7 ms·

I'm pretty certain the Chrome PMs actively decided long ago that people who use lots of tabs make up too small of a population to support in-browser with specia

by wcarss 11y ago

I'm pretty certain the Chrome PMs actively decided long ago that people who use lots of tabs make up too small of a population to support in-browser with special features. The featureset has worsened with time, moving from correct rendering of more than one horizontal page of tabs (but infinitely compressing them to the point that you cannot click on any specific one) to an obvious graphical bug (rendering tab handles behind the + button and then off the right edge of the screen), to today: no graphics glitch, it is just impossible to tell you have more than a certain number of tabs. They're there, just without any indication at all. I know those things because I frequently have >200 tabs open, and have done so for many years. But I'm not surprised that it would be considered too niche to fix, because the reactions of most people (among a fairly tech-savvy sample of people looking at my web browser) go to the point of making comments about their surprise at how many tabs are open on my screen. It just isn't very common behaviour. During the 'graphical glitch' era, I was an intern on the WebKit team at Google and asked about the bug, and some people knowingly chuckled and said, "yeah, that isn't something that's going to be fixed soon." I imagine it was also a tough bug. Anyway, it would still be cool to support better tab features.

fridek 11y ago
One of my all-time favorite quotes on browsers, from http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/08/holistic-webgl.html http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/08/holistic-webgl.html "Have you actually seen how people use web browsers? Honestly it's kind of horrifying. It's not unusual for people to have 100+ tabs open across several different browser windows in a session that's been running continuously since sometime in the late 90s." I was one of those 1k+ tabs people until recently, when I just admitted I'm not going back to read any of this stuff. Considering Chrome team has finite resources I'm glad they spend it on use cases resolving around actually browsing things over just keeping them unread forever.
- drb311 11y ago
  I've been trying to shock the monkey for 4 hours now and still haven't won the $20.
mccr8 11y ago
The cynical interpretation is that discouraging people from opening many tabs means having less tabs open which means the browser performs better. This is particularly true in Chrome, which tries to use a process-per-tab, something you can't really do with 200 tabs.
mscrivo 11y ago
I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the muscle memory of knowing where each tab is? If so, how does that work when you move to a device that has a different resolution?
- cozuya 11y ago
  Tabaholics should really take a look at the onetab chrome extension to temporarily bookmark/store pages.
- bgaluszka 11y ago
  Personally I use tabs as sort of temporary bookmarks and I don't use bookmarks at all. Right now I have 7 windows open and every one of them has tens of tabs open. Windows help me organize them by topic (e.g. I have window where I lookup stuff related to biking, another window is for learning rust, and another is work related stuff etc). I use FF with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- Klathmon 11y ago
  Well for me i generally have about 10 tabs "pinned" that are always there, always in the same place, and always open. That is in my "general" window which i also browse reddit/hn and other sites on. http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using. Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows. Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap). It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day. I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.
MadcapJake 11y ago
Having that many tabs open is nuts. It makes the tab bar completely unusable. However, I too suffer from the same tabophilia. So I have a couple solutions, (a) a bookmark bar folder titled "to-do" where I just save anything that I haven't even skimmed over yet but want to and (b) Pocket for when I've read/skimmed and want to store the info for later use. With these two methods I frequently hover around ~20 tabs open and I usaully dump to either method when I cross the close-button threshold (tabophiliacs will know what I mean). Recently I've been trying to force myself to use Firefox to use their tab groups feature and I think I really like it especially for organizing tabs needed for projects. Makes it easy to just click the tab group button and select which project I'm working on and immediately have all the tabs I need.
- jamesrcole 11y ago
  > Having that many tabs open is nuts That's a completely emotional response. "It makes the tab bar completely unusable" -- maybe the problem is with the tab bar, not the user. What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? Perhaps if effort was put into it, we could come up with some good solutions. I would bet that there's a not-insignificant number of users who have heaps of tabs open.
  - lfowles 11y ago
    Yup, widescreen monitor, I moved my tabs over to the left side on Firefox and use a tree view extension. Tabs on top is definitely not for power (tab) users.
  - k__ 11y ago
    I have the feeling this multiple-tab-thing is similar to the desktop cluttering, back in the days. Temporary downloads, you don't need for long, but somehow you delete them only if the desktop is full.
  - strathmeyer 11y ago
    > What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? My browser bookmarks just fine. Why do I need all these pages currently loaded into memory? "problem exists between chair and keyboard"
derptacious 11y ago
I'm replying to your comment because it is on the top... But there is almost a majority of users in this thread using their browsers similarly - maybe we should get together and solve this. Maybe it will be a redesign of the difference between bookmarks and tabs as sort of "temporary bookmarks." I could see unused tabs getting popped off the stack into a bookmarks category which should automatically be selected by use of some simple search-engine based heuristic. One should be able to run their bookmarks through this categorizer to build consistent and limited categories.
kmicklas 11y ago
I for one don't use a huge number of tabs because of the poor browser support for it... I suspect a lot more users would use a lot more tabs if it were actually convenient to do so.
lewisl9029 11y ago
The conclusion they've drawn is rather naive because this is definitely a chicken-egg problem. They've completely disregarded the possibility that the lack of effective tab management is limiting most users to use only a tiny number of tabs. Tree Style Tabs for Firefox has been an integral part of my browsing experience ever since I discovered it: http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png I just wish some browser vendor would release an official vertical tabs solution that had a more seamless implementation of autohide/autoexpand (for non-maximized windows where horizontal space is at a premium).
- Nadya 11y ago
  I wish I knew of another way to enable this - but if you use the FireGestures addon there is a special menu for tab switching you can access no matter where in the window your mouse is. Hold right click and scroll your mouse wheel down (you have to tweak a setting to have scrolling up also bring up the menu). Your tabs will appear where your cursor is as a drop down list, sort of like a context menu. Combined with tab groups (ctrl+shift+e, or make another mouse gesture) and I can sort my tabs into categories and quickly switch between my tabs by either switching tab groups or using my mouse wheel, no matter where my cursor is. So much time saved from not having to go to the top/side of my browser to switch tabs. :) E: The setting is under "Advanced" -> "Wheel Gestures" and the action is "[Popup] List all tabs"
- idlewan 11y ago
  Opera 12.16 (the last Opera version) had both native support for vertical tab bar and toolbars (it already had it a decade ago) and a kind-of-okay "tab group" feature (groups of tabs could be collapsed so that they wouldn't take much space visually). Unfortunately, they started from stratch with Chromium-Opera, and even after more than 10 versions it still lacks most of the great features of Opera. Day to day, I use both Firefox with Tree Style Tab, and Chromium with Tabs Outliner. This isn't perfect: Firefox still takes a minute to load the session with 700+ tabs, and Tabs Outliner feels kind of a hack and isn't really integrated.

by wcarss 11y ago

fridek 11y ago

One of my all-time favorite quotes on browsers, from http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/08/holistic-webgl.html http://blog.tojicode.com/2013/08/holistic-webgl.html "Have you actually seen how people use web browsers? Honestly it's kind of horrifying. It's not unusual for people to have 100+ tabs open across several different browser windows in a session that's been running continuously since sometime in the late 90s." I was one of those 1k+ tabs people until recently, when I just admitted I'm not going back to read any of this stuff. Considering Chrome team has finite resources I'm glad they spend it on use cases resolving around actually browsing things over just keeping them unread forever.

drb311 11y ago
I've been trying to shock the monkey for 4 hours now and still haven't won the $20.

mccr8 11y ago

The cynical interpretation is that discouraging people from opening many tabs means having less tabs open which means the browser performs better. This is particularly true in Chrome, which tries to use a process-per-tab, something you can't really do with 200 tabs.

mscrivo 11y ago

I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the muscle memory of knowing where each tab is? If so, how does that work when you move to a device that has a different resolution?

cozuya 11y ago
Tabaholics should really take a look at the onetab chrome extension to temporarily bookmark/store pages.
bgaluszka 11y ago
Personally I use tabs as sort of temporary bookmarks and I don't use bookmarks at all. Right now I have 7 windows open and every one of them has tens of tabs open. Windows help me organize them by topic (e.g. I have window where I lookup stuff related to biking, another window is for learning rust, and another is work related stuff etc). I use FF with https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Klathmon 11y ago
Well for me i generally have about 10 tabs "pinned" that are always there, always in the same place, and always open. That is in my "general" window which i also browse reddit/hn and other sites on. http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png http://i.imgur.com/FBXmBqh.png Then i have a second window which i use for work. That generally has a few work-specific tabs (work email, time tracking, trello, etc...) which are always pinned, plus a few "general work" tabs which i'm using. Then i like to open a new window for each project i'm working on. So i've got one right now working on integrating node.js with our 80's language. That window has about 15 tabs from the node manual as well as the 80's language manual and some stuff about dlls in windows. Then i have a window for my personal project i'm currently working on. It has the github repo, travis.ci, coveralls, and sauce-labs pinned, as well as the handful of tabs that i'm currently using in that project (research, test tabs, various other crap). It totals to about 4 windows, and about 100-200 tabs total depending on how busy i am any given day. I don't bookmark or close them because i don't have to, and while some of the pinned tabs are important, many of them are just where i left off and aren't really bookmark-worthy.

MadcapJake 11y ago

Having that many tabs open is nuts. It makes the tab bar completely unusable. However, I too suffer from the same tabophilia. So I have a couple solutions, (a) a bookmark bar folder titled "to-do" where I just save anything that I haven't even skimmed over yet but want to and (b) Pocket for when I've read/skimmed and want to store the info for later use. With these two methods I frequently hover around ~20 tabs open and I usaully dump to either method when I cross the close-button threshold (tabophiliacs will know what I mean). Recently I've been trying to force myself to use Firefox to use their tab groups feature and I think I really like it especially for organizing tabs needed for projects. Makes it easy to just click the tab group button and select which project I'm working on and immediately have all the tabs I need.

jamesrcole 11y ago
> Having that many tabs open is nuts That's a completely emotional response. "It makes the tab bar completely unusable" -- maybe the problem is with the tab bar, not the user. What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? Perhaps if effort was put into it, we could come up with some good solutions. I would bet that there's a not-insignificant number of users who have heaps of tabs open.
- lfowles 11y ago
  Yup, widescreen monitor, I moved my tabs over to the left side on Firefox and use a tree view extension. Tabs on top is definitely not for power (tab) users.
- k__ 11y ago
  I have the feeling this multiple-tab-thing is similar to the desktop cluttering, back in the days. Temporary downloads, you don't need for long, but somehow you delete them only if the desktop is full.
- strathmeyer 11y ago
  > What if browsers were designed for the lots-of-tabs use case? My browser bookmarks just fine. Why do I need all these pages currently loaded into memory? "problem exists between chair and keyboard"

derptacious 11y ago

I'm replying to your comment because it is on the top... But there is almost a majority of users in this thread using their browsers similarly - maybe we should get together and solve this. Maybe it will be a redesign of the difference between bookmarks and tabs as sort of "temporary bookmarks." I could see unused tabs getting popped off the stack into a bookmarks category which should automatically be selected by use of some simple search-engine based heuristic. One should be able to run their bookmarks through this categorizer to build consistent and limited categories.

kmicklas 11y ago

I for one don't use a huge number of tabs because of the poor browser support for it... I suspect a lot more users would use a lot more tabs if it were actually convenient to do so.

lewisl9029 11y ago

The conclusion they've drawn is rather naive because this is definitely a chicken-egg problem. They've completely disregarded the possibility that the lack of effective tab management is limiting most users to use only a tiny number of tabs. Tree Style Tabs for Firefox has been an integral part of my browsing experience ever since I discovered it: http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png I just wish some browser vendor would release an official vertical tabs solution that had a more seamless implementation of autohide/autoexpand (for non-maximized windows where horizontal space is at a premium).

Nadya 11y ago
I wish I knew of another way to enable this - but if you use the FireGestures addon there is a special menu for tab switching you can access no matter where in the window your mouse is. Hold right click and scroll your mouse wheel down (you have to tweak a setting to have scrolling up also bring up the menu). Your tabs will appear where your cursor is as a drop down list, sort of like a context menu. Combined with tab groups (ctrl+shift+e, or make another mouse gesture) and I can sort my tabs into categories and quickly switch between my tabs by either switching tab groups or using my mouse wheel, no matter where my cursor is. So much time saved from not having to go to the top/side of my browser to switch tabs. :) E: The setting is under "Advanced" -> "Wheel Gestures" and the action is "[Popup] List all tabs"
idlewan 11y ago
Opera 12.16 (the last Opera version) had both native support for vertical tab bar and toolbars (it already had it a decade ago) and a kind-of-okay "tab group" feature (groups of tabs could be collapsed so that they wouldn't take much space visually). Unfortunately, they started from stratch with Chromium-Opera, and even after more than 10 versions it still lacks most of the great features of Opera. Day to day, I use both Firefox with Tree Style Tab, and Chromium with Tabs Outliner. This isn't perfect: Firefox still takes a minute to load the session with 700+ tabs, and Tabs Outliner feels kind of a hack and isn't really integrated.