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Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current t

Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed, and you may not remember where you left of. So why can't I have the front page on the left of the window, and anything I click on on the right (replacing whatever is already there)? The front page would remain in place, so I'm not losing my context. I can click on something, quickly determine if it is worth reading in depth, and go on to the next thing if it's not. I would never have a thousand tabs open; just the one would be enough. Why isn't this a thing in browsers? It would make so many websites so much easier to deal with...

kace91 5y ago
On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well. That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.
- agent327 5y ago
  No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.
tigerlily 5y ago
So like a left and right pane? That would be extremely useful, especially for search engine results, you could click on results in the left pane and quickly view them in succession in the right side pane.
- agent327 5y ago
  Exactly! Thank you, stranger, for understanding what I'm saying :-)
- beagle3 5y ago
  Iirc polar (getpolarized.io, I think) does that. I was going to test it, but their v2 dropped local storage in favor of cloud only, so I lost interest.
- agent327 5y ago
  Hi! If you ever see this, you can vote on the idea here: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/728459 https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/728459 Thanks :-)
e3bc54b2 5y ago
> but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?") Get "Tree Style Tabs". All the tabs are in hierarchy. Anything opened via "Open in new tab" becomes a child tab. This way, the "train of thought" is always preserved.
- agent327 5y ago
  Yes, but then you end up with fifty tabs open, meaning you'll doomscroll for the rest of the day. I very much prefer to see it the way I described it, with the main page on the left and the content on the right. My screen is plenty wide enough to make that possible.
  - e3bc54b2 5y ago
    Doomscroll usually isn't an issue. Tree Style Tabs collapses a tree you're not in by default. So by default you only see the top level tabs, and your current branch is expanded. If your screen is 1080p or higher, you can easily see ~20+ tabs in single view. The trick is to not switch tabs by mouse. Firefox searches through open tabs with '%' prefix. So I don't have to doomscroll ro find my tab. And the tab that I'm currently viewing has full context history open, instead of just homepage as per your suggestion. Our workflows could be different, but two levels of context is bit limiting. Right now, I have 3 trees with 3 layers of hierarchi and one tree with 4 levels. Occasionally I've reached 5 or 6 levels, but those are very short lived and cleaned up immediately. The biggest advantage this setup provides me is that I can offload the tab (and by proxy work) state onto my machine instead of holding it in my brain. This comes handy when working on multiple things simultaneously, because I can focus on task in front of me, and when I switch to different task the browser retrieves and presents its state from where I left it.
adamkl 5y ago
I do this my having two windows open side-by-side (a 32” 4K monitor and a tiling window manager make this easy) and just drag a link from the left browser window over to the right. Not as nice as simply clicking, but usable. If you’re willing to change browsers if necessary, Firefox has a Side View [0] extension that offers some functionality, though it’s just an “experiment” that hasn’t been updated in years. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/side-view https://github.com/mozilla/side-view
- freediver 5y ago
  Very cool, thanks for sharing.
- agent327 5y ago
  I checked out sideview, but if you click a link in the sideview pane it just changes the page in the side view. I want it to change the webpage in the right-hand part of the window.
reportgunner 5y ago
>Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Shift+Click to open in a new window is the third option.

kace91 5y ago

On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well. That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.

agent327 5y ago
No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.

tigerlily 5y ago

So like a left and right pane? That would be extremely useful, especially for search engine results, you could click on results in the left pane and quickly view them in succession in the right side pane.

agent327 5y ago
Exactly! Thank you, stranger, for understanding what I'm saying :-)
beagle3 5y ago
Iirc polar (getpolarized.io, I think) does that. I was going to test it, but their v2 dropped local storage in favor of cloud only, so I lost interest.
agent327 5y ago
Hi! If you ever see this, you can vote on the idea here: https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/728459 https://mozilla.crowdicity.com/post/728459 Thanks :-)

e3bc54b2 5y ago

> but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?") Get "Tree Style Tabs". All the tabs are in hierarchy. Anything opened via "Open in new tab" becomes a child tab. This way, the "train of thought" is always preserved.

agent327 5y ago
Yes, but then you end up with fifty tabs open, meaning you'll doomscroll for the rest of the day. I very much prefer to see it the way I described it, with the main page on the left and the content on the right. My screen is plenty wide enough to make that possible.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
  Doomscroll usually isn't an issue. Tree Style Tabs collapses a tree you're not in by default. So by default you only see the top level tabs, and your current branch is expanded. If your screen is 1080p or higher, you can easily see ~20+ tabs in single view. The trick is to not switch tabs by mouse. Firefox searches through open tabs with '%' prefix. So I don't have to doomscroll ro find my tab. And the tab that I'm currently viewing has full context history open, instead of just homepage as per your suggestion. Our workflows could be different, but two levels of context is bit limiting. Right now, I have 3 trees with 3 layers of hierarchi and one tree with 4 levels. Occasionally I've reached 5 or 6 levels, but those are very short lived and cleaned up immediately. The biggest advantage this setup provides me is that I can offload the tab (and by proxy work) state onto my machine instead of holding it in my brain. This comes handy when working on multiple things simultaneously, because I can focus on task in front of me, and when I switch to different task the browser retrieves and presents its state from where I left it.

adamkl 5y ago

I do this my having two windows open side-by-side (a 32” 4K monitor and a tiling window manager make this easy) and just drag a link from the left browser window over to the right. Not as nice as simply clicking, but usable. If you’re willing to change browsers if necessary, Firefox has a Side View [0] extension that offers some functionality, though it’s just an “experiment” that hasn’t been updated in years. [0] https://github.com/mozilla/side-view https://github.com/mozilla/side-view

freediver 5y ago
Very cool, thanks for sharing.
agent327 5y ago
I checked out sideview, but if you click a link in the sideview pane it just changes the page in the side view. I want it to change the webpage in the right-hand part of the window.

reportgunner 5y ago

>Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Shift+Click to open in a new window is the third option.