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Why do people need dozens or hundreds of tabs to the point that they need groups for them? We've had bookmarks (and folders for them) for decades... It made way

by slily 3y ago

Why do people need dozens or hundreds of tabs to the point that they need groups for them? We've had bookmarks (and folders for them) for decades... It made way more sense when you could expect tabs to always be loaded, and not behave like another set of bookmarks.

kitsunesoba 3y ago
Bookmarks have management overhead and are too easily forgotten about. For a lot of people tabs serve as a sort of to-do list or with groups, repositories for sites that will briefly be useful for a certain task in the near future. They naturally get closed as they’re done with, eschewing any kind of cleanup step as is necessary with bookmarks.
- slily 3y ago
  That sounds like how I use tabs but doesn't explain how people end up with enough tabs open to make them impossible to navigate in a horizontal layout and without grouping them. When I'm done with a tab, I close it. If I'm going back to it later, I leave it and... go back to it later. If I don't, I close it... or I bookmark it. I don't see how you go from using tabs as a short-term "read later" feature to having several dozens of them open at any given time. And while deleting bookmarks takes a second to do, so does going through your tabs to get rid of the ones that haven't been useful in 2 months. Personally, if I run out of horizontal space I consider it a good reminder to clean up, but then I see people with so many tabs that all they see is a ton of icons, and I wonder if they even know that bookmarks exist. That image came to mind as I read some of the other comments under this post, and I feel like we're just reinventing bookmarks for people who don't realize that bookmarks exist (bookmarks have been deemphasized for a while through trends like hiding the bookmarks toolbar by default).
arp242 3y ago
Usually what happens is stuff like like: - I spend time researching X, have a few pages open for that, get bored with it, want to continue in a few days. - I work on X, which has a few related tabs open, and I need to switch to Y for a bit. - There's a long-term thing I'm working on and off. - Something I found and want to look at later; "bookmarks-light" (bookmarks might as well be /dev/null for me).
- dizhn 3y ago
  You would probably also like Simple Tab Groups. The tabs are grouped however you like and get out of your way until you want to look at them again.
  - arp242 3y ago
    I used that on Opera way back in the day (before the Blink rewrite). Back then there weren't any Firefox extensions that I liked (either too complex or too 'janky', IIRC) so I just gave up on vertical tabs and grouping, but maybe I should look at it again as that was years ago. Thanks!
nirvdrum 3y ago
There's two primary reasons for me: * Convenience * Tooling It's more convenient to keep tabs open. With Tree Style Tabs on Firefox and Orion's vertical tabs I can retain the relationship. The browser generally keeps it cached so even if the site goes offline I can read what I need to. If I have a form partially entered, I can resume it. If the page has infinite scroll but doesn't update the URL, I can stay where I was. Some sites tie resources to a particular session so resuming from a bookmark won't get you to the resource anyway. But, I can also find things faster if they're on a pile on my desk than I can if they're put away in a drawer so I'm sure it's different for everyone. As for tooling, I think browsers just aren't very good at bookmark management. I find the sidebar for bookmarks borderline useless, but a tree of tabs in the same space is quite efficient for me. The bookmark manager isn't much better. We can use folders, but not really have the rich links the web was designed for. I often have both the HN discussion and article open with either a parent-child or sibling relationship in my vertical tabs. That's not easily replicated with bookmarks. The other tooling issue is tab management isn't great. Chrome's shrinking tabs is terrible HCI; you can't read them and they become harder to click. Finding a tab can be frustrating. It's often easier to open a new tab to complete a task than go hunting for the one I want. Pinning tabs doesn't work great with multiple windows and seeing just the favicon isn't super helpful if you need to pin two pages from the same domain. Between the tabs I keep open because that's how my brain works best and between tabs I get stuck with because browsers haven't provided better tooling, it's easy to grow into the hundreds and then periodically cull them.
eviks 3y ago
Because bookmarks are a bad separate UI, the tabs and sessions are right there and retain your currently working scheme, and also don't include something you worked on 10 years ago and saved in the same folder And the content of tabs is also cached/loaded unlike with bookmarks

by slily 3y ago

kitsunesoba 3y ago

Bookmarks have management overhead and are too easily forgotten about. For a lot of people tabs serve as a sort of to-do list or with groups, repositories for sites that will briefly be useful for a certain task in the near future. They naturally get closed as they’re done with, eschewing any kind of cleanup step as is necessary with bookmarks.

slily 3y ago
That sounds like how I use tabs but doesn't explain how people end up with enough tabs open to make them impossible to navigate in a horizontal layout and without grouping them. When I'm done with a tab, I close it. If I'm going back to it later, I leave it and... go back to it later. If I don't, I close it... or I bookmark it. I don't see how you go from using tabs as a short-term "read later" feature to having several dozens of them open at any given time. And while deleting bookmarks takes a second to do, so does going through your tabs to get rid of the ones that haven't been useful in 2 months. Personally, if I run out of horizontal space I consider it a good reminder to clean up, but then I see people with so many tabs that all they see is a ton of icons, and I wonder if they even know that bookmarks exist. That image came to mind as I read some of the other comments under this post, and I feel like we're just reinventing bookmarks for people who don't realize that bookmarks exist (bookmarks have been deemphasized for a while through trends like hiding the bookmarks toolbar by default).

arp242 3y ago

Usually what happens is stuff like like: - I spend time researching X, have a few pages open for that, get bored with it, want to continue in a few days. - I work on X, which has a few related tabs open, and I need to switch to Y for a bit. - There's a long-term thing I'm working on and off. - Something I found and want to look at later; "bookmarks-light" (bookmarks might as well be /dev/null for me).

dizhn 3y ago
You would probably also like Simple Tab Groups. The tabs are grouped however you like and get out of your way until you want to look at them again.
- arp242 3y ago
  I used that on Opera way back in the day (before the Blink rewrite). Back then there weren't any Firefox extensions that I liked (either too complex or too 'janky', IIRC) so I just gave up on vertical tabs and grouping, but maybe I should look at it again as that was years ago. Thanks!

nirvdrum 3y ago

There's two primary reasons for me: * Convenience * Tooling It's more convenient to keep tabs open. With Tree Style Tabs on Firefox and Orion's vertical tabs I can retain the relationship. The browser generally keeps it cached so even if the site goes offline I can read what I need to. If I have a form partially entered, I can resume it. If the page has infinite scroll but doesn't update the URL, I can stay where I was. Some sites tie resources to a particular session so resuming from a bookmark won't get you to the resource anyway. But, I can also find things faster if they're on a pile on my desk than I can if they're put away in a drawer so I'm sure it's different for everyone. As for tooling, I think browsers just aren't very good at bookmark management. I find the sidebar for bookmarks borderline useless, but a tree of tabs in the same space is quite efficient for me. The bookmark manager isn't much better. We can use folders, but not really have the rich links the web was designed for. I often have both the HN discussion and article open with either a parent-child or sibling relationship in my vertical tabs. That's not easily replicated with bookmarks. The other tooling issue is tab management isn't great. Chrome's shrinking tabs is terrible HCI; you can't read them and they become harder to click. Finding a tab can be frustrating. It's often easier to open a new tab to complete a task than go hunting for the one I want. Pinning tabs doesn't work great with multiple windows and seeing just the favicon isn't super helpful if you need to pin two pages from the same domain. Between the tabs I keep open because that's how my brain works best and between tabs I get stuck with because browsers haven't provided better tooling, it's easy to grow into the hundreds and then periodically cull them.

eviks 3y ago

Because bookmarks are a bad separate UI, the tabs and sessions are right there and retain your currently working scheme, and also don't include something you worked on 10 years ago and saved in the same folder And the content of tabs is also cached/loaded unlike with bookmarks