8 ms·

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

by 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.
        generalizations 5y ago
        I only stay with Firefox for tree style tabs. I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power users.
        eitland 5y ago
        All except us who will cling as to not give Google a way to make ad blocking impossible. And for me it is actually not about the ads, it is about tracking power; about should decide what runs or not on my hardware. I'd recommend more people think like this. For me it is a small sacrifice for now at least.
        graeme 5y ago
        Is this meaningfully different from the Firefox implementation? I’m interested in trying. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oicakdoenlelpjnkoljnaakdofplkgnd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Window-based task grouping (where that's possible) is ... somewhat tenable. It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.
      - hansel_der 5y ago
        > Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this. imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2. tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.
        dredmorbius 5y ago
        I was probably using that, when it was around. Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.) I'd like to be able to: - Search tabs (by metadata). - Search tabs (by content). - Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks. - A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.) - Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select. - Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.) I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.
- jeanchen 5y ago
  I highly recommend Tabs Outliner, a Chrome extension
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    A very pale shadow of TST.
- kirubakaran 5y ago
  https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ does tree-style web history visualization. This is a personal knowledge graph app I'm working on.
- mglass3000 5y ago
  I use Bookmark OS which lets me organize tab sessions in a folder tree structure. Worth checking out
- kodablah 5y ago
  I made https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ to solve this, but I don't really maintain it (I just build it for myself on each new Chromium) and it doesn't work on Mac.
  - generalizations 5y ago
    That looks awesome. I'm going to try it out. Do extensions work on it?
    - kodablah 5y ago
      No. It's also a bit buggy and you'll want to compile with latest CEF yourself.
wvenable 5y ago
I have multi-row tabs on Firefox (just requires some chrome CSS customization). I use 3 rows of 30 tabs with enough space so I can read the title. I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any other browser, that's basically unmanageable.
jlokier 5y ago
I agree, I'm the same. People who sneer at large tab collections don't seem to realise that when they can be put to sleep, tidied away (various extensions allow groups to be folded), they are more like advanced bookmarks and working context. Or, they think there is no justification for having such collections. For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y beckons. There is usually not enough time. I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things. I would really like to learn from highly productive "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one. So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot if the page is removed. I would really like them to be integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the ability to capture and show a collection of web page content decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major part of my working life in closed commercial software. I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox, unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree Style Tabs extension. It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n²) somewhere, but it reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but kept the tabs, everything became fast. Sidebery. After trying out other extensions I settled on Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways, and works reasonably well with containers. (There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my windows there are empty panels as a result.)
harshalizee 5y ago
Yup, grouping in tree style tabs is a godsend. I largely ended up sticking to Firefox over chrome mainly due to this extension.
ssaturn 5y ago
This is the only reason I use edge over chrome, for tree tabs. I would use firefox but I have noticed significant slowdown on some websites that I use frequently.
felipeerias 5y ago
The most interesting feature of tree-style tabs is that they build a detailed information structure implicitly, as a side effect of browsing actions that you would do anyway. I think that is the right approach for any attempt to improve browser UIs.
shostack 5y ago
Do tab extensions like this pose any security risk in terms of hoovering up and transmitting your browser history of sensitive info on pages you visit (think tokens in Urls)?

by jzoch 5y ago

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.
      - generalizations 5y ago
        I only stay with Firefox for tree style tabs. I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power users.
        eitland 5y ago
        All except us who will cling as to not give Google a way to make ad blocking impossible. And for me it is actually not about the ads, it is about tracking power; about should decide what runs or not on my hardware. I'd recommend more people think like this. For me it is a small sacrifice for now at least.
        graeme 5y ago
        Is this meaningfully different from the Firefox implementation? I’m interested in trying. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oicakdoenlelpjnkoljnaakdofplkgnd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Window-based task grouping (where that's possible) is ... somewhat tenable. It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option. Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.
    - hansel_der 5y ago
      > Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this. imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2. tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        I was probably using that, when it was around. Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.) I'd like to be able to: - Search tabs (by metadata). - Search tabs (by content). - Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks. - A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.) - Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select. - Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.) I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.
jeanchen 5y ago
I highly recommend Tabs Outliner, a Chrome extension
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  A very pale shadow of TST.
kirubakaran 5y ago
https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ does tree-style web history visualization. This is a personal knowledge graph app I'm working on.
mglass3000 5y ago
I use Bookmark OS which lets me organize tab sessions in a folder tree structure. Worth checking out
kodablah 5y ago
I made https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ to solve this, but I don't really maintain it (I just build it for myself on each new Chromium) and it doesn't work on Mac.
- generalizations 5y ago
  That looks awesome. I'm going to try it out. Do extensions work on it?
  - kodablah 5y ago
    No. It's also a bit buggy and you'll want to compile with latest CEF yourself.

wvenable 5y ago

I have multi-row tabs on Firefox (just requires some chrome CSS customization). I use 3 rows of 30 tabs with enough space so I can read the title. I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any other browser, that's basically unmanageable.

jlokier 5y ago

I agree, I'm the same. People who sneer at large tab collections don't seem to realise that when they can be put to sleep, tidied away (various extensions allow groups to be folded), they are more like advanced bookmarks and working context. Or, they think there is no justification for having such collections. For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y beckons. There is usually not enough time. I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things. I would really like to learn from highly productive "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one. So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot if the page is removed. I would really like them to be integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the ability to capture and show a collection of web page content decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major part of my working life in closed commercial software. I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox, unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree Style Tabs extension. It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n²) somewhere, but it reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but kept the tabs, everything became fast. Sidebery. After trying out other extensions I settled on Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways, and works reasonably well with containers. (There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my windows there are empty panels as a result.)

harshalizee 5y ago

Yup, grouping in tree style tabs is a godsend. I largely ended up sticking to Firefox over chrome mainly due to this extension.

ssaturn 5y ago

This is the only reason I use edge over chrome, for tree tabs. I would use firefox but I have noticed significant slowdown on some websites that I use frequently.

felipeerias 5y ago

The most interesting feature of tree-style tabs is that they build a detailed information structure implicitly, as a side effect of browsing actions that you would do anyway. I think that is the right approach for any attempt to improve browser UIs.

shostack 5y ago

Do tab extensions like this pose any security risk in terms of hoovering up and transmitting your browser history of sensitive info on pages you visit (think tokens in Urls)?