[HN Gopher] Vivaldi 3.6 Introduces Two-Level Tab Stacks
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Vivaldi 3.6 Introduces Two-Level Tab Stacks
Author : philonoist
Score : 99 points
Date : 2021-01-28 11:13 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (vivaldi.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vivaldi.com)
| enriquto wrote:
| Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be merged into a
| single interface. The difference between them is just
| quantitative.
| currysausage wrote:
| Reminds me of this Firefox concept:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20090801232011/informationarchite...
| rakoo wrote:
| I feel like there's some paradigm we haven't reached yet. As
| the parent said, bookmarks and history are just 2 different
| views of the same underlying data and tabs provide an
| isolation of the context
|
| If we go back to the root of what the web is, we have a graph
| where nodes are documents and edges are a user clicking on a
| link at a given time, and the user wants to keep a few of the
| documents in the current context. So not only is there's a
| graph, which is not easy to represent and navigate, but the
| edges depend on time. Maybe some VR thing can help us see
| something new here
| generalizations wrote:
| We could generalize further and say that's what the entire
| window manager of an OS represents. Though, there's a
| difference between 'currently loaded' and just the address,
| and for less-than-high-end computers, that difference can
| mean a lot.
|
| That graph also contains a lot of noise - e.g. documents
| that aren't needed. I wonder if VR would help, by letting
| us see more, or if that better paradigm could also be
| implemented on 2D screens.
|
| There's already various graph visualization tools. But the
| tricky part would be wrapping that up into something useful
| - like a tree graph vs. tree style tabs. And if this would
| be more than 1-dimensional, like TST, then it would likely
| have to be a full page.
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| If that were true then Firefox's autocomplete in the address
| bar would be all I needed, but in fact I regularly use the
| different Awesome Bar shortcuts to search either currently open
| tabs (%) or bookmarks (*). In fact the lack of this feature is
| one of the things I don't like about Chrome.
| lmkg wrote:
| I believe this as well. That's the reason why I have a triple-
| digit number tabs open, and haven't bookmarked a site in twenty
| years. I much prefer having only a single interface to manage,
| which for me is tabs. I suspect many others with a similar tab-
| count are the same.
| talesfromearth wrote:
| I want to give other browsers a try, especially Vivaldi with its
| many settings to fiddle. But Firefox's multi-account containers
| add-on is a godsend since I have to switch between multiple
| accounts for work.
| D13Fd wrote:
| I committed to switching to Vivaldi back in 2019 or so. I
| installed it on all of my machines (including Mac and PC). But
| I found it to be unstable and prone to crashes and weird
| issues, even though the features were nice. I eventually gave
| up in frustration and switched to Firefox, which I've found to
| be rock solid by comparison.
|
| I personally am not planning to give Vivaldi another shot any
| time soon after that mess.
| eirki wrote:
| Alternate anectdata: I switched to Vivaldi a year or two ago
| and have had no problems with crashes.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| So this is basically Firefox' Tree Style Tabs but less powerful
| and embedded in a slower UI?
|
| The one and only reason I stopped using Vivaldi every time I
| tried it is the performance. But it becomes more and more obvious
| the developers simply have different priorities.
| drcongo wrote:
| I have to keep a Chrome-like browser around just for things
| like MS Teams that supposedly won't run in anything else, I
| have Vivaldi and Brave. I hate Brave for the crypto nonsense it
| shoves in my face among other things, but Vivaldi is so
| unbelievably slow that I'm forced to use Brave. It boggles my
| mind that anyone would release something that slow and then
| never work on that problem
| generalizations wrote:
| I wish, but it isn't. There was a request a few years ago for
| tree style tabs to be implemented in Vivaldi, but I think the
| dev didn't like the conflict with their own tab layout
| implementation.
|
| Seems to me there's a subset of power users on Firefox just
| waiting for any other browser to implement tree style tabs.
| hellojason wrote:
| I've been using 2 hidden features in Chrome and Edge called Tab
| Groups and Minimize Tab Groups, which let you assign a bunch of
| tabs to a group and minimize them down to a size the length of
| text that you named that group. Color coding too. Game changer.
|
| You can enable them in the chrome://flags and edge://flags.
| rakoo wrote:
| Color coding comes for free with containers in Firefox. I agree
| it makes things much easier.
| jjp wrote:
| Is there a way to persist the name, color across sessions. I'd
| love to be able to open all the bookmarks in a folder and then
| have them assigned to the same group/color. Then that way I can
| recreate one of a handful of different multi-tab environments
| at the start of each session.
| chabad360 wrote:
| Chrome has that too, but last I checked, they do not persist if
| you close the browser. Is edge any different?
| nilsandrey wrote:
| In Edge it does persist for me. Seems to doesn't persists
| between updates.
| nilsandrey wrote:
| I'm using it too, it's great. Also you may check the auto-
| create flag, allowing new tabs belonging to the source page's
| group.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Colored tabs are such an underrated feature. I loved them on
| OS/2.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I think a lot of tech companies would benefit from having a
| team that does nothing but install and run old software and
| operating systems to mine them for good features that have
| been forgotten.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is called bookmarks, I really don't get the tabpocalypse.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store
| bookmarks but also being good at finding them again.
|
| In contrast a hierarchical tab structure can act both as the
| stuff I'm currently working on as well as a way to store all
| things I find interesting in named groups. If you didn't
| manually tag all your bookmarks, ideally with a consistent
| naming scheme, finding certain sites again can be quite a task.
| But I know what tab group a certain website that I last used 2
| years ago and can't remember the name/url of has to be in. It's
| basically the web version of a file manager. Why would I spend
| time to organise bookmarks in some folder structure if the
| structure already exists in the tab bar, always up to date?
| asiando wrote:
| > No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only
| store bookmarks but also being good at finding them again.
|
| And tabs solve this problem how? In most browsers they aren't
| even searchable.
|
| The only advantage over a folder of bookmarks is that you can
| close one with a shortcuts, whereas bookmarks require several
| clicks.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Because tabs get lost when browser crashes and don't allow
| for searching.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| You are wrong on both claims. Firefox usually still
| preserves the session despite crashes, and even if it
| doesn't you can still restore it again via "recently closed
| windows". Although I only had to do that once, after a
| certain bug-riddled Windows 10 update. I have at least 300
| tabs opened constantly in two Firefox windows, and I never
| lost a session.
|
| And Firefox automatically searches all tabs in addition to
| bookmarks whenever you type in the address bar, and lets
| you jump to that tab directly.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Try to do that in incognito mode after a crash.
|
| 300 tabs! I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Try to do that in incognito mode after a crash.
|
| That argument makes no sense. Both bookmarks as well as
| persistent tabs are not something you'd use in incognito
| mode. Also, if you use incognito mode for anything that
| should survive a crash you're probably using it wrong.
| Firefox and Chrome let you use separate profiles for a
| reason.
|
| > 300 tabs! I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
|
| No need to be condescending. Especially not considering a
| few years ago I also thought it's crazy. Truth is, it's
| simply how bookmarks should have been designed from the
| start. If you disagree that doesn't bother me, but your
| point about browser crashes is still not accurate.
| ksec wrote:
| Whenever we have a discussions on Browser and topic of too many
| Tabs comes up, there are always a small portion of HN user
| _suggest_ to me and those who uses lots of tabs are using the
| browser _Wrong_ , _ADHD_ or having _mental_ problem.
|
| And should seek changing workflow or treatment.
|
| I currently have a relatively small number of Tabs opened, 150. I
| guess to those who only have a few tabs open at max think of us
| as crazy or alien.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| Does anyone know if anything similar exists for firefox? I
| remember trying some such addons a while ago but they were all
| extremely laggy.
| Lopiolis wrote:
| Personally, I've switched over to Sidebery from Tree Style Tabs
| (which I used for years). TST was just too buggy for my liking.
| Ennea wrote:
| I'm curious: what bugs did you run into? I've started using
| TST about a week ago and have not encountered any bugs
| whatsoever.
| Lopiolis wrote:
| Primarily tabs losing their position, not maintaining their
| hierarchy, weird behaviour around moving tabs around,
| crashing and freezing. Also all-around bad performance.
| Maybe it's improved since I last used it a year ago, but it
| was so infuriatingly buggy for such a long time that I'm
| just not willing to give them another chance. Especially
| when Sidebery just works (99% of the time) and it's more
| performant than TST ever was.
| eitland wrote:
| Yep, this exact thing existed I think, - in addition to Tree
| Style Tabs that have already been mentioned.
| notamy wrote:
| Sidebery (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery) is great, but is
| currently not on the Mozilla addons site due to issues with
| review (https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues/336).
| bombledmonk wrote:
| Firefox-csshacks [1] will let you do multi-level tabs in
| Firefox. I've been using it to give me 3 rows of tabs since
| Firefox broke Tabmix Plus. It's not as slick as an addon, but
| it shouldn't be a problem for anyone who lurks here. Clone a
| repo into your firefox profile directory and copy and paste a
| few lines of config to enable that feature. This is the sole
| feature that has kept me on the Firefox side of things.
|
| [1] https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
| rjzzleep wrote:
| On the other hand I keep trying to use Vivaldi but the UI is
| just slow. At least in Linux it is.
| idoubtit wrote:
| Tree Style Tabs has more features and is arguably better. In
| the year following the core changes in Firefox (Chrome
| extensions, threaded tabs) I had many bugs (high cpu load,
| broken tree, no restoring at startup...) but I haven't seen a
| bug in the past year. Configuration was not easy though, and It
| don't know if it still requires fidgeting with Firefox's files
| in order to remove the default tab bar.
| epage wrote:
| There is the more powerful version, Tree Style Tabs. Been using
| it for years and can't switch browsers because of it :).
|
| I've seen people talk about Sideberry but I've never tried it.
| pityJuke wrote:
| I've personally found Sideberry a more performant and less
| buggy version of TST as of late.
| quietbritishjim wrote:
| Tree Style Tab [1] is a generalisation of this to arbitrary
| levels of nesting. It also goes down the side of the browser
| window, which is a far better use of space. I'd say it's the
| number 1 reason I (still) use Firefox.
|
| [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-
| ta...
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| I tried it and it was incredibly fiddly, the number of
| preferences bordering on ridiculous. I switched to Tree Tabs
| and so far liking it.
| h_anna_h wrote:
| I used it before but I am not a huge fan of it, I do not
| remember the exact reason however so I might try it again. So
| far I have been using tab manager plus but it does not let
| you group tabs together (unless if you create new windows). I
| miss the old firefox panorama.
| quercusa wrote:
| It used to be buggy but I've been using it now for months
| and haven't had any problems.
| unicornporn wrote:
| So, honest question... Why would one chose Vivaldi over Firefox
| (with Tree Style Tab)?
| remram wrote:
| Speed I guess? I have trouble putting your question in the
| context of this thread.
| generalizations wrote:
| Context, to me, seems to be that firefox + tree style tabs is
| a better implementation of what vivaldi is showing here.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I wrote a Firefox extension for exactly this almost 20 years ago
| back in their XUL iteration of extensions. Everything old is new
| again I guess. Brings back memories.
| BugWatch wrote:
| Crazy Browser, IE browser shell I used 20 years ago, had this
| same capability (actually, "more powerful", since it was not
| limited to two).
|
| If I were them, frankly I'd be ashamed a bit (or a lot) of
| bragging about it in 2020.... but that's just me, I guess.
|
| (Nowdays [more like many a year], a Firefox user with even
| heavier TreeStyleTab addiction. Now, if only Mozilla would
| finally get its session API in order...)
| onychomys wrote:
| The real solution Vivaldi offers to the tabpocalypse has been
| here for ages: tabs on the side instead of on top! We all have
| widescreen monitors now, so losing 50 or 100 pixels on the
| horizontal plane isn't really a big problem. And the tabs then
| become scrollable downwards, while still keeping their
| readability. It took me a couple of days to get used to them over
| on the sidebar, but I could never go back.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I don't need the tab text on screen all the time, so while
| sometimes I'll pull up a tab sidebar I spend the vast majority
| of my time with a line of favicons and it doesn't make a
| significant difference where you put that line.
| divbzero wrote:
| The real solution to tabpocalypse is closing those browser
| tabs!
|
| I periodically bookmark my open tabs to a dated folder and
| close all for sanity. Bookmarks search via address bar will
| find any previous tabs that I still need to access.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I went for "Snooze Tabs":
| https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/
|
| You can set a date&time it will open again. It's perfect. I
| can better split private and business stuff, regular pages I
| re-visit and so on.
| patwolf wrote:
| I've been trying out the side tabs for a week now and cannot
| get used to it. So many sites I use have left hand menus, e.g.
| JIRA, AWS, that is seems like cognitive overload to see both
| menus butted up against each other.
|
| With top tabs there's at least the URL bar to provide some
| spatial separation between the two.
| toyg wrote:
| Just push it to the right then...? If it's doable, that is.
| That's where I keep my system taskbar.
| onychomys wrote:
| Yeah, I do mine on the right, and keep the browser on my
| right-hand monitor, so the list of tabs is way at one side
| of my view. It's worked really well for me.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| Exactly what I am doing. Tabs on the right on the right-
| hand monitor on Mac (which has window controls on the
| left). They never get in the way, basically I only see
| them when I am going to use them.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Yeah, in Firefox I've been really happy with Tree-Style
| Tabs on the right hand side.
| duhi88 wrote:
| I like the concept of the tab sidebar, but I can't get over
| having tabs in a different location. Even though I'm fully
| aware that I have more horizontal screen relestate than
| vertical, I never remember to use the sidebar.
|
| I've wanted to use tab groups for a while, but it never stuck
| because of the UI. I'm hoping this helps, and I love that they
| offer a sidebar layout, too.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| Tabs on the side is the real reason I am using Vivaldi as my
| primary browser. Tab stacks are useful, too, although I typically
| only use them when doing research of some kind.
|
| Just installed the new version with two-level tab stacks, seems
| pretty cool so far, but not yet sure how useful they will be in
| day-to-day browsing.
| Tomis02 wrote:
| Does anyone else remember how, in old Opera, tabs could overflow
| into multiple lines? Good days.
| mlajtos wrote:
| If you are interested in tab stacks or tiling, check out
| https://github.com/mlajtos/mosaic
| namero999 wrote:
| Opera has, since a while, the concept of workspace. A vertical
| icon bar is created at the edge of the screen, which basically
| acts as if there were multiple windows where to group tabs by
| topic. For instance, personal, work, media, research, topic x, y,
| z. The only improvement I see would be to optionally isolate the
| workspace from one another (so as to have different sessions on
| the same websites).
| Tesl wrote:
| I use Opera for this feature alone, makes a huge difference!
| wejick wrote:
| They have it since before Blink migration, I still remember
| when they announced this feature. The implementation a bit
| different because back then screen resolution is not as good as
| today, now we can easily afford literally 2 tab rows.
| namero999 wrote:
| I like the fact that it's on the side, with widescreen
| monitors I prefer to sacrifice 30px of lateral space. They
| also integrate the most common instant messengers in there,
| which means less open tabs. Since last release, Spotify is
| docked too.
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| forgive my ignorance, but why are these browsers based on
| chromium only? cant they build on firefox codebase just like
| palemoon and basilisk, waterfox, seamonkey, iceweasel?
|
| if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum
| staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it
| because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?
| epage wrote:
| They'd basically have to fork Firefox. There isn't a clear
| distinction between the engine and the browser. They had an
| embedding API at one point but dropped it because the design
| made it hard to evolve both.
|
| This is on top of people wanting quick market share which
| requires compatibility with the "big player" :(
| 2Gkashmiri wrote:
| uh,, arent these big players usually just reskinned chromiums
| only? whats giving them an advantage in terms of market
| share?
| nicoburns wrote:
| The point is that reskinning Firefox is pretty difficult
| because there's no stable API between the "skin" and
| underlying engine. Firefox used to have an option for
| embedding Gecko, but it's no longer maintained.
| lmkg wrote:
| Vivaldi had a blog post recently that touched on this
| tangentially.
|
| https://vivaldi.com/blog/vivaldi-browser-vs-google-chrome/
|
| > At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and
| the most widely used - that was important to us. Moreover,
| Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if
| we wanted web pages to not break, we'd have to fork Chromium.
|
| I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before
| the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the
| time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time
| unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet.
| If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision
| might be different.
| mdre wrote:
| I asked this once, and people told me it had something to do
| with firefox being a PITA to compile, among other things
| acct776 wrote:
| "'Oh, Firefox bad' thing"?
|
| You mean the fact that their security is atrocious in
| comparison?
| dsissitka wrote:
| Mirror:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210128111931/https://vivaldi.c...
| Hamuko wrote:
| As someone with like 150+ tabs open in Firefox, I should probably
| be happy about this, but I'm not. Feels like they're encouraging
| my sick obsession with tabs when I should in fact be put on
| rehab.
| Zancarius wrote:
| As someone with currently 3500 tabs open and regularly hits
| 6000, I can only say: Amateur!
|
| (Kidding. I just never close anything until I get annoyed
| because I like to use them as active working memory for a
| period of about a month or longer.)
| rafaelvasco wrote:
| Been using Workona on Edge. Helps a lot.
| saint_angels wrote:
| Does adding more visible tabs solves the problem of having too
| many tabs? If not, what is it for?
| podiki wrote:
| Talking about tabs can only remind me of how bad I am (was??) at
| hoarding them [0]. Years and years worth. All the best
| organization systems in the world can't save you from clicking
| more and more. It was at least a little terrifying whenever I
| close Firefox and it says I'm closing 5 windows with 768 tabs
| (which it will restore, but I worry)...
|
| [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/88adya/death-by-1000-tabs-
| co...
| generalizations wrote:
| Usually restores. I've pulled similar stunts, and once in about
| every 20-100 restores it'll just fail. FYI.
| philsnow wrote:
| I periodically (or when I'm about to upgrade either) grab all
| the tabs from chrome/firefox and save them out to files /
| org-mode, with things like this https://gist.github.com/phils
| now/780b131608878d93e9a8ad37935...
| fn1 wrote:
| Why not close them? YAGNI
| okareaman wrote:
| I downloaded 3.6 because I read it has a very customizable
| interface. I wanted to add a feature, only to find out it already
| has it. Example; when I am browsing Twitter I want the bookmarks
| bar across the top to only have my Twitter folders. I can do this
| in Vivaldi by right clicking on my Twitter folder and selecting
| "Set As Bookmark Bar Folder." Nice.
| aloer wrote:
| I am one of those that keeps everything in tabs (currently 856
| open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook)
|
| And tabs are imho the perfect abstraction. This is misguided
| effort.
|
| The issue is with the way multiple browser windows are managed.
| When I have many tabs I must have a way to manage many windows as
| well. Visually!
|
| Whether these can and should be improved on a browser level I
| can't say.
|
| MacOS is already very very good at this and much better than
| anything else
|
| I extensively use app expose and spaces to visually and spatially
| find what I need and structure my environment by projects and
| topics. I have everything I need exactly where I left it,
| together with all other applications and information that was
| related to it
|
| Adding more management features should not be the responsibility
| of the browser. That's why I've never been a fan of any of the
| popular tab management extensions or browser features
| AbraKdabra wrote:
| > currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook
|
| bruh
| devcriollo wrote:
| why do you have so many tabs open? if i need to see something
| then i save it to bookmarks or session buddy. How long will it
| take you to see the content of that amount of tabs if you are
| ever going to do it?
| aloer wrote:
| But why do you save it in bookmarks? With tabs it's right
| there where I left it. Same scroll state, same visual
| content. Why go through the hassle of bookmarking if tabs are
| already built in and work well?
|
| With bookmarks you lose so much important context. Our minds
| just don't work well on lists of links
|
| As I said it's important the OS works the same way. I always
| have on the left most space my utility window for example
| with messengers and mail tabs open
|
| I always have localhost for development for each project on
| the left most tab followed by the most common docs and
| tickets I need throughout the project. And then over time I
| build up tabs to the right. And naturally the ones in the far
| right are the latest ones so when I come back to the project
| that often helps recalling what was done last
|
| And if it becomes too much and the tabs are still relevant
| then I just extract the middle part between localhost+docs on
| the one side and the latest research on the right and out it
| in its own window in the background
|
| So essentially I use all the dimensions there are:
|
| - within the tabs there is an order
|
| - within the space there is an order (left half, right half
| on 34" wide screen)
|
| - in depth there is an order (windows all the way to the back
| are the oldest and will be culled from time to time)
|
| - and then there is the spaces themselves which are mainly
| for different projects
| [deleted]
| leephillips wrote:
| "The solution to too many tabs is here - a second Tab Bar."
|
| Why stop at two?
|
| If you think that this is the feature that you have been waiting
| for, maybe consider the possibility that browser tabs are not the
| ideal way to store and organize information.
| leetcrew wrote:
| there is a tab tree extension for firefox that is kinda
| popular. I like the concept (often I want to follow a bunch of
| links out of the same page without losing my place), but I
| found the sidebar implementation clunky.
| wejick wrote:
| I beg to differ, tabs itself is information. Even though it's
| just "ephemeral", it's something ripe for any additional
| management tools. With all the tab chaos and context switching
| needs, this will be really helpful.
| leephillips wrote:
| Most of your tabs are probably things that you intend to read
| later, or want to keep around to refer to, or something like
| that. Each one takes up a big chunk of RAM, and either a few
| or a lot of CPU cycles, depending on your browser and what's
| running on the page. Each one takes up some screen real
| estate and makes it harder to navigate among the tabs that
| you're actively using. If your browser crashes you may lose
| some tabs and the information that they represent. You can't
| use this information easily if you switch to another browser.
|
| If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file
| system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any
| software, or write your own, to manage this information. But
| how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well,
| just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new
| front page story about another system to do just that. I
| wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the
| kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.
| drcongo wrote:
| This is the new blades on razors. Pretty soon we'll have 5 tab
| bars and a lubrication strip.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'd cool it on that analogy until you see 3. I bet it won't
| happen. (Arbitrary nesting needs a better UI)
| sieste wrote:
| "The solution to too many tabs is here - MORE TABS!"
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Main link currently down... also discussed on The Verge:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/28/22253198/vivaldi-web-brow...
| notretarded wrote:
| I remember this as a Firefox plugin back in the early 2000's. Why
| is this news?
| 1f60c wrote:
| Because Firefox != Vivaldi
| fn1 wrote:
| I never understood how people not close (or bookmark) tabs. When
| I'm heavily working i have 20-30 tabs open. But after the work is
| done, i'll close what I don't need and bookmark the rest.
|
| Then again I also tend not to have more than 5 mails in my inbox.
| tzuyu wrote:
| That has to be the best feature of vivaldi. Default browser for
| two years.
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(page generated 2021-01-28 23:02 UTC)