20 ms·

Overcoming Tab Overload

• twobitshifter 5y ago
  I was actually a big user of firefox panorama. I know that it wasn’t easy to discover but it was the best idea of tabs I’ve seen. Expose, grids, and multiple desktops work the best for switching windows, why not have it for tabs? I think that with the right desktop environment we could completely get rid of most tabs. Windows and ie were terrible with opening new windows which made tabs a necessity, but really they should be used for grouping related pages.
  • andrewaylett 5y ago
    It's still around, as a fork of a fork: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-... I never really got to grips with having different sets of tabs within the same window -- that's the kind of thing I use multiple windows for. But I still have the extension installed because it's the easiest way to show several hundred tabs in a way which means I can avoid loading the content just to close tabs.
    • bityard 5y ago
      There have been so many forks of this, and they have all been buggy or gotten stalled. This one in particular randomly forgets some of your tab groups. ("you had ONE job!") The closest thing that works for me is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro... but I'm not thrilled with the user experience.
• readflaggedcomm 5y ago
  Appears to describe a tab grouping extension, but the closed beta (and lack of screenshots) suggests beta testing is machine learning to hash out the UI and grouping criteria. Unless they plan for it to be a service.
• dole 5y ago
  I love OneTab, being able to dump 50-100 tabs out to a running page of links to restart the browser is simple peace of mind to me.
  • imilk 5y ago
    I love Onetab as well. The problem I often have is sending a lot of tabs to Onetab, then never looking at them again. Which may not actually be a problem and more of an indication for how "important" the tab actually was. The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific topic, but the topic is not in the Title of the page and it can get lost in the clutter. Or maybe more useful, a search service that just crawled the pages in your Chrome history, rather than the entire web.
    • edmundsauto 5y ago
      The OneNote value add to me is that it allows me to close tabs without guilt. I don't really need to save them but can't let go - OneNote lets me let go.
    • odddog309 5y ago
      if you are using firefox you can use https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-stash/
• daly 5y ago
  Is it ironic that I opened this in a tab? I'd like a browser function that says "open a text file and save all the URLs"
  • Hamuko 5y ago
    I actually used to use AppleScript to grab open tab URLs in Chrome but I switched to Firefox and AFAIK, Firefox doesn't support AppleScript. tell application "Chromium" set tabCount to get count every tab of window 1 repeat with i from 1 to tabCount set currentUrl to get URL of tab i of window 1 end repeat end tell
  • jmholla 5y ago
    Somebody shared this in a different comment, but the OneTab extension looks like exactly what you are asking for: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ (minus it being builtin).
  • Jap2-0 5y ago
    I saw mention of this on HN somewhere previously, but I've found that Tablist[0] is simple (a couple dozen lines of code) and works well. [0] https://github.com/slymax/tablist https://github.com/slymax/tablist (links to Chrome and Firefox extensions there)
• dpflan 5y ago
  Here is their browser extension for "rethinking" tabs: https://www.skeema.com/ https://www.skeema.com/ (currently invite + waitlist). Was really hoping for images of the actual, HCI-research-informed UI update, but alas.
• micropresident 5y ago
  Given that almost all screens are widescreen, the fact that browsers don't have a sidebar of tabs is absolutely retarded UX design. Though this one seems to be okay: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs-reloaded/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
  • kube-system 5y ago
    Vivaldi does
  • zaptheimpaler 5y ago
    Genius idea! Most websites have too much space on the sides anyways, this would be perfect. It simple but I never thought to look for this - just got an extension to do it and it seems great.
  • lstamour 5y ago
    Since March, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium supports vertical tabs, just click a button in the tab bar to turn it on: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/03/04/amp-up-your-performance-with-startup-boost-and-find-information-blazingly-fast-with-microsoft-edge-and-bing/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/03/04/amp-u... I believe back in the day that Opera was the first browser to commonly support the feature. And I remember using Firefox and Mozilla extensions for tab management a decade ago. The more things change...
    • wolpoli 5y ago
      Vertical tab in Microsoft Edge is a game changer for me. With it, it is easier for me to scan what tabs I have open, which makes it easier for me to close tabs that I no longer need.
• alfl 5y ago
  I've opened this in a tab and intend to read it later.
  • Arrath 5y ago
    Doing this, and then never ever following up on it, was how I learned that Chrome on Android changes the tab count to ':D' once you go over 100 tabs open.
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      It's funny how Firefox for Android goes from 99 to 8... And they can't even get the eight the right way around, it's laid on its side.
    • cube2222 5y ago
      Same, later I discovered that Safari on iOS has a 500 tab limit.
  • ksec 5y ago
    Same here, it is acting like a reading list. Mostly because Bookmark sucks.
    • pessimizer 5y ago
      Fixing bookmarks would cure tab hoarders like me.
      • jrcii2 5y ago
        What have you tried? Just curious as I use Pocket and I am somewhat satisfied with it, though I rarely end up reading any of the articles I bookmark.
        • pessimizer 5y ago
          I've never seen anything that gave me the impression that it would help, but at one point I was brainstorming a firefox extension a lot like the one described in the article, which is making me hopeful.
• colordrops 5y ago
  Brave on android recently added a feature that automatically groups tabs. It's quite nice.
• colordrops 5y ago
  One thing I do is keep a text file with lists of links, e.g. "programming", "gardening", "health" etc and if I haven't looked at a tab after a few days, I copy the URL and put it in the appropriate list, then close the tab. If the browser prompted me to "archive" a tab after a few days and select a category, I'd probably use the functionality.
• greenmana 5y ago
  Vivaldi is such a great browser, it has really wonderful and hands down the best tab management features. https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/ https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/
• aidos 5y ago
  I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality. When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.
  • eterm 5y ago
    I'm completely the same, I might have a dozen active tabs but everything gets closed down asap, and in general I'll have multiple windows for different contexts each with just a few tabs.
  • refactor_master 5y ago
    For me, tabs are very much a manifestation of what’s going on in my mind at that very instant. Basically a cache. But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One. The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.
    • dkarras 5y ago
      >But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One. That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt. Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation. Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  So weird to me. I think this every time I read about browser tabs, organization strategies, etc. I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open. And that's if I'm busy. Normally it's one or two -- whatever it is that I'm currently working on. And at the end of the day -- all closed. History and cache cleared. Start clean the next day.
  • barbazoo 5y ago
    Even the history, eh? That would definitely slow me down next time I want to go back to that same page. I guess I rely on the browser suggesting the previously visited website to me.
• jzoch 5y ago
  Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination to save my tabs across restarts to track everything. Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs open (but asleep!) and just pick the tree im interested in. Dont need to save bookmarks or save articles for later - they are all there always.
  • lightfooted 5y ago
    I’d like to try this. What browser do you use? I see that it’s a feature for Vivaldi and I also see a Chrome extension.
    • zo1 5y ago
      Not OP, but Tree Style Tabs is for Firefox.
      • jrcii2 5y ago
        Thank you so much for sharing! This is a game changer - I'd been using two separate windows and manually dragging things around like a noob.
        • eitland 5y ago
          Now you also probably see why many of us prefer Firefox. And: this might be hard to believe but it was much better before - extension wise.
          • all_usernames 5y ago
            I switched to Firefox for Tree Style Tabs.
            • 5y ago
• azhenley 5y ago
  Stop using tabs for your code and start using our tool, CodeRibbon: https://utk-se.github.io/CodeRibbon/ https://utk-se.github.io/CodeRibbon/
  • Assossa 5y ago
    Any plans on bringing this to VS Code?
    • azhenley 5y ago
      It certainly isn't easy, but we are trying! https://github.com/utk-se/CodeRibbon/issues/80 https://github.com/utk-se/CodeRibbon/issues/80
• bonecrush 5y ago
  I have 0 problems with tabs. I used to and man they can be annoying. The system that finally worked for me is to bind "Close all Tabs to Left" to Ctrl + Left, likewise for right, and Close All Except Open Tab to Ctrl + Up. I found this enables painless instant culls, I just save URLs everything I want to survive a total cull (it's hardly ever more than 2 URLs, most tabs are junk which I suppose is the main problem). Ctrl + W for Close Current Tab and Ctrl + Shift + T for Reopen Closed Tab are also pretty useful (require no bind).
• andyxor 5y ago
  related: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338
• chatmasta 5y ago
  I would love to see a Miro-style, infinite canvas, tiling tab manager. If I zoom out past the page, show me a canvas with thumbnails of all my tabs, that I can click and drag to group or arrange however I want. Then let me zoom into one of the thumbnails to switch to that tab. Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.
  • alin23 5y ago
    Safari on iOS actually does that exact thing when the device is in landscape mode.
  • ksec 5y ago
    Doesn't Tab Overview in Safari on macOS already does that? ( Without the Drag and Drop Part ) The problem is its current implementation completely kills your SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview gesture and icons.
    • jlokier 5y ago
      Safari's Tab Overview is unfortunately not like the OP's idea. The lack of dragging, and also because there's no way to zoom out further and make visual groups. And I suppose being horribly slow with many tabs makes it very different from the OP's idea too. I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state, just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work. I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself). But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast while using a huge amount of memory that slows down everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and being the reason other things I use for work were getting slow. I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.
• daralthus 5y ago
  I can highly recommend Tabli [1] an open source chrome extension that you can use to save and restore groups of tabs very quickly. [1] https://www.gettabli.com/ https://www.gettabli.com/
  • daralthus 5y ago
    Skeema sounds something I would try, but fully open source is a must.
• stzsch 5y ago
  I wish there was a way to completely force firefox to keep only one window open. I imagine that would help with my tab-hoarding, as I tend to branch into more windows (up to ~50) once they reach too many (20 or so) tabs each.
• flobosg 5y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095701
• paulpauper 5y ago
  >Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand. how about multiple layer tabs I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
  • rubyist5eva 5y ago
    Vivaldi has this, it's actually quite useful.
  • leephillips 5y ago
    It sounds like you would enjoy this new browser: https://lee-phillips.org/permatab/ https://lee-phillips.org/permatab/
• rubyist5eva 5y ago
  i get anxious when I have more than like 5 tabs open...I don't know how people handle having 20-100+
  • barryhoodlum 5y ago
    I think it's just an information hoarding mentality. Like people you see on hoarding TV shows with stacks upon stacks of old newspapers just in case they "need" to refer to them one day.
• 1MachineElf 5y ago
  I am one such tab-overloaded computer user. There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.) The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk... My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync. I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/ https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/ I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.) I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/ Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing. As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.
  • 5y ago
• SkyMarshal 5y ago
  I still miss Opera's MDI (Multiple Document Interface). Using that vs using tabs felt like using a tiled window manager vs graphical window manager. You could get so much more efficient with the MDI once you dialed in shortcuts, window switching and rearranging, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/opera-2-0 https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/op...
• spython 5y ago
  A few years ago I've argued that a tab is the wrong metaphor, wrong unit of interaction: https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/ I am currently working on a new and fun approach to managing this kind of cognitive spaces, hopefully to be published this month.
• amadeuspagel 5y ago
  My main problem with tabs is that they function as an additional window manager, meaning I'm constantly using two window managers at the same time, and getting confused between them. For example, I can use Ctrl+Tab to cycle through browser tabs and Alt+Tab to cycle through windows. I can't use either to cycle through everything I have open.
  • tgbugs 5y ago
    It is actually worse than that. Many/most implementations of tabs are completely opaque to the window manager so if you want to programmatically control your browser windows e.g. by moving a window with a certain title to the front you can't do it for windows that contain a certain tab unless it is the active tab. Oops.
    • joseluis 5y ago
      I use the window-titler extension exactly for that. it precedes the window title with your custom one between brackets and you can filter processes from the command line to find the window you want... I made a script with wmctrl to bring windows to the front like this.
• arduinomancer 5y ago
  I don't understand the "having a million tabs open workflow" that seems so common I frequently move 1-2 tabs to the left side and use "close tabs to right". Probably do this 4-5 times per day. If I end up needing something I just look in history or ctrl + shift + t to get it back. Having too many open feels super distracting to me and makes it harder to focus. I also use bookmarks a lot too, so that might be the difference.
  • kordlessagain 5y ago
    How do you feel about full text search and image extraction and classification for those URLs?
• kordlessagain 5y ago
  Hi Mike.
• lyall 5y ago
  I've found doing something that sounds crazy very helpful in overcoming my own personal tab overload: automatically closing tabs after they go ignored for a certain amount of time (~12 hours for me). It's garbage collection for tabs! I use the Tab Wrangler Chrome extension[0] for the job, but there are others too. Turns out that I don't actually care about the vast majority of tabs that I leave open—but can't seem to close!—and the extension makes it easy to re-open any automatically closed ones that I did happen to care about. The result is logging on each day to much less tab clutter than I left the night before. 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...
  • mlac 5y ago
    Same here. You can do this on iOS with tabs that are open longer than a day, but I don’t think this is a built in feature for safari on MacOS. I find it useful on the phone where I’ll often open multiple tabs (navigate through to the new tab and leaving the old one open in case I need to go back) and completely forget about them. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-automatically-close-tabs-on-iphone https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-automatically-close-t...
• naggie 5y ago
  I used to have many dozens of tabs open statically, kind of like a TODO list I never get round to. Some tabs are open all the time for email, chat as well. I've eliminated those tabs and now have tabs related to what I'm currently doing only. There could still be dozens, but importantly they do get closed. To prevent the static tabs, I do 2 things: 1) Map tabs I monitor (email, chat etc) to a streamdeck, pressing a physical button every time I want to check 2) Save those static "TODO" tabs to a task manager[1] and treat them as tasks. [1]: My own task manager: https://github.com/naggie/dstask/ https://github.com/naggie/dstask/ -- saving the URL in note means I can open the tab in a browser again in a command (open)
• NwtnsMthd 5y ago
  I don't need a better way to manage the tabs I have open I need to quit the habit of opening dozens of them. Its digital hoarding. Maybe it's overly dramatic of me to compare it to hoarding, it does legitimately increase productivity. But it also tends to spiral out of control now and then (for me).
• qwertox 5y ago
  I miss the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension so much. I had 3 rows of tabs with more via the scroll wheel, and they were of fixed width. I often ended up with 80 open tabs and switching was no issue. It was such a great feeling being able to close all the tabs after the work was done. With Chrome now I constantly need to drag tabs out in order to create a new window to start a new collection of tabs, so that I normally have about 6 browser windows open, then, when looking for a group of tabs, I first need to find the window. It's the same with Firefox since they moved away from allowing custom XUL code. Here's an example I just found on Google https://thasulinux.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tab_mix_plus.png https://thasulinux.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tab_mix_plus....
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• crazygringo 5y ago
  I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow. But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my position in a video, etc etc etc. And all of that gets lost if I close a tab or even restart my browser to upgrade. I just want to serialize the current DOM/source files and JavaScript/window state to unserialize it later. Sure, network connections will break but websites can usually handle that. Because while the organization/usage of tabs/bookmarks is one thing, a HUGE roadblock to closing tabs is losing state. I'm sure it wouldn't be even close to trivial for browsers to build, but it still would just be so helpful.
  • diego898 5y ago
    This is a huge problem for me as well. If you find something please report back! It would be a huge benefit to me as well!
  • swiley 5y ago
    > a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. This is next on the todo list for the browser I'm writing. I have a lot of ideas for it but I want to get some basic javascript working first.
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • kirubakaran 5y ago
    I'm working on this for https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/
    • pseudalopex 5y ago
      Is it end to end encrypted?
• alsetmusic 5y ago
  The article refers to their “new” tab / task management tool. The web page[0] for it has no information or screenshots. Anyone have a link to see the tool in action? [0] https://www.skeema.com/ https://www.skeema.com/
  • catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
    After some digging, I found some more information here: https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-of-browser-tabs-and-why-we-cant-get-rid-of-them https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-...
    • alsetmusic 5y ago
      This was very informative. Thank you! Reminds me of Workona, which also seemed appealing but didn’t find its way into my workflow.
      • catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
        Why didn’t workona work for you?
      • demadog 5y ago
        I have found Workona amazing and a life saver. I use it daily.
• andrewla 5y ago
  The real problem here is that the "back" button doesn't really make anyone happy. If it were instantaneous (like the page was kept alive in an invisible tab, essentially) and preserved state, then 75% of the use cases for tabs would go away. The remaining use cases are more around opening a bunch of links from the same page, so we'd keep tabs around for that, but maybe auto-group them with the page of origin for some contextualization.
  • bityard 5y ago
    Huh? The back button renders the previous page absolutely instantaneously for me in Firefox and Chrome. I am plenty happy with the Back button. The problem is that my browsing is not at all linear. While reading one page, I'll open 3 or 4 links in new tabs to read once I'm done with the current one. (I have done this already on this very HN comments page.)
• eivarv 5y ago
  I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave. https://cleave.app https://cleave.app Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level. I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources. I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
  • dmcgee 5y ago
    Very interesting idea, look forward to seeing it. I try to work this way, but using different desktop spaces, but it doesn't work quite as well as I'd like. This is interesting if it can just keep one desktop but easily switch in and out of context and "sleep" everything else. Also will be interesting to see how to manage the context itself.
• IHLayman 5y ago
  On my iPad this is a problem. On my desktops, I have Firefox with Tridactyl installed, turning off the tab bar, nav bar, and menu. Everything is handled via keyboard if I can help it, including tab navigation: with a single keystroke I can start searching my open tabs fairly quickly by typing a portion of the tab title, and at end of day I bookmark tabs I want to read later with one command, clear all remaining tabs with another. Super easy, and no need for a learning algorithm to start trying to learn my surfing habits. Not trying to sound snarky, this tool just seems a bit like overkill. It might be useful on my iPad where it is cumbersome to do those steps, but it would also be useful to have Tridactyl there too.
• WesolyKubeczek 5y ago
  I just declare a tab bankruptcy every once in a while. Close everything, forget I opened those tabs. If it is important enough, it's already stashed away in a format that lends itself to offline reading. If it's not yet stashed, it will bubble up eventually from among other things. If I don't have time to stash it away, whom am I kidding? I'm not going to come back to it in a near future anyway. I already have a couple of things that remind me of how guilty I am by not coming back to them, why add more?
• catchmeifyoucan 5y ago
  Hey, I'm building Amna (https://getamna.com https://getamna.com) Tabs + Tasks. This research made my day. I think my findings with users are consistent with the researchers. Improved focus, and feeling less overwhelmed, and the larger context management aspect of things goes away when you browse with tasks offloaded from your head. Amna works by managing your Chrome Windows. Instead of organizing tabs after you've done your work, you start with the task first, and click on it. That way you can "scope" a browser to a specific goal, and toss it when you're done. It saves your tabs as your work. It's still a WIP (the website and product are kinda out of sync), you can still try it out and pass along feedback :)
• vxxzy 5y ago
  Just fire up another window :)
• deckard1 5y ago
  Based on what they show so far[1], I'm not really convinced tasks are the solution. The UI they present seems really clunky for 2021. > He means we need something richer, that we should be collecting information by “task” or another word he brings up again and again, “context.” Yes, context makes sense. But it needs to be context over time. Context that evolves and can be searched and revisited. You should be able to pull up the context of last month, or the 2nd week of May of last year. > “If you think about it, Google does a good job giving us thousands of search results,” says Kittur. “But that entire process after search results is being done pretty much entirely in our heads. Precisely. Fixing tabs is not about the browser at all. It's a problem with search. Search begins and ends at Google. What we really need is a search that starts global and integrates personally. Think of tabs as a sort of cache of what you have brought in from the broader internet. This "cache" should have a simple search interface (think Slack's search, vim Ctrl+P, fzf, Command+Space/Spotlight, etc.) but also have the ability to pull up some sort of window that you can navigate context by other means. Such as date, device, location, etc. "Show me what I was looking at on my phone when I was at Starbucks last Wednesday" kind of thing. Tabs are the fear of losing context. Make context durable, transparent, holistic (i.e. you can zoom to either the trees or the forest), and global (sync across all devices) then you will have largely solved tabs. [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-of-browser-tabs-and-why-we-cant-get-rid-of-them https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-...
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• kuratkull 5y ago
  "... or ashamed by how many they had open" What is this? I for one am proud of my (minimum) 4 dozen open tabs on average. But on a more serious note, as a SE I rejoice when I see a "<5 minutes read" article. If it's more than that I just leave it open (if it seems interesting enough). Usually I go back to my backlog during the next week or so and read the ones I still deem interesting based on the title and a quick scroll through, those that don't catch my interest any more or are just too darn long will get C-w'd. Also when I have a few dozen tabs open in my phone I just send them to my desktop(s) and close them on the phone - they were either too long to be read on a phone, or required some investigation before a commitment.
• jcun4128 5y ago
  My thing is a chrome extension dumping all open tabs. But that's all it does. Also a centralized personal store of info, so I can save something for future research... have a scatter brain, randomly researching stuff. What I wish had reliable persistence is Windows 10 virtual desktops.
• namero999 5y ago
  Opera solved this problem egregiously with workspaces. No need for extensions or other tricks. This feature alone is worth a try of what is regardless the most ergonomic browser I've ever used.
• QuadrupleA 5y ago
  Here's a radical solution - close tabs when you're done with them. There's a little known feature in browsers called bookmarks that's like tabs, but they don't consume any RAM or bandwidth when you're not using them, and they don't clutter your UI. You can search them, group them into "tab folders", even synchronize them across devices. Spread the word - bookmarks are the future.
  • shard 5y ago
    That's the problem, I have nearly 100 tabs open because I am not done with them.
    • QuadrupleA 5y ago
      Having 100 tasks going at once seems like a chaotic nightmare to me - but different working styles I guess.
      • shard 5y ago
        It's not 100 different tasks. For example, online research into a topic could lead to a bunch of tabs with relevant info. If I am going to be using the results of the research in the next few weeks, I just leave the tabs open. I don't want to bother managing bookmarks for something short term like that.
  • bityard 5y ago
    I _do_ close tabs when I'm done with them. The problem is that I have multiple things I'm working on and I don't want to close the dozen or two tabs open that I have related to it while I'm still working on the project, because looking up the bookmark, or finding the URL, and then scrolling the right spot is many times more work than just keeping the tab open and switching back to it when I need it. My favorite Firefox feature of all time was "Tab Candy" which was later renamed to "Panorama" It allowed you to automatically group tabs by project or context and let you switch between them seamlessly. Firefox decided to kill it and there is nothing like it now, all of the closest alternatives--when they actually work--require you to manually save and reload groups, which is not effort I'm willing to make.
• riccardomc 5y ago
  I am ruthless with my tabs. I always close them all at the end of my day. Just like Inbox 0, I aim for Tab 0. Serenity is the reward for this small disciplined effort. Close them. They're not going anywhere. You can always find the links back tomorrow. An entire multi-million industry wants you to find them back as easily as possible. You might even find better ones when you start fresh. It's just your loss aversion instincts kicking in[1]. It's how your brain is wired. But we live in the golden age of information retrieval. You don't need to hoard tabs. Your brain just doesn't know. Trust me, if you can. Close them. It will be ok. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
  • NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
    Same here. Right clicking my leftmost tab and hitting "Close tabs to the right" is so freeing once you get used to it. That aside, how do you do the [1] type of linking? Manually? I checked the docs and in classic hacker style they didn't avail me.
    • seryoiupfurds 5y ago
      Yeah, it's a social construct not a feature. You type [1] in the paragraph, and then you type [1]: https://example.com/ https://example.com/ at the end of your comment.
  • dewlinedew2 5y ago
    I used to use the Bookmark all Tabs to a folder feature at the end of each day. It's the equivalent of sweeping it under the rug, or creating a folder named desktop_new and burying everything there
  • dmt0 5y ago
    That multi-million industry does a good job at burying the content that's not fresh any more, and not a very good job at filtering out SEO manipulators. Good luck googling for that article from a year ago that had a nuanced comparison of A and B.
• Overdr0ne 5y ago
  I really want my tabs to just be emacs buffers. Emacs has sooo many different tools to organize and operate on buffers, so different types of users can compose a workflow that works for them, including plain old tabs if they really want. And of course, extensibility, the most important feature imo And you can do this now of course, with w3m or other plaintext browsers, but it's just not that comfy for most webpages these days. And there's emacs-webkit, but it's still a bit of a pita to install. I still use qutebrowser for most things, and with i3/sway plus the save-session function, i can get hierarchy and persistence, and that seems sufficient for now...
  • Overdr0ne 5y ago
    For the record though, I'm very pleased to see people explicitly questioning the UI status quo, esp one so widely assumed as tabs. It seems browsers are just following the 'dont touch anything or you'll drive away our base' method of development, and it's depressing... Can't be much fun for the developers either I imagine. I look forward to seeing what they come up with
  • narwally 5y ago
    I find that the more you use emacs the more you get frustrated that nothing else works the way it does in emacs. You either deal with it, try and hack some emacs functionality into your favorite tools, or end up living full-time inside of emacs--relegating your desktop environment to a glorified emacs launcher.
• jxramos 5y ago
  Is there a public demo of it posted anywhere?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• etiam 5y ago
  Salvaged from my own current tab overload: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel I occurred to me that this might make a nice working metaphor for web browsers: Make a virtual wheel with a defined (default-manageable) number of positions to fill. Add ability to rotate, or slide, in a number of such wheels. Any wheel that doesn't get active use for some reasonable amount of time goes automatically from active inventory to searchable long term archives.
• codeecan 5y ago
  Some people might find this interesting: https://refresh.study https://refresh.study
• fnord77 5y ago
  a simple fish-eye view as you hover over tabs would be fantastic...
• Camillo 5y ago
  Tabs were 95% solved years ago by the visionary genius Piro with his "Tree Style Tab" extension: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
• sonograph 5y ago
  I used to have this problem. Now I just collect bookmarks that I will never read
• ellis0n 5y ago
  I'm glad that such research is being carried out, since the browser is the main tool and chaos is happening in it. I use LiveComment for manage 10k+ tabs. Pretty practical https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment
• rconti 5y ago
  I was a VERY late convert to tabs, and I only use them for browsers now (and not all the time, either). I always felt that the OS X command-tilde functionality, for switching between windows the same way you switch through applications using command-tab, was superior. You're always switching between the most recently used windows, chronologically. You can even remember when something was several keystrokes back, and if you don't remember, you can see it in realtime. It's insanely frustrating to try to switch between two arbitrary tabs in a browser, you have to use the mouse, and keep track of which tab you want to use. I was just running into this problem earlier today, switching between a doc I was reading and a tab I was working in. Of course, having separate windows for everything leads to more visual clutter, and hurts discoverability a little bit.
  • bobbylarrybobby 5y ago
    I’ve often wondered if a sort function that could switch between “manual” tab order and recent tab order. So that you could keep things organized in both space and time.
    • Vinnl 5y ago
      Firefox can have Ctrl+tab run chronologically, and then Ctrl+PageUp/Down still use the 'manual' order.
  • febed 5y ago
    This is one of the things that annoys me about Chrome. Last I checked, there wasn't a solution for this. Opera had it as a feature a long time ago.
  • Vinnl 5y ago
    New Firefox installs have Ctrl+tab run chronologically, and you can this behaviour for existing installs as well if you want.
    • stonewareslord 5y ago
      I cannot stand this functionality and it's the first thing I disable on new installations. For me, Ctrl+tab is right and Ctrl+shift+tab is left. I much prefer Firefox's awesome bar navigation when jumping around. % app will show all tabs with a title or URL containing app, * yo does the same for bookmarks containing yo, and ^ for history. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-shortcuts?redirectslug=awesome-bar-keyboard-shortcuts https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh... Edit: unfortunately, the % shortcut does not work with containers.
• incanus77 5y ago
  I recently switched after decades on Safari to a task-oriented browser called Min: https://minbrowser.org https://minbrowser.org. It’s fantastic!
• sakisv 5y ago
  Personally I found a very simple approach that works great for me. In the beginning of the pandemic I tried to reduce social media exposure, to maintain some degree of mental health and reduce distractions. The way I did it was first to remove all the apps from my phone. This had the added benefit of improving the battery life. This meant that if I wanted to go on fb or Twitter, then I had to use the browser versions which are generally slower, not so optimized for phone usage, and overall the UX is much worse. Even this though was not enough. Firefox would gladly save my session and despite the subpar UX, I still found myself going back to it more often than I would like. The solution to this was simple: Incognito. Coupled together with a 2FA and disabling the password manager autocomplete by removing the URL from the relevant entries, it made such a huge difference. Then I started using incognito for more things, like HN, where I would open 6-7 tabs "to read them later" and I never did, so they kept piling up. For me this works great, especially on the phone. If I really want to read something I read it there and then. If for whatever reason I don't, and android decides to terminate my Firefox then so be it. If I really want to I can search for it again, but then I ask myself whether it is worth it.
  • 600frogs 5y ago
    FYI, Firefox focus sounds perfect for you - it doesn't track history or save any state, and wipes itself after use.
• mrobot 5y ago
  I am glad this came up. I had just started work on synchronizing my Emacs org-mode clock tasks with tree style tabs and i see there are some other good things to check out in this thread. Also signed up for Skeema waiting list.
• dgellow 5y ago
  It’s not a tooling issue IMHO. It’s about accepting that you do not need to hoard every single piece of information. Once you accept to let go and develop the habit to close your tabs regularly (for example at the end of each day), the problem is solved. No more anxiety related to your browser state! I was a hardcore hoarder, with 300+ tabs all the time, until I realized I was the source of the issue. Now I open as many tabs as I need during the day, then just know I will close everything at the end of the day and start a fresh session. It’s very relaxing. If I really need something I wrote it down in my notes somewhere but that’s really not often.
• shakow 5y ago
  Grouping tabs by topic to read them later and from other browsers was one of the main problem I wanted to address in my workflow. My current solution is to having developed a webextension + server system (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/ https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/) where I can stash any tab in a TOREAD list, and those replace my blank new tab page. Crude, but it does the job for me.
• VMtest 5y ago
  I think somehow I have overcome this tab overloadding problem on my own I have restricted myself from browsing internet on mobile phone, so I only view them from my personal computer I always keep a note on what I browse, regardless of how important or useless it is (except entertainment stuff to some extent) I am using this note taking method to all my work as well, for example, searching online about security aspect of several CI/CD pipeline tools that my company use The notes that I create are all mostly markdown files, with names to their own, so I can grep or find whenever I want, and encrypt and archive the whole folder as I want to back them up By note taking down the links that I have viewed, sometimes with some wordings for explanation, I can keep track most of them, not all, becacuse sometimes I use namings that I couldn't recall and that's totally fine, I can still grep/find as I want anyway I would just put down some file names so you guys can get a better idea 1. 3d-printing.md 2. asm.md 3. algorithms.md 4. browser.md 5. cybersecurity.md 6. hacking.md 7. graphics.md 8. gamedev0.md 9. reverse-engineering.md 10. storage-hard-drive.md 11. vpn-proxy.md 12. video-hardware-acceleration.md 13. game-engine.md 14. freelance-startups-business-side-hustle.md 15. fuchsia.md 16. electrical-and-computer-engineering.md 17. electronics.md and a lot more like 300. linux/doc/linux-kernel.md 301. android/doc/android-apps.md 302. macos/doc/macos.md 303. windows/doc/windows-install.md Edit: if you are wondering why do this at all when everything is just one google search away, well, i guess that's the whole point
• nigerian1981 5y ago
  I find the Workona browser extension works well to organise tabs into groups and then restore tabs when required.
• noir_lord 5y ago
  I just open three browsers. Vivaldi for music, long running stuff, gmail, Jira. Firefox for searching, transient stuff. Chrome for its dev tools. It means I can kill either FF and Chrome entirely at any point and lose nothing valuable, not interrupt anything. That and I don’t hoard tabs, I either bookmark and close or just close and use the history.
• k__ 5y ago
  I started doing "inbox zero" ten years a go and somehow ended up in a bit of an OCD situation. Now I have to close/archive anything I'm not currently using. Emails, apps, tabs, background processes, messenger contacts. If I dealt with it and isn't something that is used on a regular basis, like the WhatsApp conversations of my partners, it has to go.
• hippari 5y ago
  Didn't Opera solved this 10+ years ago with Tab Group ?
• desktopninja 5y ago
  Generally limit browser tabs to 5. Like the old tmobile myFavs 5. Helps keep focus otherwise "unlimited" tabs makes me totally distracted. Especially on HN.
• iAm25626 5y ago
  For the podcast fan: https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806137130/episode-972-the-cryptoqueen https://www.npr.org/2020/02/14/806137130/episode-972-the-cry...