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The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning). It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing research would benefit from it.

sphars 3y ago
Vivaldi can do tab tiling. Not nearly as customizable as an IDE as you describe, but you can vertically or horizontally tile multiple tabs on the same "page". Only browser I know that has that close of functionality https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/ https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/
- nsonha 3y ago
  Arc Browser does it but currently closed beta, I have spare invitations if you need.
  - hxii 3y ago
    I wanted to try it since I couldn't understand what the fuss was about, then I saw it's still in closed beta. What are your impressions of it?
    - mthoms 3y ago
      I'm not the person you asked but I love it. It's actually solved my tab hoarding problem and made my life so much simpler. Caveat: I'm an ADHD sufferer so my experience may not be typical.
      - hxii 3y ago
        I actually have ADHD(I) as well, and have been trying to battle tab/bookmark hoarding myself. It seems Vivaldi is working well, but I was wondering what Arc has to offer.
    - nsonha 3y ago
      You likely know what I'm talking about, tab pinning is broken in all mainstream browsers, it isn't broken in Arc. In addition, you can pin groups of multiple tabs tilled side by side (not very useful without a wide screen, but still)
  - FractalHQ 3y ago
    It’s highly limited compared to the tiling in Vivaldi. You can only tile 2 tabs at a time. Arc also doesn’t seem to have horizontal tabs so you lose 10-20% of your screen space to the vertical tabs bar which gets annoying. I do like Arc but there are some basic things missing that make it hard to use.
    - nsonha 3y ago
      Maybe you tried it a while ago? You can tile unlimited tabs either horizontally or vertically (but not both). I've never found any reason to tile any thing vertically anyway, the web just isn't designed for small horizontal windows. I use an ultrawide 32" screen and even for window tilling I use PaperWM (technically a Hammerspoon script because PaperWM isn't on MacOS). So I only need to navigate windows/tabs in one dimension (horizontally). Arc does have the benefits of native UI, Vivaldi at least when I tried a couple of months ago was very janky, presumably because the browser chrome is written in React. Somewhere in this thread people mentioned Stack browser which is actually closer to PaperWM in terms of how it tiles tabs. For both Arc and Vivaldi it's very annoying if you resize (going fullscreen and back) windows with tiles because the size of the tiles gets messed up. Stack just keeps the size and make them scrollable.
- niutech 3y ago
  Check out my Split Browser (https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser), currently alpha.
jerpint 3y ago
tmux but a browser
RileyJames 3y ago
I’d be keen to try something like that out. I’ve been using pop os for the past few months and I’ve fallen in love with its snapping window manager. I have a 4K screen plus the laptop (xps 13). I can have two browsers open, then my ide. And then terminal on the laptop screen. And I can easily slide the divider between the ide and browsers as necessary based on what requires the most space at the time. Only issues I’ve run into is being able to move multiple stacked windows to a new location, all at once. I probably just haven’t found the right shortcut. It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, as the browsers are independent, but I’d be keen to see new browsing options like that.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  If only PopOS had a better name. I like their wm but the naming sucks tbh.
- dmytrish 3y ago
  Sway (and i3?) actually has the notion of containers, which can contain multiple windows and can be selected and manipulated as a unit. It works nicely. The only thing that I haven't automated yet is that I have a rather specific workspace layout on my 4k screen and converting it from/to a laptop-screen workspace when unplugged takes a few steps.
  - RileyJames 3y ago
    Interesting. I’ll take a look. Yes, plugging and unplugging is a major pain. I often find my windows re-appear on the wrong screen. And sometimes the wrong desktop… which is weird.
benjaminkitt 3y ago
I use Stack browser. Not quite what you describe, but a step in that direction. https://stackbrowser.com/ https://stackbrowser.com/
- djcannabiz 3y ago
  After taking a glance at their website, this seems quite similar to the arc browser. Have you tried arc, and if so how do you think they compare?
  - nsonha 3y ago
    To save you time trying it out, their implementation of tiling is better than that of Arc. Unfortunately it suffers the same problem most mainstream browsers do: broken pinned tabs, and there is no pinned tab groups like Arc
    - nsonha 3y ago
      correct: there IS tabs/groups pinning, just no extensions support, for now.
qudat 3y ago
That’s why people like single tab browsers. Then you leverage a tiling manager like i3 or sway to manage the windows
- echelon 3y ago
  This! Everything in the OS should follow that workflow. Even better if every text entry can be made modal like vim.
  - eviks 3y ago
    > every text entry can be made modal like vim. That's such a wasted design opportunity - give the users freedom in using a proper text editing tool instead of whatever awfulness the OS designers got stuck in decade(s) ago
- dangond 3y ago
  What are some examples? I finally got around to using a tiling window manager this week and have been loving it, but would love a browser without a status bar to go with it
  - qudat 3y ago
    The main one that comes to mind is https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ But there are many other minimal UI browsers as well as Firefox that support no tabs. I’ve been using qutebrowser which doesn’t have much of a UI since it is vim based
    - mo_42 3y ago
      I like tab-less browsers. Leaving tab/window management to the OS means I don’t have to learn browser-specific commands on top of the OS's ones. I'm using Firefox with a custom userChrome.css: #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } Works quite ok but I cannot disable opening tabs completely in Firefox.
- gukov 3y ago
behnamoh 3y ago
And not an IDE like VSCode, but a fully customizable IDE. It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway. A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over feature for the vertical tabs doesn't work if the cursor is at the very left of the screen? And why can't we move the vertical bar to the right side of screen?
- felixfbecker 3y ago
  VS Code has always had vertical tabs. It actually launched without horizontal tabs support and only added it due to community pressure. The reason was that VS Code/Monaco was originally designed to run in the browser, and the VS Code team wanted to avoid having a "tabs within tabs" UI.
  - behnamoh 3y ago
    That’s just factually wrong.
    - bhargav 3y ago
      https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/108264#issuecomment-754512877 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/108264#issuecomme...
      - behnamoh 3y ago
        that’s visual studio not vsc.
        simonjgreen 3y ago
        The thread has both. And it backs up the factually one claim as it is an ask for vertical tabs in vscode.
Davidbrcz 3y ago
So emacs ?
- allarm 3y ago
  Obviously, but Emacs is (un)fortunately not for everyone.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser. Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets". HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
  - DVRC 3y ago
    Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive?
hliyan 3y ago
Or, getting rid of tabs and going back to individual browser windows, but with some mechanism to visualise and navigate between them better on the desktop (e.g. window shrinks to 30% of full size on loss focus and stays to a side of the desk top until restored). I remember managing a fairly large number of Internet Explorer windows on Windows 98.
- nsonha 3y ago
  I thought about that too, the ability to group windows into tabs*, regardless of application is better managed by the desktop environment, rather than application. [*] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-tile https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...
Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
Early versions of Opera (maybe 20 years ago or so, I don't remember when exactly) had real MDI, where the tabs were subwindows rather than actual tabs. You could arrange them however you wanted, tile, cascade, etc. For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.
- junon 3y ago
  I really, really liked a lot of Opera's ideas. I think someone on that team really understood good UI design principles, at least at the feature level. If memory serves it included an IRC client at least, and maybe even an FTP client? Can't remember about the latter, but definitely the former. Perhaps a bit "bloated" for its time, but it was always pretty sleek to use. In fact I don't exactly remember why it never became mainstream. Maybe it had too many quirks or lagged behind others in terms of the new features, which... isn't entirely its own fault. Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now. It looks like it has Whatsapp integration, among other things, which is the absolute last thing I'd ever want my browser to have an integration with.
  - pmlnr 3y ago
    Opera had a mail client that just hit the right spot of simplicity and functionality. I miss it to this very day.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
    Indeed, it did include IRC client, FTP client, email client and download manager with torrent support (not 100% sure if all at the same time, because it has been many years and versions blur in my mind). The funny thing is that even though it included a lot of features I didn't use (for example, I never used the email client, not because it was bad, but I didn't use POP3/IMAP in general during that period), it was still much more efficient than all competitors in terms of speed, memory usage and even download size (at some point it boasted to be the only browser that fit in a floppy disk, although of course not for long). I think the reason why it never became mainstream is that it was a paid product for a long time, while all other browsers were free. It eventually became free, but by then, competitors were too entrenched. I also dislike Whatsapp but depending on country, it might be a necessary evil. In Spain for example, not having Whatsapp practically means forgoing any socialization with non-nerds. It's so ingrained in daily life that being without it is almost unthinkable for most people. Anyway, the current Opera doesn't have almost anything in common with the original one. Different engine, company, team, vision and even continent (owned by a Chinese company), only the brand and a thin sliver of identity remains. (The sad thing is that I use it, because I still find it to be the least bad option for my needs...).
pharmakom 3y ago
isn't this a failing of the operating systems more than anything? like you can have multiple windows side by side, so what's the benefit of panes?
nologic01 3y ago
> The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Yep. That is exactly how I think about it as well. The browser and the IDE are effectively the same metaphor of a "super-app", just different security assumptions about where the information resides, how much it can be trusted and what can be done with it, how active the user input etc. In systems such as Firefox OS or ChromeOs the boundaries dissolve further. Thinking about open source desktops and their application ecosystems, instead of countless independent efforts that waste precious talent in incompatible replication there could be some sort of architecture where lower level apps (editors, file/tab/bookmark/tag managers, shells, webview or spreadsheet renderers etc) could be recombined in various ways in the browser/IDE (or run as standalone apps).
dietr1ch 3y ago
I actually want a windowing system that provides the tree tab bar instead. I feel the paradigm of having windows around have been stuck for 40yrs and that the only major mainstream innovation is just manually tiling windows. KDE has allowed grouping windows as tabs, but that never really took off. There's a vast amount of tiling WMs, but none of them are truly popular, and I also don't want to open a terminal, or worse, emacs, to deal with wifi/bluetooth/thumbdrives just to showoff how unnecessarily awkward some things get to be when you don't run some mainstream desktop.
DonHopkins 3y ago
How about taking another step back, and having a browser that functions as a scriptable user-customizable editable window manager like HyperCard? Run the web browser directly on the hardware, and implement the desktop window manager with that, in a way that the whole system is a scriptable integrated development environment. Then it's easy to implement tabbed windows, pie menus, and user-editable HyperCard-like interfaces. Here's a big step in the right direction of supporting pie menus on the desktop: Simon Schneegans's "Kando" project aims to implement cross-platform pie menus on the desktop. Simon implemented the beautiful "Pie Fly" Gnome shell extension and WYSIWYG pie menu editor, so I am really looking forward to what he does with other desktop interfaces! Introducing: Kando: https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2 https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2 https://github.com/kando-menu/kando https://github.com/kando-menu/kando >Kando will be a pie menu for the desktop. It will be highly customizable and will allow you to create your own menus and actions. For instance, you can use it to control your music player, to open your favorite websites or to simulate shortcuts. It will be available for Windows, Linux and maybe macOS. Fly-Pie: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie >Fly-Pie is an extension for GNOME Shell which lets you open marking menus via keyboard shortcuts. And — to the best of my knowledge — it is the first GNOME Shell extension with achievements! >You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. It features a continuous learning curve which lets you gradually lift-off from a grumpie menu rookie to a snappie menu pielot. (You got it? Like pilot, but with a ). Once you opened a marking menu, you can seamlessly transition between three alternative selection modes: >Point-and-Click: Select items by clicking on them or anywhere in the corresponding wedges. >Marking-Mode: Select items by drawing gestures. To do this, click anywhere and drag your mouse. Pausing or making a turn selects the currently dragged item. >Turbo-Mode: You can also "draw" gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift, or Alt without having to press your mouse button! This is especially useful when you opened the menu with a shortcut involving such a modifier. Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk I've written about reinventing scriptable HyperCard-like window managers with pie menus and tabbed windows before: SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)): https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-goodnews-99f411e58ce4 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649 >At Sun we experimented with implementing an X11 window manager in NeWS. We didn't have transparency at the time (1992), but we did support shaped windows! >The NeWS window manager supported cool stuff (for both X11 and NeWS windows!) like rooms, virtual scrolling desktops, tabbed windows, pie menus, was easily extensible and deeply customisable in PostScript, and ran locally in the window server so it could respond instantly to input events, lock the input queue and provide feedback and manipulate windows immediately without causing any context switches or dealing with asynchronous locking, unlocking and event handling. You'd never lose a keystroke or click when switching between applications, for example. [...] And here's how I think you should design a programmable "window manager" these days -- but it would be much more than just a window manager! It would be great for integrating legacy desktop and mobile applications into VR, for example! >aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery >Don asks Peter Korn: Hey I would love to bounce an idea off of you! I didn't realize how much work you've done in accessibility. >There is a window manager for the Mac called Slate, that is extensible in JavaScript -- it makes a hidden WebView and uses its JS interpreter by extending it with some interfaces to the app to do window management, using the Mac Accessibility API. >So I wanted to make pie menus for it, and thought of a good approach: make the hidden WebView not so hidden, but in the topmost layer of windows, covering all the screens, with a transparent background, that shows the desktop through anywhere you don't draw html. >Then just make pie menus with JavaScript, which I've done. Works like a charm! >THEN the next step I would like to do is this: >aQuery -- like jQuery, but for selecting, querying and manipulating Mac app user interfaces via the Accessibility framework and protocols. >So you can write jQuery-like selectors that search for and select Accessibility objects, and then it provides a convenient high level API for doing all kinds of stuff with them. So you can write higher level plugin widgets with aQuery that use HTML with jQuery, or even other types of user interfaces like voice recognition/synthesis, video tracking, augmented reality, web services, etc! >For example, I want to click on a window and it will dynamically configure jQuery Pie Menus with the commands in the menu of a live Mac app. Or make a hypercard-like user interface builder that lets people drag buttons or commands out of Mac apps into their own stacks, and make special purpose simplified guis for controlling and integrating Mac apps. >Does that sound crazy? I think it just might work! Implement the aQuery "selector engine" and heavy lifting in Objective C so that it runs really fast, and presents a nice high level useful interface to JavaScript. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919 >>Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us? >Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [lots of opinions omitted, see link above...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690 >>Simula: A VR window manager for Linux [...] >Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot. >That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented. >Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar. >VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR. >The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open-ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces. >For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces. >Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen-scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX. >Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061 >Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...] >Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source. >Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818 >Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins... >It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python: https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly >Morgan Dixon's work with Prefab is brilliant. >I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.
niutech 3y ago
Try Otter Browser, which has an MDI interface, or my Split Browser (https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser)

sphars 3y ago

Vivaldi can do tab tiling. Not nearly as customizable as an IDE as you describe, but you can vertically or horizontally tile multiple tabs on the same "page". Only browser I know that has that close of functionality https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/ https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/

nsonha 3y ago
Arc Browser does it but currently closed beta, I have spare invitations if you need.
- hxii 3y ago
  I wanted to try it since I couldn't understand what the fuss was about, then I saw it's still in closed beta. What are your impressions of it?
  - mthoms 3y ago
    I'm not the person you asked but I love it. It's actually solved my tab hoarding problem and made my life so much simpler. Caveat: I'm an ADHD sufferer so my experience may not be typical.
    - hxii 3y ago
      I actually have ADHD(I) as well, and have been trying to battle tab/bookmark hoarding myself. It seems Vivaldi is working well, but I was wondering what Arc has to offer.
  - nsonha 3y ago
    You likely know what I'm talking about, tab pinning is broken in all mainstream browsers, it isn't broken in Arc. In addition, you can pin groups of multiple tabs tilled side by side (not very useful without a wide screen, but still)
- FractalHQ 3y ago
  It’s highly limited compared to the tiling in Vivaldi. You can only tile 2 tabs at a time. Arc also doesn’t seem to have horizontal tabs so you lose 10-20% of your screen space to the vertical tabs bar which gets annoying. I do like Arc but there are some basic things missing that make it hard to use.
  - nsonha 3y ago
    Maybe you tried it a while ago? You can tile unlimited tabs either horizontally or vertically (but not both). I've never found any reason to tile any thing vertically anyway, the web just isn't designed for small horizontal windows. I use an ultrawide 32" screen and even for window tilling I use PaperWM (technically a Hammerspoon script because PaperWM isn't on MacOS). So I only need to navigate windows/tabs in one dimension (horizontally). Arc does have the benefits of native UI, Vivaldi at least when I tried a couple of months ago was very janky, presumably because the browser chrome is written in React. Somewhere in this thread people mentioned Stack browser which is actually closer to PaperWM in terms of how it tiles tabs. For both Arc and Vivaldi it's very annoying if you resize (going fullscreen and back) windows with tiles because the size of the tiles gets messed up. Stack just keeps the size and make them scrollable.
niutech 3y ago
Check out my Split Browser (https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser), currently alpha.

jerpint 3y ago

tmux but a browser

RileyJames 3y ago

I’d be keen to try something like that out. I’ve been using pop os for the past few months and I’ve fallen in love with its snapping window manager. I have a 4K screen plus the laptop (xps 13). I can have two browsers open, then my ide. And then terminal on the laptop screen. And I can easily slide the divider between the ide and browsers as necessary based on what requires the most space at the time. Only issues I’ve run into is being able to move multiple stacked windows to a new location, all at once. I probably just haven’t found the right shortcut. It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, as the browsers are independent, but I’d be keen to see new browsing options like that.

behnamoh 3y ago
If only PopOS had a better name. I like their wm but the naming sucks tbh.
dmytrish 3y ago
Sway (and i3?) actually has the notion of containers, which can contain multiple windows and can be selected and manipulated as a unit. It works nicely. The only thing that I haven't automated yet is that I have a rather specific workspace layout on my 4k screen and converting it from/to a laptop-screen workspace when unplugged takes a few steps.
- RileyJames 3y ago
  Interesting. I’ll take a look. Yes, plugging and unplugging is a major pain. I often find my windows re-appear on the wrong screen. And sometimes the wrong desktop… which is weird.

benjaminkitt 3y ago

I use Stack browser. Not quite what you describe, but a step in that direction. https://stackbrowser.com/ https://stackbrowser.com/

djcannabiz 3y ago
After taking a glance at their website, this seems quite similar to the arc browser. Have you tried arc, and if so how do you think they compare?
- nsonha 3y ago
  To save you time trying it out, their implementation of tiling is better than that of Arc. Unfortunately it suffers the same problem most mainstream browsers do: broken pinned tabs, and there is no pinned tab groups like Arc
  - nsonha 3y ago
    correct: there IS tabs/groups pinning, just no extensions support, for now.

qudat 3y ago

That’s why people like single tab browsers. Then you leverage a tiling manager like i3 or sway to manage the windows

echelon 3y ago
This! Everything in the OS should follow that workflow. Even better if every text entry can be made modal like vim.
- eviks 3y ago
  > every text entry can be made modal like vim. That's such a wasted design opportunity - give the users freedom in using a proper text editing tool instead of whatever awfulness the OS designers got stuck in decade(s) ago
dangond 3y ago
What are some examples? I finally got around to using a tiling window manager this week and have been loving it, but would love a browser without a status bar to go with it
- qudat 3y ago
  The main one that comes to mind is https://surf.suckless.org/ https://surf.suckless.org/ But there are many other minimal UI browsers as well as Firefox that support no tabs. I’ve been using qutebrowser which doesn’t have much of a UI since it is vim based
  - mo_42 3y ago
    I like tab-less browsers. Leaving tab/window management to the OS means I don’t have to learn browser-specific commands on top of the OS's ones. I'm using Firefox with a custom userChrome.css: #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; } Works quite ok but I cannot disable opening tabs completely in Firefox.
gukov 3y ago

behnamoh 3y ago

And not an IDE like VSCode, but a fully customizable IDE. It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway. A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over feature for the vertical tabs doesn't work if the cursor is at the very left of the screen? And why can't we move the vertical bar to the right side of screen?

felixfbecker 3y ago
VS Code has always had vertical tabs. It actually launched without horizontal tabs support and only added it due to community pressure. The reason was that VS Code/Monaco was originally designed to run in the browser, and the VS Code team wanted to avoid having a "tabs within tabs" UI.
- behnamoh 3y ago
  That’s just factually wrong.
  - bhargav 3y ago
    https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/108264#issuecomment-754512877 https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/108264#issuecomme...
    - behnamoh 3y ago
      that’s visual studio not vsc.
      - simonjgreen 3y ago
        The thread has both. And it backs up the factually one claim as it is an ask for vertical tabs in vscode.

Davidbrcz 3y ago

So emacs ?

allarm 3y ago
Obviously, but Emacs is (un)fortunately not for everyone.
DonHopkins 3y ago
UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser. Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets". HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy... >HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.) Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
- DVRC 3y ago
  Do any version of UniPress Emacs (that support the NeWS driver) or NeMacs survive?

hliyan 3y ago

Or, getting rid of tabs and going back to individual browser windows, but with some mechanism to visualise and navigate between them better on the desktop (e.g. window shrinks to 30% of full size on loss focus and stays to a side of the desk top until restored). I remember managing a fairly large number of Internet Explorer windows on Windows 98.

nsonha 3y ago
I thought about that too, the ability to group windows into tabs*, regardless of application is better managed by the desktop environment, rather than application. [*] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-tile https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...

Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago

Early versions of Opera (maybe 20 years ago or so, I don't remember when exactly) had real MDI, where the tabs were subwindows rather than actual tabs. You could arrange them however you wanted, tile, cascade, etc. For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.

junon 3y ago
I really, really liked a lot of Opera's ideas. I think someone on that team really understood good UI design principles, at least at the feature level. If memory serves it included an IRC client at least, and maybe even an FTP client? Can't remember about the latter, but definitely the former. Perhaps a bit "bloated" for its time, but it was always pretty sleek to use. In fact I don't exactly remember why it never became mainstream. Maybe it had too many quirks or lagged behind others in terms of the new features, which... isn't entirely its own fault. Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now. It looks like it has Whatsapp integration, among other things, which is the absolute last thing I'd ever want my browser to have an integration with.
- pmlnr 3y ago
  Opera had a mail client that just hit the right spot of simplicity and functionality. I miss it to this very day.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y ago
  Indeed, it did include IRC client, FTP client, email client and download manager with torrent support (not 100% sure if all at the same time, because it has been many years and versions blur in my mind). The funny thing is that even though it included a lot of features I didn't use (for example, I never used the email client, not because it was bad, but I didn't use POP3/IMAP in general during that period), it was still much more efficient than all competitors in terms of speed, memory usage and even download size (at some point it boasted to be the only browser that fit in a floppy disk, although of course not for long). I think the reason why it never became mainstream is that it was a paid product for a long time, while all other browsers were free. It eventually became free, but by then, competitors were too entrenched. I also dislike Whatsapp but depending on country, it might be a necessary evil. In Spain for example, not having Whatsapp practically means forgoing any socialization with non-nerds. It's so ingrained in daily life that being without it is almost unthinkable for most people. Anyway, the current Opera doesn't have almost anything in common with the original one. Different engine, company, team, vision and even continent (owned by a Chinese company), only the brand and a thin sliver of identity remains. (The sad thing is that I use it, because I still find it to be the least bad option for my needs...).

pharmakom 3y ago

isn't this a failing of the operating systems more than anything? like you can have multiple windows side by side, so what's the benefit of panes?

nologic01 3y ago

> The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Yep. That is exactly how I think about it as well. The browser and the IDE are effectively the same metaphor of a "super-app", just different security assumptions about where the information resides, how much it can be trusted and what can be done with it, how active the user input etc. In systems such as Firefox OS or ChromeOs the boundaries dissolve further. Thinking about open source desktops and their application ecosystems, instead of countless independent efforts that waste precious talent in incompatible replication there could be some sort of architecture where lower level apps (editors, file/tab/bookmark/tag managers, shells, webview or spreadsheet renderers etc) could be recombined in various ways in the browser/IDE (or run as standalone apps).

dietr1ch 3y ago

I actually want a windowing system that provides the tree tab bar instead. I feel the paradigm of having windows around have been stuck for 40yrs and that the only major mainstream innovation is just manually tiling windows. KDE has allowed grouping windows as tabs, but that never really took off. There's a vast amount of tiling WMs, but none of them are truly popular, and I also don't want to open a terminal, or worse, emacs, to deal with wifi/bluetooth/thumbdrives just to showoff how unnecessarily awkward some things get to be when you don't run some mainstream desktop.

DonHopkins 3y ago

How about taking another step back, and having a browser that functions as a scriptable user-customizable editable window manager like HyperCard? Run the web browser directly on the hardware, and implement the desktop window manager with that, in a way that the whole system is a scriptable integrated development environment. Then it's easy to implement tabbed windows, pie menus, and user-editable HyperCard-like interfaces. Here's a big step in the right direction of supporting pie menus on the desktop: Simon Schneegans's "Kando" project aims to implement cross-platform pie menus on the desktop. Simon implemented the beautiful "Pie Fly" Gnome shell extension and WYSIWYG pie menu editor, so I am really looking forward to what he does with other desktop interfaces! Introducing: Kando: https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2 https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2 https://github.com/kando-menu/kando https://github.com/kando-menu/kando >Kando will be a pie menu for the desktop. It will be highly customizable and will allow you to create your own menus and actions. For instance, you can use it to control your music player, to open your favorite websites or to simulate shortcuts. It will be available for Windows, Linux and maybe macOS. Fly-Pie: https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie >Fly-Pie is an extension for GNOME Shell which lets you open marking menus via keyboard shortcuts. And — to the best of my knowledge — it is the first GNOME Shell extension with achievements! >You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. It features a continuous learning curve which lets you gradually lift-off from a grumpie menu rookie to a snappie menu pielot. (You got it? Like pilot, but with a ). Once you opened a marking menu, you can seamlessly transition between three alternative selection modes: >Point-and-Click: Select items by clicking on them or anywhere in the corresponding wedges. >Marking-Mode: Select items by drawing gestures. To do this, click anywhere and drag your mouse. Pausing or making a turn selects the currently dragged item. >Turbo-Mode: You can also "draw" gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift, or Alt without having to press your mouse button! This is especially useful when you opened the menu with a shortcut involving such a modifier. Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk I've written about reinventing scriptable HyperCard-like window managers with pie menus and tabbed windows before: SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)): https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-goodnews-99f411e58ce4 https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649 >At Sun we experimented with implementing an X11 window manager in NeWS. We didn't have transparency at the time (1992), but we did support shaped windows! >The NeWS window manager supported cool stuff (for both X11 and NeWS windows!) like rooms, virtual scrolling desktops, tabbed windows, pie menus, was easily extensible and deeply customisable in PostScript, and ran locally in the window server so it could respond instantly to input events, lock the input queue and provide feedback and manipulate windows immediately without causing any context switches or dealing with asynchronous locking, unlocking and event handling. You'd never lose a keystroke or click when switching between applications, for example. [...] And here's how I think you should design a programmable "window manager" these days -- but it would be much more than just a window manager! It would be great for integrating legacy desktop and mobile applications into VR, for example! >aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery >Don asks Peter Korn: Hey I would love to bounce an idea off of you! I didn't realize how much work you've done in accessibility. >There is a window manager for the Mac called Slate, that is extensible in JavaScript -- it makes a hidden WebView and uses its JS interpreter by extending it with some interfaces to the app to do window management, using the Mac Accessibility API. >So I wanted to make pie menus for it, and thought of a good approach: make the hidden WebView not so hidden, but in the topmost layer of windows, covering all the screens, with a transparent background, that shows the desktop through anywhere you don't draw html. >Then just make pie menus with JavaScript, which I've done. Works like a charm! >THEN the next step I would like to do is this: >aQuery -- like jQuery, but for selecting, querying and manipulating Mac app user interfaces via the Accessibility framework and protocols. >So you can write jQuery-like selectors that search for and select Accessibility objects, and then it provides a convenient high level API for doing all kinds of stuff with them. So you can write higher level plugin widgets with aQuery that use HTML with jQuery, or even other types of user interfaces like voice recognition/synthesis, video tracking, augmented reality, web services, etc! >For example, I want to click on a window and it will dynamically configure jQuery Pie Menus with the commands in the menu of a live Mac app. Or make a hypercard-like user interface builder that lets people drag buttons or commands out of Mac apps into their own stacks, and make special purpose simplified guis for controlling and integrating Mac apps. >Does that sound crazy? I think it just might work! Implement the aQuery "selector engine" and heavy lifting in Objective C so that it runs really fast, and presents a nice high level useful interface to JavaScript. [...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919 >>Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us? >Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [lots of opinions omitted, see link above...] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690 >>Simula: A VR window manager for Linux [...] >Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot. >That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented. >Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar. >VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR. >The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open-ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces. >For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces. >Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen-scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX. >Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061 >Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...] >Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source. >Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818 >Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins... >It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python: https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly >Morgan Dixon's work with Prefab is brilliant. >I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.

niutech 3y ago

Try Otter Browser, which has an MDI interface, or my Split Browser (https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser https://github.com/niutech/splitbrowser)