications in, and have a tab associated with each of them. So you could group a bunch of open web pages, a word document and a file folder for some research on a particular topic. Or a game and a walkthrough together. Your repl, ide, and a web browser open on stackoverflow for some programming. Instead of application-oriented navigation, you'd have group s of tasks that you'd navigate between. You'd probably ctrl-tab between tabs inside of a container more often than you'd alt-tab between tasks.
  - calvinmorrison 5y ago
    see: tabbed (suckless.org) XEmbed i3
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      Or Fluxbox
  - kemitche 5y ago
    You can do this, at least with Windows or Linux, by grouping windows into separate desktops.
antonkar 5y ago
Don’t ever close any tabs one-by-one: bookmark and close all of them once a month when you computer starts being slow :)
- tharkun__ 5y ago
  I really don't get bookmarks. You'll spend and endless amount of time categorizing stuff that you then can't find again in them. Close your tabs. Type keywords you remember to find things from browsing history. It's like using Gmail search vs a folder structure and 'filing' things. Like this one dude I know who'd have organized bookmarks. He wants to watch something on Netflix. The structure goes something like this Top level->Media->Streaming Services->Paid->Netflix (also has Prime Video in there). I just type 'n' into my location bar and hit enter because my browser has learned that if something starts with n I usually go to Netflix.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    For things you use regularly enough I agree, but history eventually expires. Also the default history UI is rubbish about surfacing connections between pages – when searching history, you can't get the browser to take you from the search result back to that actual point in your browsing history that search result is coming from, then then browser only shows you the last visit of each URL anyway even though internally it stores older visits, too, and it doesn't allow you to see connections between pages (I opened that link from this page etc.). So if you know the right keywords to directly find a page again it's fine, but if you only know that before (or after) visiting that page you visited a different page, and you can only find that different page in your history you're sort of stuck. As usual, the best extension for dealing with that problem in Firefox (Norwell History Tools) was nuked by the 57 update, and last time I checked none of the possible webextension replacements included all functionality of the original add-on – although it seems that there is some hacky way of running the original add-on even in a current Firefox, if you dare (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/ https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/)
    - tharkun__ 5y ago
mattlondon 5y ago
I sometimes wonder about this ... It is very rare for me to have more than 10 tabs open at once per window/monitor. Often just 4 or 5. I close the browser frequently (multiple times a day potentially) and start with a clean sheet each time the browser starts. I feel uneasy if I have 10+ open at once and will regularly groom tabs' ordering, culling ones if they are not something I am working on right now (... or in the next 30 mins etc) I have seen people at work with hundreds open spending ages trying to find the right tab for a presentation or spreadsheet or log file or whatever. It just feels like the sort of people with "lots" of tabs are the disorganised ones who forget to email you back when they say they will or turn up late to meetings. Are they just disorganised examples, and there are actually organised people that use hundreds of tabes at once? To people with this many tabs, why do you do it? The only explanation I've heard is "I'll look at this later" but that is what bookmarks or navigation history or search engines are for?
- dropofwill 5y ago
  Bookmarks are a pain to manage and navigation history expires. I guess I use tabs like automatically created bookmarks, when i’m done with them i just close the tab. I have fuzzy search across the tabs, so i never click around on a tab looking for what i want.
mrkramer 5y ago
Tab management is hell for me it is one of the most annoying things that I have to deal in my life. It's almost driving me crazy but funny enough no "Tab Extension" helps me since I'm not sure how reliable it is; I don't want to store my tabs remotely and then wake one day only to find it gone. Only thing that I can do is to export my tab links locally. We need local Tab Management solution so I can do it safely on my local PC. I remember one time I was in Tab frenzy and I had around 100 tabs opened on my mobile phone Chrome browser and I think I hit the maximum limit because Chrome started showing me smiley face every time I tried to open a new tab I guess cool Easter Egg. I had an idea of getting rid of "Browser Tab" concept and include all opened Tabs in one tab as HTML document so for example when you open a new Tab(web link) it would get included in your HTML document tab so essentially you would have a list of all opened Tabs(web links). Imagine having one tab in your browser in a form of HTML document with the list of all "opened tabs" , "recently closed" etc. something similar to "Browser History" but of active sessions(web links). Something similar is done by Tab Extensions but they are not good enough. You could even emulate links (load all web pages in one web HTML document) or scrape them and incrementally search them all in order to minimize tremendous management hassle and noise from information overload.
- wildrhythms 5y ago
  >I remember one time I was in Tab frenzy I can relate, and I call this "Tab Hell." Did you ever try the old Firefox "Panorama" feature? (previously referred to as "Tab Candy")
  - mrkramer 5y ago
    I never heard of Tab Candy but from what I read [0] and saw it seems like awesome project. It looks like it is no longer supported, is there any project that revived it or any spiritual successor? [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/TabCandy/FAQ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/TabCandy/FAQ
dkarras 5y ago
Dealing with tabs (and when it isn't enough, multiple windows of browsers) is the worst part of computing I experience. Really, the bane of my existence. When I'm developing / doing research, I have to juggle multiple questions with possible answers spread on multiple sites and after a while it gets out of hand. Organizing as I go does not work because I need the flow and organization kills it. Leaving it be doesn't work after a while because the friction of going back to what you need becomes insurmountable. And if you are multitasking (divert your attention to a different problem / research topic with the intent of going back to the original problem later on) it becomes an absolute nightmare as the mess is multiplied. I do use extensions to stash tabs, but they generally stash with page headers and not all page headers are informative. Someone who knows what they are doing should really solve this problem.
- syrrim 5y ago
  Tree style tabs.
ziml77 5y ago
Something that always throws me off is web apps. I'll be looking at docs or something in one tab and then want to interact with something in another tab but will naturally reach for the taskbar to switch from reading to interacting. Breaking the web app off into another window helps a bit, but it still ends up grouped under the browser. Switching to non-grouped taskbar buttons might help, but in general I prefer having them grouped.
ChrisArchitect 5y ago
what's this about right off the bat - 20 years ago? Tabs were not as common/I'd argue didn't even exist, 20 years ago. Like, Opera might have had them but Firefox didn't popularize until what, 2004-05 maybe? And even that took awhile to go anywhere if you factor in initial slow growth of Firefox...so we're talking late 00s by time Tabs are a thing
Spivak 5y ago
What would really help me accumulate fewer tabs is an extension that makes the back button actually work (say using Firefox's tab hiding API) that every time I click a link it hides my current tab, and opens the page in a new tab and let's me navigate through my tabs temporally using back/forward just like the back/forward buttons are supposed to.
pabs3 5y ago
I found an interesting thing with Firefox (on Linux/Wayland), one window with 1000 tabs uses significantly less memory than 100 windows with 10 tabs each.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
vladstudio 5y ago
I'm a bit late to shameless plugs party :-) but here goes – https://wardrobe.vlad.studio/ https://wardrobe.vlad.studio/ – my solution to the tab mess problem. It is somewhere between "I'll just keep all my tabs open" and "I organize my sessions carefully".
- fraXis 5y ago
  +1 for Wardrobe. I have been using it for a couple of months now and it works great. Vlad also offers excellent support and if you come across a problem, he is very quick at getting it fixed.

71 points by lnyan 5y ago

As someone who reboots periodically just to clear dozens of windows with a hundred tabs or more, can affirm that this is the modern bane of my work existence. +1 to making this better. Please.

jraph 5y ago
You could run something like killall firefox / killall chromium instead of a full reboot, no?
tharkun__ 5y ago
I would like to understand why to be honest. As my sibling pointed out already, reboots aren't necessary, even if you really need to kill all those windows. I haven't rebooted my work laptop in about half a year now for example. I would also like to understand how you get to that state in the first place. I see colleagues at work with so many tabs they don't know what is what all the time and they spend so much time trying to find the right tab it's unbelievable. They need to show something to us that requires switching between maybe two or three tabs and they always mess it up. Half the time in these meetings is spent on findings tabs and/or scrolling wildly within them. Personally I have exactly 2 Windows open and I never get to more tabs than where I can still see from the tab title what is what. I also know what's where, meaning Gmail is open in the first tab of the first window, calendar in Tre second, timesheet in the third. Second window has sprint board and monitors as first and following tabs and is generally used for 'work'. When unneeded work tabs get closed. For example if I review a PR, the tab stays open until I'm done with that PR and then it's closed. Your situation might be completely different from theirs but your post reminded me of this. Can you explain how you get there and why?
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The paper identified some reasons in Table 1 and Section 6. O1: Reminders and Resumption O2: Revisiting References O3: Avoid Costly Re-finding O4: Sunk Costs and Aspirations O5: External Mental Model O6: Uncertain Relevance
  - tharkun__ 5y ago
    I 'get' that I just don't get it ;) O1 sure I leave stuff open to remind me too. Like the PR I didn't finish reviewing. But once I'm done I close the tab. O2/O3 I get that but I don't need a tab open. I use Firefox and no bookmarks. I just type what I remember to find something specific. Let's say I need to revisit a google doc about a certain topic. I'll type "docs <topic title part>" and most likely it'll be one of the top 3 results shown from my browsing history. I find _everything_ that way and I just don't get why I'd need to leave the tab open or sort things into bookmarks with categories and such. O4 I am particularly talking about work so I wonder how this would play a role but who knows. O5/O6 this seems largely to correspond to O1 if you ask me. I do sometimes find duplicate tabs open and close them or I find reminder tabs that I no longer need because something else reminded me of them but I did that task in a new tab, which is since closed. The point is that if I have only maybe 20 tabs total open it's easy to clean up. I would agree that having 500 open would just be overwhelming. Then again I'm known to go over our 'backlog' and just close 500 tickets in an hour long session because our product managers can't apparently keep the backlog at a reasonable size.
    - pseudalopex 5y ago
      Framing everything in terms of the specific way you do things is unlikely to lead to understanding people whose needs or minds differ from yours.
      - tharkun__ 5y ago
        I get that people's minds work differently. I don't get why they don't use the tools that are there to help them. They just have to be used. As an example I get that some people just have to categorize things. That's ok. But why then use these insanely nested bookmark folder trees to try and find stuff and failing? If it doesn't work, try something else. I didn't figure out the current (as you say very specific) way of doing things overnight. It's a constantly evolving thing. I get that someone might not know for example that some of this is possible and thus can't bring themselves to close tabs for fear of not finding it again. Once you know though how powerful and easy the search is, is there just a psychological barrier some people can just never break through? Can you provide any insight into that?

superkuh 5y ago

The thing is, if you use a web browser instead of a javascript engine designed for delivering DRM media (ie, chrome, modern FF), you can open as many tabs as you want without consequence. The problem is not tabs. The problem is multi-process and treating the browser like an operating system. I regularly operate with 1000+ tabs on less than 3 GB of ram. This works because I disable javascript and look at web sites instead of run applications. I have extensions to full text search and switch between them and each tab stores it's path on the web, unlike bookmarks. And I've been saving my sessions every month since Opera 5 introduced tabs (I use a FF fork now). That covers 2003-2021. Tabs are great. Modern browsers are bad.

SkyMarshal 5y ago
What do you mean by “each tab stores it's path on the web”?
- pseudalopex 5y ago
  The back and forward buttons work.
Guest42 5y ago
Are the 1000+ tabs related? Is this for research (or workflow, or just preferred routine...)?
- c22 5y ago
  I'm not the OP, but I maintain many windows--one for each line of inquiry/project and a few special windows for e.g. webmail. Each of these windows may contain 1-20 tabs and I regularly push around 500 open tabs. Like the OP, I make this possible by default disabling javascript.
  - artificial 5y ago
    The Great Suspender (fork) along with saving sessions is essential for high quantities. Browsers save tab context, you can go forward and backward unlike bookmarks. Super cool for sleuthing sessions.

parhamn 5y ago

We (https://synth.app https://synth.app) do something similar to tab suspender with some slight modifications. My browser CPU/memory usage has dropped significantly and it’s really noticeable. One thing we learned is hot-swapping screenshots while you load in the background (on pages you haven’t interacted with) works wonders. Basically I go back to a tab, see the info where I left off while our browser hot swaps it with the loaded page. Often just hovering on the “sleeping” tab list to see the last captured shot to grab the snippet of info or to realize that isn’t the tab you needed is sufficient. I’m not sure if suspender does this.

terhechte 5y ago
This actually sounds like a great browser, looking forward to trying it out!
- parhamn 5y ago
  Thanks! Looking forward to you trying it!

gumby 5y ago

> Tabs have become integral to Web browsing yet have changed little since their introduction nearly 20 years ago. I used OmniWeb on the Mac which had tabs and tab groups more than 20 years ago. It was so liberating when the official alternative on the Mac was the dreadful IE. Still has tab features I miss today.

tbrockman 5y ago

Shameless plug, I actually built a little Chrome extension (works in latest Brave too last I checked) that aims to help you manage your tab growth. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prune/gblddboefgbljpngfhgekbpoigikbenh?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/prune/gblddboefgbl... It keeps track of the last time you looked at a tab, and depending how you set it up can either group tabs into a collapsed group, or close them automatically once they reach a set threshold. It also stops you from opening duplicates, focusing originals instead (based on exact URI match).

lyjackal 5y ago
I would love something like this, but for Firefox. Does anyone have any recommendations?
- atomicfiredoll 5y ago
  I'd also be curious about the auto grouping. I'm currently using Auto Tab Discard, which has a "Permanently delete (remove) old discarded tabs if they are inactive for (in hours)" and I'm manually grouping things with Panorama View. I don't know if it's built in to Firefox or one of the addons, but I've noticed it will already suggest an existing tab when I type the name/site in to the address bar.
- bentcorner 5y ago
  I'm a fan of tree-style tabs for firefox. Child descendants can be collapsed and you can re-arrange the hierarchy as you open/close tabs. It's a little finicky with drag/drop but is very powerful. Edge has vertical tabs which is space saving but lacks a hierarchy which is important to me.
- tbrockman 5y ago
  Yeah, originally it did work on Firefox, but since migrating to manifest v3 and adding the tab grouping feature (API not available in Firefox), it is unfortunately no longer compatible. If I can in the future I'll definitely try to make something available for Firefox users.
5y ago

atomicfiredoll 5y ago

I really wish that Firefox hadn't mitigated Panorama View to existence as an add-on. In the world of constant multitasking and switching between various interests, it really helps me create a mental map. Panarama also seemed to help me bridge the gap between leaving tabs open and relegating the content to the forgotten arcana of my favorites list--something that probably deserves a rethink itself when it comes to keeping important items surfaced. That said, Panorama has it's shortcomings. I would have loved to see it evolve tools around automatically sorting and pruning groups or migrating them to favorites easier.

hashhar 5y ago
You'll love this then. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... Much more powerful than panorama especially if you use container tabs.
- clairity 5y ago
  i ended up with tabby a few months back when a similar topic came up and it was recommended here: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-tab-manager/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabby-window-...

lewisjoe 5y ago

One more shameless plug, I actually built a chrome extension that helps you close tabs you want to read later and deliver them to your inbox. Helps you close tabs confidently, knowing it's not lost forever. https://closetab.email https://closetab.email https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/closetabemail/lkgcnpldaonnbdnkiimgdjkecopjnbeb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/closetabemail/lkgc...

alin23 5y ago
This is exactly what I needed! Thank you for making it and especially for talking about it publicly! I think shameless plugs should be viewed as more positive. It's much better to find out about a product or tool in a relevant context and from the author itself instead of an Ad or blog post.

anthony_romeo 5y ago

Real talk on tabs -- Tabs were always just a way for the browser to mitigate how horribly window managers handled multiple open windows at the time. IMO the OS/Distro/WM itself should be managing a global tab interface for all apps to use, rather than having app-makers needlessly reinvent the wheel over-and-over again.

johnchristopher 5y ago
Interesting read: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th... Tabs didn't appear in Netscape before 2002. I recall reading somewhere on the web that devs from Netscape didn't like the idea but don't quote me on that.
bentcorner 5y ago
It'd be neat to have a "container window" within which you could put arbitrary applications in, and have a tab associated with each of them. So you could group a bunch of open web pages, a word document and a file folder for some research on a particular topic. Or a game and a walkthrough together. Your repl, ide, and a web browser open on stackoverflow for some programming. Instead of application-oriented navigation, you'd have group s of tasks that you'd navigate between. You'd probably ctrl-tab between tabs inside of a container more often than you'd alt-tab between tasks.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  see: tabbed (suckless.org) XEmbed i3
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Or Fluxbox
- kemitche 5y ago
  You can do this, at least with Windows or Linux, by grouping windows into separate desktops.

antonkar 5y ago

Don’t ever close any tabs one-by-one: bookmark and close all of them once a month when you computer starts being slow :)

tharkun__ 5y ago
I really don't get bookmarks. You'll spend and endless amount of time categorizing stuff that you then can't find again in them. Close your tabs. Type keywords you remember to find things from browsing history. It's like using Gmail search vs a folder structure and 'filing' things. Like this one dude I know who'd have organized bookmarks. He wants to watch something on Netflix. The structure goes something like this Top level->Media->Streaming Services->Paid->Netflix (also has Prime Video in there). I just type 'n' into my location bar and hit enter because my browser has learned that if something starts with n I usually go to Netflix.
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  For things you use regularly enough I agree, but history eventually expires. Also the default history UI is rubbish about surfacing connections between pages – when searching history, you can't get the browser to take you from the search result back to that actual point in your browsing history that search result is coming from, then then browser only shows you the last visit of each URL anyway even though internally it stores older visits, too, and it doesn't allow you to see connections between pages (I opened that link from this page etc.). So if you know the right keywords to directly find a page again it's fine, but if you only know that before (or after) visiting that page you visited a different page, and you can only find that different page in your history you're sort of stuck. As usual, the best extension for dealing with that problem in Firefox (Norwell History Tools) was nuked by the 57 update, and last time I checked none of the possible webextension replacements included all functionality of the original add-on – although it seems that there is some hacky way of running the original add-on even in a current Firefox, if you dare (https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/ https://github.com/xiaoxiaoflood/firefox-scripts/)
  - tharkun__ 5y ago

mattlondon 5y ago

I sometimes wonder about this ... It is very rare for me to have more than 10 tabs open at once per window/monitor. Often just 4 or 5. I close the browser frequently (multiple times a day potentially) and start with a clean sheet each time the browser starts. I feel uneasy if I have 10+ open at once and will regularly groom tabs' ordering, culling ones if they are not something I am working on right now (... or in the next 30 mins etc) I have seen people at work with hundreds open spending ages trying to find the right tab for a presentation or spreadsheet or log file or whatever. It just feels like the sort of people with "lots" of tabs are the disorganised ones who forget to email you back when they say they will or turn up late to meetings. Are they just disorganised examples, and there are actually organised people that use hundreds of tabes at once? To people with this many tabs, why do you do it? The only explanation I've heard is "I'll look at this later" but that is what bookmarks or navigation history or search engines are for?

dropofwill 5y ago
Bookmarks are a pain to manage and navigation history expires. I guess I use tabs like automatically created bookmarks, when i’m done with them i just close the tab. I have fuzzy search across the tabs, so i never click around on a tab looking for what i want.

mrkramer 5y ago

Tab management is hell for me it is one of the most annoying things that I have to deal in my life. It's almost driving me crazy but funny enough no "Tab Extension" helps me since I'm not sure how reliable it is; I don't want to store my tabs remotely and then wake one day only to find it gone. Only thing that I can do is to export my tab links locally. We need local Tab Management solution so I can do it safely on my local PC. I remember one time I was in Tab frenzy and I had around 100 tabs opened on my mobile phone Chrome browser and I think I hit the maximum limit because Chrome started showing me smiley face every time I tried to open a new tab I guess cool Easter Egg. I had an idea of getting rid of "Browser Tab" concept and include all opened Tabs in one tab as HTML document so for example when you open a new Tab(web link) it would get included in your HTML document tab so essentially you would have a list of all opened Tabs(web links). Imagine having one tab in your browser in a form of HTML document with the list of all "opened tabs" , "recently closed" etc. something similar to "Browser History" but of active sessions(web links). Something similar is done by Tab Extensions but they are not good enough. You could even emulate links (load all web pages in one web HTML document) or scrape them and incrementally search them all in order to minimize tremendous management hassle and noise from information overload.

wildrhythms 5y ago
>I remember one time I was in Tab frenzy I can relate, and I call this "Tab Hell." Did you ever try the old Firefox "Panorama" feature? (previously referred to as "Tab Candy")
- mrkramer 5y ago
  I never heard of Tab Candy but from what I read [0] and saw it seems like awesome project. It looks like it is no longer supported, is there any project that revived it or any spiritual successor? [0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/TabCandy/FAQ https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Projects/TabCandy/FAQ

dkarras 5y ago

Dealing with tabs (and when it isn't enough, multiple windows of browsers) is the worst part of computing I experience. Really, the bane of my existence. When I'm developing / doing research, I have to juggle multiple questions with possible answers spread on multiple sites and after a while it gets out of hand. Organizing as I go does not work because I need the flow and organization kills it. Leaving it be doesn't work after a while because the friction of going back to what you need becomes insurmountable. And if you are multitasking (divert your attention to a different problem / research topic with the intent of going back to the original problem later on) it becomes an absolute nightmare as the mess is multiplied. I do use extensions to stash tabs, but they generally stash with page headers and not all page headers are informative. Someone who knows what they are doing should really solve this problem.

syrrim 5y ago
Tree style tabs.

ziml77 5y ago

Something that always throws me off is web apps. I'll be looking at docs or something in one tab and then want to interact with something in another tab but will naturally reach for the taskbar to switch from reading to interacting. Breaking the web app off into another window helps a bit, but it still ends up grouped under the browser. Switching to non-grouped taskbar buttons might help, but in general I prefer having them grouped.

ChrisArchitect 5y ago

what's this about right off the bat - 20 years ago? Tabs were not as common/I'd argue didn't even exist, 20 years ago. Like, Opera might have had them but Firefox didn't popularize until what, 2004-05 maybe? And even that took awhile to go anywhere if you factor in initial slow growth of Firefox...so we're talking late 00s by time Tabs are a thing

Spivak 5y ago

What would really help me accumulate fewer tabs is an extension that makes the back button actually work (say using Firefox's tab hiding API) that every time I click a link it hides my current tab, and opens the page in a new tab and let's me navigate through my tabs temporally using back/forward just like the back/forward buttons are supposed to.

pabs3 5y ago

I found an interesting thing with Firefox (on Linux/Wayland), one window with 1000 tabs uses significantly less memory than 100 windows with 10 tabs each.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

vladstudio 5y ago

I'm a bit late to shameless plugs party :-) but here goes – https://wardrobe.vlad.studio/ https://wardrobe.vlad.studio/ – my solution to the tab mess problem. It is somewhere between "I'll just keep all my tabs open" and "I organize my sessions carefully".

fraXis 5y ago
+1 for Wardrobe. I have been using it for a couple of months now and it works great. Vlad also offers excellent support and if you come across a problem, he is very quick at getting it fixed.