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Show HN: Rethinking Tabs in Firefox

127 points by Sujeto 4y ago

akrymski 4y ago
What bothers me in modern browser UIs is the distinction between bookmarks and tabs. They are really the same thing. Bookmarks are just inactive tabs. And tabs are just bookmarks (that I haven't deleted). Closing a tab is the same as deleting a bookmark. Searching tabs or searching bookmarks - should be the same thing. Just call them both "pages" and keep last N active in memory.
divan 4y ago
Why people still buying the concept of tabs? Tabs make sense for document viewers. Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. They are full-fledged virtual machines for apps (only those that can be written in JS and use typesetting engine as a UI platform - which is nuts, but okay). The point is, web apps, like normal apps, require proper window manager. Why the hell I should not be able to switch to app when popup alert is shown in another app? Why I can't put two apps side by side inside this VM? Why can't I switch between web apps opened in browser in a similar way as in KDE, Windows or MacOS (Stage Manager type switching would be great). There so much space for experimentation here. But no, we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.
- tenebrisalietum 4y ago
  Well, in the early 00's when Firefox was starting to become a thing and it introduced the usage of tabs, it really mattered whether something was a local app or something that's primarily the contents of another server fetched and displayed/processed on your computer. It was useful to think of the browser be the "Internet remote window". Now, since basically everything is an Internet app, perhaps the distinction between local and remote isn't too important anymore for most people.
  - alias_neo 4y ago
    As a backend software engineer, most long-running terminals on my machine are are often remote connections, and I don't tend to use tabs there (and like to tile them with tmux). Sounds like the the browser could behave much the same way for me. TL;DR: I agree.
- hbn 4y ago
  You can do most of this stuff by popping the tabs into separate windows. Is it really a better solution to have a window manager in an app that's already in an OS with its own window manager? Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years. But I don't know about a full-on window manager.
  - pmontra 4y ago
    Probably separate windows for the tabs deserving to be promoted to apps and a tiling window manager would achieve what GP wants. We have comments here on HN praising i3. https://i3wm.org/ https://i3wm.org/ However the always open tabs I work with most of the time work better in full screen mode on my 15" laptop. Sentry, TeamCity, YouTrack, Bitbucket, AWS (more than one tab), Google Cloud Console, the web apps I'm working on. Little space for tiling.
  - dahfizz 4y ago
    Every feature of the OS will eventually be re-implemented in the browser. It will be slower and less convenient to use.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years. Firefox had this as an addon before Quantum. I used it often, even with a tiling window manager, because the tab tiles didn't have their own toolbars/etc - it saved a lot of space. Its modern replacement isn't very useful, it just arranges multiple windows into tiles, each with their own toolbars/etc.
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    I use Panorama Tab Groups to group tabs by project. When I click on a tab group the browser window only shows the tabs in that group. Selecting a different tab group swaps in the other set of tabs. It lets me have understandable groups of 10-20 tabs per project/subject.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  The vast majority of my tabs are actually documents.
  - toastal 4y ago
    Yep. It's definitely both.
- Nullabillity 4y ago
  Nobody's preventing you from popping out tabs into separate windows. In fact, for a while KWin allowed you to tab any windows.. sadly that feature seems to have been lost somewhere around the Plasma 4 -> Plasma 5 transition...
- morsch 4y ago
  App vs document is a false dichotomy. I don't know about your usage, but I tend to have a small handful of open tabs that are on the app end of the spectrum (chat, email, audio/video, that's about it), a magnitude more tabs that are on the document end (documentation, blog posts, news articles) and the same magnitude that are in-between (shopping, project management stuff, hacker news). The app tabs are the ones that profit the least from the hypertext paradigm; other tabs tend to spawn new sub tabs which are more or less short lived. I use tree style tabs to manage that. It's easy enough to use my actual window manager to manage the app style tabs, by putting them in their own window. But for the most part, this hasn't been necessary. The Firefox popout video player has been more useful than I would have thought, though.
  - divan 4y ago
    > App vs document is a false dichotomy. Could you support this with arguments?
    - morsch 4y ago
      There are websites that are very much like an app, like Gmail or Slack. 20 years ago, most people used standalone applications for these. Other websites are not app-like at all: Wikipedia articles, blogs like substack, API documentation; these are documents. And they still make up a significant portion of my browsing -- so yes, my browser is still a hypertext viewer. YMMV, like I said, maybe you mostly have apps open; I don't. And many websites are in-between: project management tools like JIRA and shopping websites like Amazon are document-based (tickets, product pages), but offer actions on top of those documents, like an app would have. They also have external links like, you know, hypertext. And the latter is true for even the app-iest of apps, which makes it useful to have them in the browser (for the same reason, some desktop apps end up embedding browsers). And conversely, even the document websites have actions that are more or less central to the experience, e.g. Wikipedia has editing, blogs have comments. So there isn't a clear line between app and document, that's a false dichotomy.
      - divan 4y ago
- stevewatson301 4y ago
  There are niche operating systems (it was posted on HN but I can't remember the name now) that consider application windows and tabs as being one and equal; you can even have one window that has tabs from different applications.
  - divan 4y ago
    I mean "tabs" is just one of many forms of hanlding multiple windows. They make a lot of sense for document viewers and alike. My claim is that browsers are so much bloa..^Wbigger that that. There is no reason to limit web apps to that document viewers type of window handling.
- nocman 4y ago
  > Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose. > we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs. Browsers do both web apps and documents (and honestly, blur the lines between them all of the time). Also, I for one wholeheartedly want tabs for both of those use cases (and I don't think I am by any means alone in wanting that).
  - divan 4y ago
    > I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose. There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps. Here are tabs I have open at the moment: - HN (board app, not a document) - Soma.fm DefCon radion (music streaming app, not a document) - Facebook (social network app, not a document) - Eurosport Player (video player, not a document) - research paper (PDF, document, but not HTML) - another forum (board app, not a document) - Canva (graphics editing app, not a document) - Miro (whiteboard app, not a document) So you're disagreeing that those apps are apps and not the documents?
    - gaws 4y ago
      > another forum What's the forum?
      - divan 4y ago
        Some Flarum forum software I run, why?
    - nocman 4y ago
      > There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. As someone who does web development, and has been doing it for longer than the last couple of decades, that statement seems unnecessarily dismissive. > But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps. While I would agree that the quantity of web pages people visit today that are 'apps' is substantially larger than it used to be, I do think there are a lot more plain HTML documents in use (particularly in boring corporate environments) than many who frequent HN would think. Of course, if you are going to call anything that executes a significant amount of Javascript an 'app', I am not sure I'm interested in the argument. My original response wasn't arguing about what was most common anyway -- you said "Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore." I was just pointing out that they still do a lot of that (and for things that I would not consider to be an 'app'). Admittedly the line between 'app' and 'document' is a bit fuzzy in some cases, but there are enough cases where (in my mind) it is not fuzzy that I still don't see your original comment as accurate.
- icedchai 4y ago
  What's stopping you from opening separate browser windows? (I remember browsers before tabs. It was awful.)
  - divan 4y ago
    Nothing. That wasn't my question.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Why does the browser need a window manager then? You can run each "app" in its own window.
drawfloat 4y ago
I honestly have to clean up once I hit 5 or 6 tabs, so genuine question to those who keep many open – once you are having to search through a list, what's the advantage over just using history/bookmarks?
- jwond 4y ago
  History is a much larger list than open tabs. For bookmarks, I don’t want to have to manage a bunch of temporary bookmarks. With a tab I can just close it and move on, but if I had created a bookmark now I have to both close the tab and delete the bookmark.
- cies 4y ago
  IIRC there's a plugin for Chrome that kills tabs once you open one more than the set limit. This to help rehabilitating tab-hoarders.
- Macha 4y ago
  State: From scrolling through large articles to web app that dump you back at the home screen when re-entering Finding content: History search just isn't as good as being able to preview a page to see if it's the right one. To-do list: There's some action remaining until the tab is dismissed, or research items to compare
navhc 4y ago
I guess I'm missing the point because it seems to me like almost all of this can be accomplished in native Firefox. If I want to search my open tabs I just type a % in the address bar with my query and it searches my tabs. If I want to search for a bookmark (which doesn't seem meaningfully different from a star) I use a * instead of %. ^ is for history. For recently visited tabs I can ctrl+tab. Clean is basically close all except pinned but it also includes the tab playing audio.
- dandanua 4y ago
  For the navigation of recent history there is the Tab Session Manager extension.
- madacol 4y ago
  Oh I wished searching tabs (%) weren't broken by Mozilla's extension "Firefox Multi-account Containers"
  - kjkjadksj 4y ago
    Too much is broken by that extension, I uninstalled it.
    - quesera 4y ago
      I use Multi-Account Containers all the time, in every profile, on every machine. So I wonder: what features do you use, which are broken by this extension, and which I am therefore missing out on? (Aside from GP's searching tabs with %, which I didn't know was broken but does have a workaround in Sidebery)
mdtrooper 4y ago
I remember a old addon for firefox that did as a "tiling window manager" of opened tabs...it was cool and useful, but now this addon does not run with the new addon api system.
quanticle 4y ago
First, thanks for making this and putting it out into the world. As someone who always tends to end up with an unreasonable number of tabs, I'm always interested in more and better tab management options. That said, I'm wondering how this compares with TreeStyleTabs (1) for tab management. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- cies 4y ago
  I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. Also, it uses some pop-ups that at times make it a bit cumbersome to use (still much better than FF without TST). Since browsers are a place where we do a lot of work, I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers. Yet, as many have said before, browsers do not seem to target power users: I cannot even change FF's shortcuts without recompiling the beast!
  - quanticle 4y ago
    >Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. I didn't seem to have any issues getting the add-on installed in my Firefox. Yes, TST suffered from some instability when Firefox initially deprecated XUL and switched to the WebExtension model exclusively, but it seems to work fine now. It even picked up the theming changes in the latest update to Firefox seamlessly. >I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers Edge comes close. It has the option to orient tabs vertically. However, it doesn't organize tabs in a hierarchical outline like TST does.
    - cies 4y ago
      > Edge comes close. Did not know that. Edge is basically MS branded Chrome, right?
      - quanticle 4y ago
        At this point, yes. At one point Edge had its own rendering engine, but MS chose to abandon it, and just use Blink instead.
orliesaurus 4y ago
I love that you are rethinking tabs, I definitely see more people coming up with alternatives to this problem, eventually something will emerge as the new standard. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs for the regular user, but when you are on 100-150 tabs then you know the tabs solution doesn't scale
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  >there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs for the regular user Horizontal tabs are ridiculously bad given standard screen dimensions.
krono 4y ago
Neat project, people have wildly differing browser workflows and it's interesting to get a glimpse of how the brain of this extension's author deals with the concept. This might benefit from using Firefox's Sidebar API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Sidebars https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  ?? Firefox has an API for a Sidebar and yet they make it such a pain to actually switch to one. I hear so many complaints about Mozilla for politics, etc, but my real complaint is that they haven't added a Vertical tabs option (which really should be the default on all browsers).
wintermutestwin 4y ago
A couple initial thoughts as a Sidebery user that keeps ~100 tabs open: 1. The whole point of vertical tabs is that horizontal browser space is "cheap." Why not keep the tab list visible? Having it be a dropdown adds an unnecessary step. 2. Horizontal (Sidebery style) pinned tabs that just show the site icon are much cleaner. I have a row (8-12 tabs depending on how wide I drag the tab bar)of frequently used sites pinned at the top of my tab list. 3. It doesn't look like you have right-click move to window functionality, which is critical for my workflow. If you add it, be sure to make it work with the Titler extension so you can work with window names. I'm glad you didn't put energy into tab trees - I think they are a waste of space. I have a window for each general category of tabs.
- malnourish 4y ago
  I migrated from Sidebery to Tab Stash [0]. I found the user experience to be a bit more streamlined; I don't find myself missing the tree-style structure, but the stashes it provides are a good replacement. [0]: https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash
- SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
  I have >1000 tabs open and probably many that I haven't looked at in >6 months now (most are discarded using Auto Tab Discard). I This many tabs causes every tab management extension I've tried to be unusably slow. Even the Firefox multi account containers popup usually takes around 2 full seconds to load, presumably because it's counting the number of tabs for each container (a feature I would happily disable if possible) via a horrendously slow API.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I can only recommend TabStash for fellow tab hoarders. You still get all your tabs, but only a few are loaded, making your browser much more snappy. (It can basically save the open ones, or the ones you find worthy either simply by date, or by some named groups)
  - Cshelton 4y ago
andrewla 4y ago
I've increasingly found that my use of tabs is closely related to the fact that back/forward navigation is unworkable in many cases. The most typical case is that I am looking at a list of things, and I want to click on a result but if I hit back, I don't want to wait an eternity for the page to reload -- if it even does; more often than not something breaks in the back navigation and the results I was looking at are not longer available or the context has switched. Basically I want cost-free backwards and forwards navigation, and tabs are how you do that. But essentially I want that hidden from me. I would much prefer if under the covers hitting back didn't navigate you away from a page, it just keeps the page you are on in a virtual tab in case you want to go back to it. Similarly, clicking a link shouldn't navigate away from the page you're on, but just put it in a virtual tab.
- shrx 4y ago
  The reloading of the google/bing/whatever search results page on backwards navigation is infuriating. I've been looking for options to turn it off in firefox but no luck.
- wintermutestwin 4y ago
  I open all links in a new tab. Back and forward are annoying even if they did work.
- savolai 4y ago
  Been thinking about this too What would be the drawback to just show the page as it was without reloading? Too much memory consumed when retaining too much state from previous pages?
  - airstrike 4y ago
    What if the page told you only what to change in the current page as you navigated to links in the same domain? Like browsing through git commits. A pain to implement but kind of an interesting experiment
- the_gipsy 4y ago
  A browser/extension that saves a snapshot when you click a link. When you click back, the snapshot is magically[1] restored. Hold my beer, I'm gonna try to "snapshot" with iframes or something. [1] I don't know if it's even possible, since this goes beyond HTML, DOM, and memory; nowadays there might be a lot IO "open", e.g. webcams, sound, websockets, etc.
WhyNotHugo 4y ago
An advantage of the tab bar on top is that it's always visible. I can glance quickly and find if that tab I'm looking for is to the left or to the right and use ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab. Or maybe there's just a few tabs, so I can jump around with alt+1, alt+2, etc. Having a menu that needs to be deployed makes the whole process slower -> I first have to open the menu, _and then_ I can start deciding which way I want to switch. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you use the browser for hours a day it is, because there's this additional cognitive cycle of having to request information to be displayed first -- rather than have it always present. Finally, the tabs on the bar on the top have virtually infinite surface and are super easy to click. You see, a 100x100px button has a defined surface where you have to point and click. The smaller the surface, the harder it is to click. But a button at the border of the screen has one dimension infinite: I don't have to aim accurately on the Y axis, I can move my mouse beyond the top of the screen and will still hit the tab.
- stemlord 4y ago
  I like always visible top tabs but personally ctrl+tab has always been bs. Hitting it 10 times then ctrl+shift+tab once more because I miscalculated has never been faster than using the mouse
  - frosted-flakes 4y ago
    Enable the Most Recently Used ordering. That way you won't have to press Ctrl+Tab more than once or twice, because most of the time you don't need to tabs at the back of the stack. Imagine if the Alt+Tab switcher worked like most browsers—it would be pretty useless. This is not an option in Chrome, for some unexplicable reason (Chrome has marked it as wontfix)., and it's the main reason I use Firefox. It's possible to hack around it with extensions and opening the Chrome extensions settings XML file and manually setting the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts, but it's fragile and annoying to set up, and has some odd behaviours in certain circumstances.
    - ivarru 4y ago
      It's a bit weird at first, but think the Chrome extension "Most Recent Used Tab Stack" works ok. It keeps the tabs sorted by moving the current tab to the left. That being said, I also prefer Firefox -- mainly because of its container extensions.
johnchristopher 4y ago
Looks cool ^^. But while we are on that subject: I don't want to manage all that mess (my history, my bookmarks, my read-it-later extensions, my stars, etc.). Plug me an IA, a cortana, a Jarvis or a duck and let me ask it in plain language what I am trying to remember. After some beeping noises it comes back with some answers, built from the stream of data that passed through my browser. And I mean the whole stream: video, subtitles of those videos, audio track, images in webpages, full text, etc. Not just a list of URL I visited. Wait, that's just Google@home, right ? Should I just live in Google search then ? Ah, I don't know. /rant
moffkalast 4y ago
You've gotta be kidding me, yet another system for grouping things that makes navigation take twice as many clicks and mouse moves. I really don't understand what's wrong with you people, first you came for the taskbars, now for our tabs. Will you never stop until everything's completely collapsed and hidden several clicks away? WHY?!? I can't believe this stupid trend that's forcing its way into all parts of UI these days. Yes, let's make everything useless because D E S I G N.
rpwilcox 4y ago
This is very cool. Two things I wish: * can it be a sidebar, instead or in addition to this popup? Then it could be up all the time, or how wide I want * I wish it did tabs across windows - this only finds tabs in the current window, but I have multiple windows of multiple tabs open on my machine. (So of course I can't find anything, yes...) But this is very neat and exciting!!
stewbrew 4y ago
I personally like the onetab extension very much. The best tab is no tab. The very notion of "tab management" is wrong. I just wish there were a way to synchronize the page via Firefox sync.
- jrmann100 4y ago
  +1 for https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ To provide a bit more context: OneTab closes (all, or specific) tabs and dumps the URLs in a stack, grouped by window or category to be quickly popped open/combed through at your leisure. It's great for the times I get sidetracked and need to hold onto thirty pages of docs without keeping them open at all times; I use it as a sort of tab purgatory which I will probably not revisit (I have 1025 tabs saved at the moment ).
TehShrike 4y ago
Maybe it's just for the benefit of screenshots, but it looks like I'd have to click or right-click to use the cool functionality – I love the idea, but I don't want to touch the mouse to interact with my browser tabs. I need keyboard accessibility to be at 100%
deafpolygon 4y ago
People with over 100 tabs open.. how? Why?
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  I'm the RCA guy so I have a lot of research projects in my tabs :)
- dotancohen 4y ago
  Research. If I'm researching something, I'll open more than 200 tabs. With Tree Style Tabs, each Google or Kagi search is a top-level tab, and each link I open from that gets opened in a sub tab. When I'm done, I'll store the useful tabs organized in an org-mode file - I have an Emacs script which grabs the currently-open tab URL and Title from Mozilla's sqlite database and adds them in org-mode link format to the current document (I can post it if anyone wants it). I can then close all that mess.
  - fikama 4y ago
    Sounds incredibly cool, to be honest I am a vim guy, but still is it your own script, is there any repo, can you share it? Also I was't aware that firefox stores open tabs in SQLite, can you point me what to type in Google to read more about it?
    - dotancohen 4y ago
      I can share it here: (defun ff-link-org () (interactive) (insert (shell-command-to-string "lz4jsoncat $FIREFOX_DIR/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq -r '.windows[0].tabs | sort_by(.lastAccessed)[-1] | .entries[.index-1] | \"[[\" + (.url) + \"][\" + (.title) + \"]]\"' | tr -d '\n'")) ) (defun ff-link-org-xdotool () "Get Firefox link in Org mode format" (interactive) (shell-command "xdotool search 'Navigator' windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Escape y o ; xdotool keydown alt key Tab ; xdotool keyup alt") ) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c f") 'ff-link-org) I misremembered, once the data was in an SQLite database but now it's easier to grab from the sessionstore backup file - it's compressed JSON. I then query it with jq and trim the newline - here's that part isolated with the format changed to provide a markdown-formated link: lz4jsoncat $FIREFOX_DIR/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq -r '.windows[0].tabs | sort_by(.lastAccessed)[-1] | .entries[.index-1] | \"(\" + (.title) + \")[\" + (.url) + \"]\"' | tr -d '\n' By the way, I'm a longtime VIM user but have recently been converting all my notes to org-mode. Emacs with Evil is a good-enough VIM replacement for notes taking, and the org-mode format is absolutely terrific.
trap_goes_hot 4y ago
For those that liked the Classic windows taskbar that has been removed in W11, I'd like to plug RetroBar - https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar
elischleifer 4y ago
not sure what I am looking at here.
barbazoo 4y ago
I've been using "Tree Style Tab" in combination with [1] to hide the old tabs and it's such a joy. I can group tabs by "topic" which is helpful when I'm working on multiple things in parallel which is pretty much always. [1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#hide-horizontal-tabs-at-the-top-of-the-window-1349-1672-2147 https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Treestyle tab is a must imo. You can even tweak some firefox config files to allow it to minimize to the icon width, then maximize when you mouse over.
warinukraine 4y ago
Tree Style Tabs. Changed my life.
shahar2k 4y ago
I'm actually surprised to have never seen a tab bar that works like the osX dock zoom effect, it seems like it'd be a great way to glance through a large amount of tab windows quickly
twobitshifter 4y ago
I'm wondering if smart history might be the end solution for tabs: - Collapse history into start leaf and end nodes. The end nodes are your tabs/state. The steps to navigate to a node are less important for history. I don’t need to know the url of the Google page I used to get to fact X, what’s important is the fact. (The Google page won’t stay the same anyways) - Opening a new tab starts a new history tree, with a possible parent tree. Let me know if anyone wants to discuss this idea.
woojoo666 4y ago
> Tabs are orded by last visit date. > Your freshest tabs are always at the top. I think I'd hate this. Every time you switch tabs, the order would change. This ruins the spatial organization I have in my mind. When doing research and opening tons of tabs, I have a general idea of where each tab is, letting me jump between pages quickly, even faster than using tab search. There's a reason why when you zoom out to see all your windows on Windows (using win+tab key), Mac OSX (using mission control), or Linux, the order of the windows generally stays the same.
- sfink 4y ago
  I want both. I want a stable ordering, which is roughly the order that I opened the tabs. And I want a recency ordering, to be able to quickly switch between the most recent handful of tabs I'm working with. Fortunately, I have exactly that already. The native tab bar gives the stable ordering, except I ignore that because I'm a tab hoarder and only look at the Tree Style Tabs sidebar. Ctrl-Tab gives the recency ordering. I certainly have complaints about how TST isn't able to provide all of the native functionality (eg the Send Tab To Device menu is empty, and the stupid native tab bar is still visible without a userChrome.css hack). But in terms of ordering, Firefox already gives me the two different orders I care about in a form that works for me.
ac130kz 4y ago
Vimium + bookmarks
terminal_d 4y ago
For anyone looking for a more polished version of the same with more features, search for "sidebery" on the firefox addons store.

127 points by Sujeto 4y ago

What bothers me in modern browser UIs is the distinction between bookmarks and tabs. They are really the same thing. Bookmarks are just inactive tabs. And tabs are just bookmarks (that I haven't deleted). Closing a tab is the same as deleting a bookmark. Searching tabs or searching bookmarks - should be the same thing. Just call them both "pages" and keep last N active in memory.

divan 4y ago

Why people still buying the concept of tabs? Tabs make sense for document viewers. Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. They are full-fledged virtual machines for apps (only those that can be written in JS and use typesetting engine as a UI platform - which is nuts, but okay). The point is, web apps, like normal apps, require proper window manager. Why the hell I should not be able to switch to app when popup alert is shown in another app? Why I can't put two apps side by side inside this VM? Why can't I switch between web apps opened in browser in a similar way as in KDE, Windows or MacOS (Stage Manager type switching would be great). There so much space for experimentation here. But no, we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.

tenebrisalietum 4y ago
Well, in the early 00's when Firefox was starting to become a thing and it introduced the usage of tabs, it really mattered whether something was a local app or something that's primarily the contents of another server fetched and displayed/processed on your computer. It was useful to think of the browser be the "Internet remote window". Now, since basically everything is an Internet app, perhaps the distinction between local and remote isn't too important anymore for most people.
- alias_neo 4y ago
  As a backend software engineer, most long-running terminals on my machine are are often remote connections, and I don't tend to use tabs there (and like to tile them with tmux). Sounds like the the browser could behave much the same way for me. TL;DR: I agree.
hbn 4y ago
You can do most of this stuff by popping the tabs into separate windows. Is it really a better solution to have a window manager in an app that's already in an OS with its own window manager? Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years. But I don't know about a full-on window manager.
- pmontra 4y ago
  Probably separate windows for the tabs deserving to be promoted to apps and a tiling window manager would achieve what GP wants. We have comments here on HN praising i3. https://i3wm.org/ https://i3wm.org/ However the always open tabs I work with most of the time work better in full screen mode on my 15" laptop. Sentry, TeamCity, YouTrack, Bitbucket, AWS (more than one tab), Google Cloud Console, the web apps I'm working on. Little space for tiling.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  Every feature of the OS will eventually be re-implemented in the browser. It will be slower and less convenient to use.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years. Firefox had this as an addon before Quantum. I used it often, even with a tiling window manager, because the tab tiles didn't have their own toolbars/etc - it saved a lot of space. Its modern replacement isn't very useful, it just arranges multiple windows into tiles, each with their own toolbars/etc.
- Tagbert 4y ago
  I use Panorama Tab Groups to group tabs by project. When I click on a tab group the browser window only shows the tabs in that group. Selecting a different tab group swaps in the other set of tabs. It lets me have understandable groups of 10-20 tabs per project/subject.
Semaphor 4y ago
The vast majority of my tabs are actually documents.
- toastal 4y ago
  Yep. It's definitely both.
Nullabillity 4y ago
Nobody's preventing you from popping out tabs into separate windows. In fact, for a while KWin allowed you to tab any windows.. sadly that feature seems to have been lost somewhere around the Plasma 4 -> Plasma 5 transition...
morsch 4y ago
App vs document is a false dichotomy. I don't know about your usage, but I tend to have a small handful of open tabs that are on the app end of the spectrum (chat, email, audio/video, that's about it), a magnitude more tabs that are on the document end (documentation, blog posts, news articles) and the same magnitude that are in-between (shopping, project management stuff, hacker news). The app tabs are the ones that profit the least from the hypertext paradigm; other tabs tend to spawn new sub tabs which are more or less short lived. I use tree style tabs to manage that. It's easy enough to use my actual window manager to manage the app style tabs, by putting them in their own window. But for the most part, this hasn't been necessary. The Firefox popout video player has been more useful than I would have thought, though.
- divan 4y ago
  > App vs document is a false dichotomy. Could you support this with arguments?
  - morsch 4y ago
    There are websites that are very much like an app, like Gmail or Slack. 20 years ago, most people used standalone applications for these. Other websites are not app-like at all: Wikipedia articles, blogs like substack, API documentation; these are documents. And they still make up a significant portion of my browsing -- so yes, my browser is still a hypertext viewer. YMMV, like I said, maybe you mostly have apps open; I don't. And many websites are in-between: project management tools like JIRA and shopping websites like Amazon are document-based (tickets, product pages), but offer actions on top of those documents, like an app would have. They also have external links like, you know, hypertext. And the latter is true for even the app-iest of apps, which makes it useful to have them in the browser (for the same reason, some desktop apps end up embedding browsers). And conversely, even the document websites have actions that are more or less central to the experience, e.g. Wikipedia has editing, blogs have comments. So there isn't a clear line between app and document, that's a false dichotomy.
    - divan 4y ago
stevewatson301 4y ago
There are niche operating systems (it was posted on HN but I can't remember the name now) that consider application windows and tabs as being one and equal; you can even have one window that has tabs from different applications.
- divan 4y ago
  I mean "tabs" is just one of many forms of hanlding multiple windows. They make a lot of sense for document viewers and alike. My claim is that browsers are so much bloa..^Wbigger that that. There is no reason to limit web apps to that document viewers type of window handling.
nocman 4y ago
> Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose. > we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs. Browsers do both web apps and documents (and honestly, blur the lines between them all of the time). Also, I for one wholeheartedly want tabs for both of those use cases (and I don't think I am by any means alone in wanting that).
- divan 4y ago
  > I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose. There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps. Here are tabs I have open at the moment: - HN (board app, not a document) - Soma.fm DefCon radion (music streaming app, not a document) - Facebook (social network app, not a document) - Eurosport Player (video player, not a document) - research paper (PDF, document, but not HTML) - another forum (board app, not a document) - Canva (graphics editing app, not a document) - Miro (whiteboard app, not a document) So you're disagreeing that those apps are apps and not the documents?
  - gaws 4y ago
    > another forum What's the forum?
    - divan 4y ago
      Some Flarum forum software I run, why?
  - nocman 4y ago
    > There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. As someone who does web development, and has been doing it for longer than the last couple of decades, that statement seems unnecessarily dismissive. > But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps. While I would agree that the quantity of web pages people visit today that are 'apps' is substantially larger than it used to be, I do think there are a lot more plain HTML documents in use (particularly in boring corporate environments) than many who frequent HN would think. Of course, if you are going to call anything that executes a significant amount of Javascript an 'app', I am not sure I'm interested in the argument. My original response wasn't arguing about what was most common anyway -- you said "Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore." I was just pointing out that they still do a lot of that (and for things that I would not consider to be an 'app'). Admittedly the line between 'app' and 'document' is a bit fuzzy in some cases, but there are enough cases where (in my mind) it is not fuzzy that I still don't see your original comment as accurate.
icedchai 4y ago
What's stopping you from opening separate browser windows? (I remember browsers before tabs. It was awful.)
- divan 4y ago
  Nothing. That wasn't my question.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Why does the browser need a window manager then? You can run each "app" in its own window.

drawfloat 4y ago

I honestly have to clean up once I hit 5 or 6 tabs, so genuine question to those who keep many open – once you are having to search through a list, what's the advantage over just using history/bookmarks?

jwond 4y ago
History is a much larger list than open tabs. For bookmarks, I don’t want to have to manage a bunch of temporary bookmarks. With a tab I can just close it and move on, but if I had created a bookmark now I have to both close the tab and delete the bookmark.
cies 4y ago
IIRC there's a plugin for Chrome that kills tabs once you open one more than the set limit. This to help rehabilitating tab-hoarders.
Macha 4y ago
State: From scrolling through large articles to web app that dump you back at the home screen when re-entering Finding content: History search just isn't as good as being able to preview a page to see if it's the right one. To-do list: There's some action remaining until the tab is dismissed, or research items to compare

navhc 4y ago

I guess I'm missing the point because it seems to me like almost all of this can be accomplished in native Firefox. If I want to search my open tabs I just type a % in the address bar with my query and it searches my tabs. If I want to search for a bookmark (which doesn't seem meaningfully different from a star) I use a * instead of %. ^ is for history. For recently visited tabs I can ctrl+tab. Clean is basically close all except pinned but it also includes the tab playing audio.

dandanua 4y ago
For the navigation of recent history there is the Tab Session Manager extension.
madacol 4y ago
Oh I wished searching tabs (%) weren't broken by Mozilla's extension "Firefox Multi-account Containers"
- kjkjadksj 4y ago
  Too much is broken by that extension, I uninstalled it.
  - quesera 4y ago
    I use Multi-Account Containers all the time, in every profile, on every machine. So I wonder: what features do you use, which are broken by this extension, and which I am therefore missing out on? (Aside from GP's searching tabs with %, which I didn't know was broken but does have a workaround in Sidebery)

mdtrooper 4y ago

I remember a old addon for firefox that did as a "tiling window manager" of opened tabs...it was cool and useful, but now this addon does not run with the new addon api system.

quanticle 4y ago

First, thanks for making this and putting it out into the world. As someone who always tends to end up with an unreasonable number of tabs, I'm always interested in more and better tab management options. That said, I'm wondering how this compares with TreeStyleTabs (1) for tab management. 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

cies 4y ago
I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. Also, it uses some pop-ups that at times make it a bit cumbersome to use (still much better than FF without TST). Since browsers are a place where we do a lot of work, I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers. Yet, as many have said before, browsers do not seem to target power users: I cannot even change FF's shortcuts without recompiling the beast!
- quanticle 4y ago
  >Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. I didn't seem to have any issues getting the add-on installed in my Firefox. Yes, TST suffered from some instability when Firefox initially deprecated XUL and switched to the WebExtension model exclusively, but it seems to work fine now. It even picked up the theming changes in the latest update to Firefox seamlessly. >I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers Edge comes close. It has the option to orient tabs vertically. However, it doesn't organize tabs in a hierarchical outline like TST does.
  - cies 4y ago
    > Edge comes close. Did not know that. Edge is basically MS branded Chrome, right?
    - quanticle 4y ago
      At this point, yes. At one point Edge had its own rendering engine, but MS chose to abandon it, and just use Blink instead.

orliesaurus 4y ago

I love that you are rethinking tabs, I definitely see more people coming up with alternatives to this problem, eventually something will emerge as the new standard. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs for the regular user, but when you are on 100-150 tabs then you know the tabs solution doesn't scale

wintermutestwin 4y ago
>there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs for the regular user Horizontal tabs are ridiculously bad given standard screen dimensions.

krono 4y ago

Neat project, people have wildly differing browser workflows and it's interesting to get a glimpse of how the brain of this extension's author deals with the concept. This might benefit from using Firefox's Sidebar API: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/WebExtensions/user_interface/Sidebars https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...

wintermutestwin 4y ago
?? Firefox has an API for a Sidebar and yet they make it such a pain to actually switch to one. I hear so many complaints about Mozilla for politics, etc, but my real complaint is that they haven't added a Vertical tabs option (which really should be the default on all browsers).

wintermutestwin 4y ago

A couple initial thoughts as a Sidebery user that keeps ~100 tabs open: 1. The whole point of vertical tabs is that horizontal browser space is "cheap." Why not keep the tab list visible? Having it be a dropdown adds an unnecessary step. 2. Horizontal (Sidebery style) pinned tabs that just show the site icon are much cleaner. I have a row (8-12 tabs depending on how wide I drag the tab bar)of frequently used sites pinned at the top of my tab list. 3. It doesn't look like you have right-click move to window functionality, which is critical for my workflow. If you add it, be sure to make it work with the Titler extension so you can work with window names. I'm glad you didn't put energy into tab trees - I think they are a waste of space. I have a window for each general category of tabs.

malnourish 4y ago
I migrated from Sidebery to Tab Stash [0]. I found the user experience to be a bit more streamlined; I don't find myself missing the tree-style structure, but the stashes it provides are a good replacement. [0]: https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash
SpaghettiCthulu 4y ago
I have >1000 tabs open and probably many that I haven't looked at in >6 months now (most are discarded using Auto Tab Discard). I This many tabs causes every tab management extension I've tried to be unusably slow. Even the Firefox multi account containers popup usually takes around 2 full seconds to load, presumably because it's counting the number of tabs for each container (a feature I would happily disable if possible) via a horrendously slow API.
- kaba0 4y ago
  I can only recommend TabStash for fellow tab hoarders. You still get all your tabs, but only a few are loaded, making your browser much more snappy. (It can basically save the open ones, or the ones you find worthy either simply by date, or by some named groups)
- Cshelton 4y ago

andrewla 4y ago

I've increasingly found that my use of tabs is closely related to the fact that back/forward navigation is unworkable in many cases. The most typical case is that I am looking at a list of things, and I want to click on a result but if I hit back, I don't want to wait an eternity for the page to reload -- if it even does; more often than not something breaks in the back navigation and the results I was looking at are not longer available or the context has switched. Basically I want cost-free backwards and forwards navigation, and tabs are how you do that. But essentially I want that hidden from me. I would much prefer if under the covers hitting back didn't navigate you away from a page, it just keeps the page you are on in a virtual tab in case you want to go back to it. Similarly, clicking a link shouldn't navigate away from the page you're on, but just put it in a virtual tab.

shrx 4y ago
The reloading of the google/bing/whatever search results page on backwards navigation is infuriating. I've been looking for options to turn it off in firefox but no luck.
wintermutestwin 4y ago
I open all links in a new tab. Back and forward are annoying even if they did work.
savolai 4y ago
Been thinking about this too What would be the drawback to just show the page as it was without reloading? Too much memory consumed when retaining too much state from previous pages?
- airstrike 4y ago
  What if the page told you only what to change in the current page as you navigated to links in the same domain? Like browsing through git commits. A pain to implement but kind of an interesting experiment
the_gipsy 4y ago
A browser/extension that saves a snapshot when you click a link. When you click back, the snapshot is magically[1] restored. Hold my beer, I'm gonna try to "snapshot" with iframes or something. [1] I don't know if it's even possible, since this goes beyond HTML, DOM, and memory; nowadays there might be a lot IO "open", e.g. webcams, sound, websockets, etc.

WhyNotHugo 4y ago

An advantage of the tab bar on top is that it's always visible. I can glance quickly and find if that tab I'm looking for is to the left or to the right and use ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab. Or maybe there's just a few tabs, so I can jump around with alt+1, alt+2, etc. Having a menu that needs to be deployed makes the whole process slower -> I first have to open the menu, _and then_ I can start deciding which way I want to switch. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you use the browser for hours a day it is, because there's this additional cognitive cycle of having to request information to be displayed first -- rather than have it always present. Finally, the tabs on the bar on the top have virtually infinite surface and are super easy to click. You see, a 100x100px button has a defined surface where you have to point and click. The smaller the surface, the harder it is to click. But a button at the border of the screen has one dimension infinite: I don't have to aim accurately on the Y axis, I can move my mouse beyond the top of the screen and will still hit the tab.

stemlord 4y ago
I like always visible top tabs but personally ctrl+tab has always been bs. Hitting it 10 times then ctrl+shift+tab once more because I miscalculated has never been faster than using the mouse
- frosted-flakes 4y ago
  Enable the Most Recently Used ordering. That way you won't have to press Ctrl+Tab more than once or twice, because most of the time you don't need to tabs at the back of the stack. Imagine if the Alt+Tab switcher worked like most browsers—it would be pretty useless. This is not an option in Chrome, for some unexplicable reason (Chrome has marked it as wontfix)., and it's the main reason I use Firefox. It's possible to hack around it with extensions and opening the Chrome extensions settings XML file and manually setting the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts, but it's fragile and annoying to set up, and has some odd behaviours in certain circumstances.
  - ivarru 4y ago
    It's a bit weird at first, but think the Chrome extension "Most Recent Used Tab Stack" works ok. It keeps the tabs sorted by moving the current tab to the left. That being said, I also prefer Firefox -- mainly because of its container extensions.

johnchristopher 4y ago

Looks cool ^^. But while we are on that subject: I don't want to manage all that mess (my history, my bookmarks, my read-it-later extensions, my stars, etc.). Plug me an IA, a cortana, a Jarvis or a duck and let me ask it in plain language what I am trying to remember. After some beeping noises it comes back with some answers, built from the stream of data that passed through my browser. And I mean the whole stream: video, subtitles of those videos, audio track, images in webpages, full text, etc. Not just a list of URL I visited. Wait, that's just Google@home, right ? Should I just live in Google search then ? Ah, I don't know. /rant

moffkalast 4y ago

You've gotta be kidding me, yet another system for grouping things that makes navigation take twice as many clicks and mouse moves. I really don't understand what's wrong with you people, first you came for the taskbars, now for our tabs. Will you never stop until everything's completely collapsed and hidden several clicks away? WHY?!? I can't believe this stupid trend that's forcing its way into all parts of UI these days. Yes, let's make everything useless because D E S I G N.

rpwilcox 4y ago

This is very cool. Two things I wish: * can it be a sidebar, instead or in addition to this popup? Then it could be up all the time, or how wide I want * I wish it did tabs across windows - this only finds tabs in the current window, but I have multiple windows of multiple tabs open on my machine. (So of course I can't find anything, yes...) But this is very neat and exciting!!

stewbrew 4y ago

I personally like the onetab extension very much. The best tab is no tab. The very notion of "tab management" is wrong. I just wish there were a way to synchronize the page via Firefox sync.

jrmann100 4y ago
+1 for https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/ To provide a bit more context: OneTab closes (all, or specific) tabs and dumps the URLs in a stack, grouped by window or category to be quickly popped open/combed through at your leisure. It's great for the times I get sidetracked and need to hold onto thirty pages of docs without keeping them open at all times; I use it as a sort of tab purgatory which I will probably not revisit (I have 1025 tabs saved at the moment ).

TehShrike 4y ago

Maybe it's just for the benefit of screenshots, but it looks like I'd have to click or right-click to use the cool functionality – I love the idea, but I don't want to touch the mouse to interact with my browser tabs. I need keyboard accessibility to be at 100%

deafpolygon 4y ago

People with over 100 tabs open.. how? Why?

jabroni_salad 4y ago
I'm the RCA guy so I have a lot of research projects in my tabs :)
dotancohen 4y ago
Research. If I'm researching something, I'll open more than 200 tabs. With Tree Style Tabs, each Google or Kagi search is a top-level tab, and each link I open from that gets opened in a sub tab. When I'm done, I'll store the useful tabs organized in an org-mode file - I have an Emacs script which grabs the currently-open tab URL and Title from Mozilla's sqlite database and adds them in org-mode link format to the current document (I can post it if anyone wants it). I can then close all that mess.
- fikama 4y ago
  Sounds incredibly cool, to be honest I am a vim guy, but still is it your own script, is there any repo, can you share it? Also I was't aware that firefox stores open tabs in SQLite, can you point me what to type in Google to read more about it?
  - dotancohen 4y ago
    I can share it here: (defun ff-link-org () (interactive) (insert (shell-command-to-string "lz4jsoncat $FIREFOX_DIR/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq -r '.windows[0].tabs | sort_by(.lastAccessed)[-1] | .entries[.index-1] | \"[[\" + (.url) + \"][\" + (.title) + \"]]\"' | tr -d '\n'")) ) (defun ff-link-org-xdotool () "Get Firefox link in Org mode format" (interactive) (shell-command "xdotool search 'Navigator' windowactivate --sync key --clearmodifiers Escape y o ; xdotool keydown alt key Tab ; xdotool keyup alt") ) (global-set-key (kbd "C-c f") 'ff-link-org) I misremembered, once the data was in an SQLite database but now it's easier to grab from the sessionstore backup file - it's compressed JSON. I then query it with jq and trim the newline - here's that part isolated with the format changed to provide a markdown-formated link: lz4jsoncat $FIREFOX_DIR/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq -r '.windows[0].tabs | sort_by(.lastAccessed)[-1] | .entries[.index-1] | \"(\" + (.title) + \")[\" + (.url) + \"]\"' | tr -d '\n' By the way, I'm a longtime VIM user but have recently been converting all my notes to org-mode. Emacs with Evil is a good-enough VIM replacement for notes taking, and the org-mode format is absolutely terrific.

trap_goes_hot 4y ago

For those that liked the Classic windows taskbar that has been removed in W11, I'd like to plug RetroBar - https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar

elischleifer 4y ago

not sure what I am looking at here.

barbazoo 4y ago

I've been using "Tree Style Tab" in combination with [1] to hide the old tabs and it's such a joy. I can group tabs by "topic" which is helpful when I'm working on multiple things in parallel which is pretty much always. [1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#hide-horizontal-tabs-at-the-top-of-the-window-1349-1672-2147 https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

kjkjadksj 4y ago
Treestyle tab is a must imo. You can even tweak some firefox config files to allow it to minimize to the icon width, then maximize when you mouse over.

warinukraine 4y ago

Tree Style Tabs. Changed my life.

shahar2k 4y ago

I'm actually surprised to have never seen a tab bar that works like the osX dock zoom effect, it seems like it'd be a great way to glance through a large amount of tab windows quickly

twobitshifter 4y ago

I'm wondering if smart history might be the end solution for tabs: - Collapse history into start leaf and end nodes. The end nodes are your tabs/state. The steps to navigate to a node are less important for history. I don’t need to know the url of the Google page I used to get to fact X, what’s important is the fact. (The Google page won’t stay the same anyways) - Opening a new tab starts a new history tree, with a possible parent tree. Let me know if anyone wants to discuss this idea.

woojoo666 4y ago

> Tabs are orded by last visit date. > Your freshest tabs are always at the top. I think I'd hate this. Every time you switch tabs, the order would change. This ruins the spatial organization I have in my mind. When doing research and opening tons of tabs, I have a general idea of where each tab is, letting me jump between pages quickly, even faster than using tab search. There's a reason why when you zoom out to see all your windows on Windows (using win+tab key), Mac OSX (using mission control), or Linux, the order of the windows generally stays the same.

sfink 4y ago
I want both. I want a stable ordering, which is roughly the order that I opened the tabs. And I want a recency ordering, to be able to quickly switch between the most recent handful of tabs I'm working with. Fortunately, I have exactly that already. The native tab bar gives the stable ordering, except I ignore that because I'm a tab hoarder and only look at the Tree Style Tabs sidebar. Ctrl-Tab gives the recency ordering. I certainly have complaints about how TST isn't able to provide all of the native functionality (eg the Send Tab To Device menu is empty, and the stupid native tab bar is still visible without a userChrome.css hack). But in terms of ordering, Firefox already gives me the two different orders I care about in a form that works for me.

ac130kz 4y ago

Vimium + bookmarks

terminal_d 4y ago

For anyone looking for a more polished version of the same with more features, search for "sidebery" on the firefox addons store.