[HN Gopher] Show HN: Rethinking Tabs in Firefox
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: Rethinking Tabs in Firefox
Author : Sujeto
Score : 109 points
Date : 2022-11-15 13:09 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (madprops.github.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (madprops.github.io)
| warinukraine wrote:
| Tree Style Tabs. Changed my life.
| orliesaurus wrote:
| I love that you are rethinking tabs, I definitely see more people
| coming up with alternatives to this problem, eventually something
| will emerge as the new standard.
|
| Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about the current
| implementation of tabs for the regular user, but when you are on
| 100-150 tabs then you know the tabs solution doesn't scale
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| >there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs
| for the regular user
|
| Horizontal tabs are ridiculously bad given standard screen
| dimensions.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| A couple initial thoughts as a Sidebery user that keeps ~100 tabs
| open:
|
| 1. The whole point of vertical tabs is that horizontal browser
| space is "cheap." Why not keep the tab list visible? Having it be
| a dropdown adds an unnecessary step.
|
| 2. Horizontal (Sidebery style) pinned tabs that just show the
| site icon are much cleaner. I have a row (8-12 tabs depending on
| how wide I drag the tab bar)of frequently used sites pinned at
| the top of my tab list.
|
| 3. It doesn't look like you have right-click move to window
| functionality, which is critical for my workflow. If you add it,
| be sure to make it work with the Titler extension so you can work
| with window names.
|
| I'm glad you didn't put energy into tab trees - I think they are
| a waste of space. I have a window for each general category of
| tabs.
| malnourish wrote:
| I migrated from Sidebery to Tab Stash [0]. I found the user
| experience to be a bit more streamlined; I don't find myself
| missing the tree-style structure, but the stashes it provides
| are a good replacement.
|
| [0]: https://github.com/josh-berry/tab-stash
| SpaghettiCthulu wrote:
| I have >1000 tabs open and probably many that I haven't looked
| at in >6 months now (most are discarded using Auto Tab
| Discard). I This many tabs causes every tab management
| extension I've tried to be unusably slow. Even the Firefox
| multi account containers popup usually takes around 2 full
| seconds to load, presumably because it's counting the number of
| tabs for each container (a feature I would happily disable if
| possible) via a horrendously slow API.
| Cshelton wrote:
| Try multiple windows. I use Tree Style Tabs extension, and
| have around 1,700 tabs open across three windows. Yes, it can
| be slow.. sometimes.. but for the most part.. everything is
| pretty smooth still!
|
| Yes, it's crazy.. but this is essentially my bookmark system.
| I take backups of the "session" so if something did happen, I
| can recover all of them. And every few years, I quickly go
| through them and start afresh. Bookmark what might still be
| relevant, and discard the rest. It works for me
| disruptthelaw wrote:
| Tab suspender is your friend
| weaksauce wrote:
| I wonder if my extension would work faster for you. I built
| it to be quick and simple so i can find a tab visually across
| many windows. basic features: click on a link to go to the
| tab, groups the tabs by windows, shows the favicon next to
| it, shows the tabs that are making noise, and allows you to
| close the tab via middle mouse button. cmd(or ctrl on
| pc)-shift-e opens it up in a tab. I'd be curious if you do
| try it to see how fast it is.
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog.
| ..
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
|
| https://www.github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
| RHSeeger wrote:
| > horizontal browser space is "cheap."
|
| I keep my browser window ~ 1/2 my screen width. If it grew, it
| would overlap other windows I am using.
| pessimizer wrote:
| That sounds like you're saying that for people who don't do
| that, horizontal browser space is _very_ cheap and can be
| reduced by half.
| woojoo666 wrote:
| > Tabs are orded by last visit date.
|
| > Your freshest tabs are always at the top.
|
| I think I'd hate this. Every time you switch tabs, the order
| would change. This ruins the spatial organization I have in my
| mind. When doing research and opening tons of tabs, I have a
| general idea of where each tab is, letting me jump between pages
| quickly, even faster than using tab search.
|
| There's a reason why when you zoom out to see all your windows on
| Windows (using win+tab key), Mac OSX (using mission control), or
| Linux, the order of the windows generally stays the same.
| rpwilcox wrote:
| This is very cool. Two things I wish: * can it be a sidebar,
| instead or in addition to this popup? Then it could be up all the
| time, or how wide I want * I wish it did tabs across windows -
| this only finds tabs in the current window, but I have multiple
| windows of multiple tabs open on my machine. (So of course I
| can't find anything, yes...)
|
| But this is very neat and exciting!!
| elischleifer wrote:
| not sure what I am looking at here.
| moffkalast wrote:
| You've gotta be kidding me, yet another system for grouping
| things that makes navigation take twice as many clicks and mouse
| moves.
|
| I really don't understand what's wrong with you people, first you
| came for the taskbars, now for our tabs. Will you never stop
| until everything's completely collapsed and hidden several clicks
| away? WHY?!? I can't believe this stupid trend that's forcing its
| way into all parts of UI these days. Yes, let's make everything
| useless because D E S I G N.
| divan wrote:
| Why people still buying the concept of tabs?
|
| Tabs make sense for document viewers. Web browsers are not
| hypertext documents viewers anymore. They are full-fledged
| virtual machines for apps (only those that can be written in JS
| and use typesetting engine as a UI platform - which is nuts, but
| okay).
|
| The point is, web apps, like normal apps, require proper window
| manager. Why the hell I should not be able to switch to app when
| popup alert is shown in another app? Why I can't put two apps
| side by side inside this VM? Why can't I switch between web apps
| opened in browser in a similar way as in KDE, Windows or MacOS
| (Stage Manager type switching would be great).
|
| There so much space for experimentation here. But no, we keep
| pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in
| tabs.
| Nullabillity wrote:
| Nobody's preventing you from popping out tabs into separate
| windows. In fact, for a while KWin allowed you to tab any
| windows.. sadly that feature seems to have been lost somewhere
| around the Plasma 4 -> Plasma 5 transition...
| morsch wrote:
| App vs document is a false dichotomy. I don't know about your
| usage, but I tend to have a small handful of open tabs that are
| on the app end of the spectrum (chat, email, audio/video,
| that's about it), a magnitude more tabs that are on the
| document end (documentation, blog posts, news articles) and the
| same magnitude that are in-between (shopping, project
| management stuff, hacker news).
|
| The app tabs are the ones that profit the least from the
| hypertext paradigm; other tabs tend to spawn new sub tabs which
| are more or less short lived. I use tree style tabs to manage
| that.
|
| It's easy enough to use my actual window manager to manage the
| app style tabs, by putting them in their own window. But for
| the most part, this hasn't been necessary. The Firefox popout
| video player has been more useful than I would have thought,
| though.
| divan wrote:
| > App vs document is a false dichotomy.
|
| Could you support this with arguments?
| morsch wrote:
| There are websites that are very much like an app, like
| Gmail or Slack. 20 years ago, most people used standalone
| applications for these.
|
| Other websites are not app-like at all: Wikipedia articles,
| blogs like substack, API documentation; these are
| documents. And they still make up a significant portion of
| my browsing -- so yes, my browser is still a hypertext
| viewer. YMMV, like I said, maybe you mostly have apps open;
| I don't.
|
| And many websites are in-between: project management tools
| like JIRA and shopping websites like Amazon are document-
| based (tickets, product pages), but offer actions on top of
| those documents, like an app would have. They also have
| external links like, you know, hypertext.
|
| And the latter is true for even the app-iest of apps, which
| makes it useful to have them in the browser (for the same
| reason, some desktop apps end up embedding browsers). And
| conversely, even the document websites have actions that
| are more or less central to the experience, e.g. Wikipedia
| has editing, blogs have comments.
|
| So there isn't a clear line between app and document,
| that's a false dichotomy.
| divan wrote:
| Thank you, but I have to disagree here.
|
| Yes, it's true that _sometimes_ the line between document
| and app is blurred. But I would argue it 's blurred
| exactly because we use things designed for document to
| make apps.
|
| Take "links" for example. In web apps, practically every
| action item is a "link" - either a "<a href=" or <button
| " that opens another link. But it's not because these
| things are links - it's because there is no other option
| to do it without links. If all is you have is a hammer,
| everything becomes a nail. In a normal app (made in a UI
| framework designed for that, and not in hypertext
| engine), instead of links you would use events or
| function calls or some similar concept.
|
| Likewise, "external" links. You can open external links
| from normal apps. You don't need to make app a HTML page
| for that.
|
| So it's not a false dichotomy. If you have ever used
| desktop/tablet/mobile apps that have blog/comments
| functionality, you unlikely to think about those screens
| and functionality "as a document". No, it's just another
| screen of the app, that renders pixels and handles user
| input. You only think about it as a document when
| everything you have is "HTML documents".
| morsch wrote:
| I totally think that slate star codex blog post I read is
| a document, even though there is an app-like comment
| function I don't use. And I totally think Wikipedia is a
| bunch of documents, even though there is an app-like edit
| functionality that I rarely access. And I totally think
| Google is a service for (among other things) looking up
| recipes, which I think are documents, even though they
| sometimes have an app-like button to re-calculate serving
| size.
|
| On the flipside, I think Whatsapp Web is an app and not a
| document, even though I know that it's implemented in
| what was traditionally a document framework.
| nocman wrote:
| > Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore.
|
| I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.
|
| > we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to
| be shown in tabs.
|
| Browsers do _both_ web apps and documents (and honestly, blur
| the lines between them all of the time).
|
| Also, I for one wholeheartedly _want_ tabs for both of those
| use cases (and I don 't think I am by any means alone in
| wanting that).
| divan wrote:
| > I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.
|
| There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last
| couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps
| using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not
| wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering
| HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day
| to day are not "documents", they are apps.
|
| Here are tabs I have open at the moment: -
| HN (board app, not a document) - Soma.fm DefCon radion
| (music streaming app, not a document) - Facebook
| (social network app, not a document) - Eurosport
| Player (video player, not a document) - research paper
| (PDF, document, but not HTML) - another forum (board
| app, not a document) - Canva (graphics editing app,
| not a document) - Miro (whiteboard app, not a
| document)
|
| So you're disagreeing that those apps are apps and not the
| documents?
| gaws wrote:
| > another forum
|
| What's the forum?
| divan wrote:
| Some Flarum forum software I run, why?
| stevewatson301 wrote:
| There are niche operating systems (it was posted on HN but I
| can't remember the name now) that consider application windows
| and tabs as being one and equal; you can even have one window
| that has tabs from different applications.
| divan wrote:
| I mean "tabs" is just one of many forms of hanlding multiple
| windows. They make a lot of sense for document viewers and
| alike. My claim is that browsers are so much bloa..^Wbigger
| that that. There is no reason to limit web apps to that
| document viewers type of window handling.
| hbn wrote:
| You can do most of this stuff by popping the tabs into separate
| windows.
|
| Is it really a better solution to have a window manager in an
| app that's already in an OS with its own window manager?
|
| Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a
| lot of IDEs have done that for years. But I don't know about a
| full-on window manager.
| Izkata wrote:
| > Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore,
| a lot of IDEs have done that for years.
|
| Firefox had this as an addon before Quantum. I used it often,
| even with a tiling window manager, because the tab tiles
| didn't have their own toolbars/etc - it saved a lot of space.
| Its modern replacement isn't very useful, it just arranges
| multiple windows into tiles, each with their own
| toolbars/etc.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Every feature of the OS will eventually be re-implemented in
| the browser. It will be slower and less convenient to use.
| pmontra wrote:
| Probably separate windows for the tabs deserving to be
| promoted to apps and a tiling window manager would achieve
| what GP wants. We have comments here on HN praising i3.
|
| https://i3wm.org/
|
| However the always open tabs I work with most of the time
| work better in full screen mode on my 15" laptop. Sentry,
| TeamCity, YouTrack, Bitbucket, AWS (more than one tab),
| Google Cloud Console, the web apps I'm working on. Little
| space for tiling.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| Well, in the early 00's when Firefox was starting to become a
| thing and it introduced the usage of tabs, it really mattered
| whether something was a local app or something that's primarily
| the contents of another server fetched and displayed/processed
| on your computer. It was useful to think of the browser be the
| "Internet remote window".
|
| Now, since basically everything is an Internet app, perhaps the
| distinction between local and remote isn't too important
| anymore for most people.
| alias_neo wrote:
| As a backend software engineer, most long-running terminals
| on my machine are are often remote connections, and I don't
| tend to use tabs there (and like to tile them with tmux).
|
| Sounds like the the browser could behave much the same way
| for me.
|
| TL;DR: I agree.
| Semaphor wrote:
| The vast majority of my tabs are actually documents.
| toastal wrote:
| Yep. It's definitely both.
| icedchai wrote:
| What's stopping you from opening separate browser windows?
|
| (I remember browsers before tabs. It was awful.)
| divan wrote:
| Nothing. That wasn't my question.
| icedchai wrote:
| Why does the browser need a window manager then? You can
| run each "app" in its own window.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I'm wondering if smart history might be the end solution for
| tabs:
|
| - Collapse history into start leaf and end nodes. The end nodes
| are your tabs/state. The steps to navigate to a node are less
| important for history. I don't need to know the url of the Google
| page I used to get to fact X, what's important is the fact. (The
| Google page won't stay the same anyways)
|
| - Opening a new tab starts a new history tree, with a possible
| parent tree.
|
| Let me know if anyone wants to discuss this idea.
| andrewla wrote:
| I've increasingly found that my use of tabs is closely related to
| the fact that back/forward navigation is unworkable in many
| cases.
|
| The most typical case is that I am looking at a list of things,
| and I want to click on a result but if I hit back, I don't want
| to wait an eternity for the page to reload -- if it even does;
| more often than not something breaks in the back navigation and
| the results I was looking at are not longer available or the
| context has switched.
|
| Basically I want cost-free backwards and forwards navigation, and
| tabs are how you do that. But essentially I want that hidden from
| me. I would much prefer if under the covers hitting back didn't
| navigate you away from a page, it just keeps the page you are on
| in a virtual tab in case you want to go back to it. Similarly,
| clicking a link shouldn't navigate away from the page you're on,
| but just put it in a virtual tab.
| basch wrote:
| That is exactly how I have always used tabs. It lets you
| preload all your pages you want, and quickly inspect and
| dismiss them. On a google search, I might middle click 7 of the
| 10 links, and then immediately close 4 of them when they arent
| what I wanted.
|
| On hckrnews.com I can first put my brain in "which of these is
| interesting to me mode", and then once they are all open,
| switch to reading.
|
| I would prefer that a page like facebook, twitter, reddit only
| ever go back to the top when the refresh button is pressed. But
| since none of them behave as a web page should, it forces you
| to open everything in a new tab to preserve the page state.
| Middle click, close tab is the replacement for link click,
| back. And as others have said, browser back and forth is
| destructive. As you navigate you lose information. The link is
| still in history, but you have lost the relationship between
| what order things were navigated to and from, and which page
| led you to them.
|
| There is a market for somebody to come around and completely
| redesign the browser chrome paradigm, replacing back/forth,
| history, tabs, and bookmarks with something more seamless that
| preserves state, intent, relationship, and time.
|
| There should be multiple ways to open something. Super
| temporary, temporary, less temporary. There should be multiple
| ways to close something, remove from history, keep in history,
| minimize.
| shrx wrote:
| The reloading of the google/bing/whatever search results page
| on backwards navigation is infuriating. I've been looking for
| options to turn it off in firefox but no luck.
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I open all links in a new tab. Back and forward are annoying
| even if they did work.
| the_gipsy wrote:
| A browser/extension that saves a snapshot when you click a
| link. When you click back, the snapshot is magically[1]
| restored.
|
| Hold my beer, I'm gonna try to "snapshot" with iframes or
| something.
|
| [1] I don't know if it's even possible, since this goes beyond
| HTML, DOM, and memory; nowadays there might be a lot IO "open",
| e.g. webcams, sound, websockets, etc.
| savolai wrote:
| Been thinking about this too
|
| What would be the drawback to just show the page as it was
| without reloading? Too much memory consumed when retaining too
| much state from previous pages?
| airstrike wrote:
| What if the page told you only what to change in the current
| page as you navigated to links in the same domain? Like
| browsing through git commits.
|
| A pain to implement but kind of an interesting experiment
| jonchang wrote:
| Firefox and other browsers use an optimization called the
| bfcache (back-forward cache) that is intended to do exactly
| that. However, lots of web developers write their pages in a
| way that defeats the bfcache optimization. Moreover, bloated
| large page sizes (including JS objects) will make the bfcache
| more likely to evict entries.
|
| Compare using back/forward on a boring HTML site like Hacker
| News, and to something like say, the Google Search results
| page. What's funny is that Google itself has a page on how to
| optimize your website for bfcache implementations, with some
| Chromium-specific tweaks, but the left hand doesn't talk to the
| right at Google, so we're stuck with lots of full page
| refreshes on Google properties.
|
| https://web.dev/bfcache/
| stemlord wrote:
| >lots of web developers write their pages in a way that
| defeats the bfcache optimization
|
| Yes, webapps, with their own internalized breadcrumb system.
| curun1r wrote:
| Just adding on...
|
| Browsers model back/forward linearly whereas the mental model I
| want is more tree-like. If I end up going back a few times and
| then click a link in the same tab, I lose all ability to go
| forward again. So a lot of my tabs are the result of using
| "duplicate tab" so I can take actions that destroy the
| back/forwards state without losing the original.
|
| If we're going to have a browser implement instant, reliable
| back/forward, I'd also like to see some simple way of choosing
| from all forward actions I've previously taken. Because my
| browsing is so often non-linear.
| andrewla wrote:
| Strongly agree -- this is where tabs as artifacts becomes
| useful. I don't necessarily feel that we need to eliminate
| tabs in favor of "virtual" tabs but that we can contain the
| "tab explosion" problem. One thing I do frequently is do a
| middle-click-on-back-button to navigate backwards but keep
| the current tab open; the enhancement here would be that this
| would be a cost-free and non-context-losing operation.
| soupfordummies wrote:
| I've never thought of this but you're spot on.
|
| I'd say that's about 50% of my usage and the other 50% is
| hoarding every HN story to later bookmark and never revisit :P
| airstrike wrote:
| Wouldn't it be easier to just upvote or favorite stories and
| then check your list of upvoted / favorites?
| dsr_ wrote:
| That's a solution that works on HN. Browser tabs in the
| background work on the whole web.
| [deleted]
| joshspankit wrote:
| Came here to say something aligned with that:
|
| I typically keep one window for each "navigation group".
|
| Answering a single question, understanding a specific topic,
| finding the product I'm going to purchase (then purchasing it).
| That way I once I'm done I can close the whole window without
| looking at the contents of the other tabs (and risking (more)
| rabbit holes)
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| An advantage of the tab bar on top is that it's always visible. I
| can glance quickly and find if that tab I'm looking for is to the
| left or to the right and use ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab. Or maybe
| there's just a few tabs, so I can jump around with alt+1, alt+2,
| etc.
|
| Having a menu that needs to be deployed makes the whole process
| slower -> I first have to open the menu, _and then_ I can start
| deciding which way I want to switch.
|
| It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you use the browser for
| hours a day it is, because there's this additional cognitive
| cycle of having to request information to be displayed first --
| rather than have it always present.
|
| Finally, the tabs on the bar on the top have virtually infinite
| surface and are super easy to click. You see, a 100x100px button
| has a defined surface where you have to point and click. The
| smaller the surface, the harder it is to click. But a button at
| the border of the screen has one dimension infinite: I don't have
| to aim accurately on the Y axis, I can move my mouse beyond the
| top of the screen and will still hit the tab.
| stemlord wrote:
| I like always visible top tabs but personally ctrl+tab has
| always been bs. Hitting it 10 times then ctrl+shift+tab once
| more because I miscalculated has never been faster than using
| the mouse
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Enable the Most Recently Used ordering. That way you won't
| have to press Ctrl+Tab more than once or twice, because most
| of the time you don't need to tabs at the back of the stack.
| Imagine if the Alt+Tab switcher worked like most browsers--it
| would be pretty useless.
|
| This is not an option in Chrome, for some unexplicable reason
| (Chrome has marked it as wontfix)., and it's the main reason
| I use Firefox. It's possible to hack around it with
| extensions and opening the Chrome extensions settings XML
| file and manually setting the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab
| shortcuts, but it's fragile and annoying to set up, and has
| some odd behaviours in certain circumstances.
| stevage wrote:
| I have always hated the orders you describe. Means you need
| to mentally keep track of how long since you used each tab,
| and there is no deterministic way of getting to a specific
| tab other than slowly tabbing until you randomly arrive
| there.
| ivarru wrote:
| It's a bit weird at first, but think the Chrome extension
| "Most Recent Used Tab Stack" works ok. It keeps the tabs
| sorted by moving the current tab to the left. That being
| said, I also prefer Firefox -- mainly because of its
| container extensions.
| wwarek wrote:
| Switching from Chrome the most annoying thing in FF was lack
| of tab switching with Ctrl+<number>. Fortunately there are
| extensions providing that. Works great for 5-6 tabs,
| especially when it gets into muscle memory (not sure if
| that's correct term in this case but what I mean is that
| brain "knows" that ctrl+1 will be X and Ctrl+3 will be Y and
| can switch between tabs without thinking of their actual
| numbers)
| m6w6 wrote:
| It's ALT+N
| klyrs wrote:
| And if you're a tab-hoarder, alt+1
| ctrl+shift+tab
|
| Goes to the rightmost tab
| zck wrote:
| alt-9 goes to the rightmost tab, as well.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'll be damned. Best thing about being wrong on the
| internet, somebody's always happy to help!
| kkfx wrote:
| Personally I've used TabCenter Redux and now Tab Center Reborn,
| tabs on side allow to see titles no matter how many tabs we
| have open, easy scrolling and grouping while not waste vertical
| screen space, witch is rare on modern 19:9+ screens (while we
| do not need much space on sides, since most screens are big
| enough)...
| trap_goes_hot wrote:
| For those that liked the Classic windows taskbar that has been
| removed in W11, I'd like to plug RetroBar -
| https://github.com/dremin/RetroBar
| TehShrike wrote:
| Maybe it's just for the benefit of screenshots, but it looks like
| I'd have to click or right-click to use the cool functionality -
| I love the idea, but I don't want to touch the mouse to interact
| with my browser tabs.
|
| I need keyboard accessibility to be at 100%
| drawfloat wrote:
| I honestly have to clean up once I hit 5 or 6 tabs, so genuine
| question to those who keep many open - once you are having to
| search through a list, what's the advantage over just using
| history/bookmarks?
| cies wrote:
| IIRC there's a plugin for Chrome that kills tabs once you open
| one more than the set limit. This to help rehabilitating tab-
| hoarders.
| Macha wrote:
| State: From scrolling through large articles to web app that
| dump you back at the home screen when re-entering
|
| Finding content: History search just isn't as good as being
| able to preview a page to see if it's the right one.
|
| To-do list: There's some action remaining until the tab is
| dismissed, or research items to compare
| jwond wrote:
| History is a much larger list than open tabs.
|
| For bookmarks, I don't want to have to manage a bunch of
| temporary bookmarks. With a tab I can just close it and move
| on, but if I had created a bookmark now I have to both close
| the tab and delete the bookmark.
| navhc wrote:
| I guess I'm missing the point because it seems to me like almost
| all of this can be accomplished in native Firefox. If I want to
| search my open tabs I just type a % in the address bar with my
| query and it searches my tabs. If I want to search for a bookmark
| (which doesn't seem meaningfully different from a star) I use a *
| instead of %. ^ is for history. For recently visited tabs I can
| ctrl+tab. Clean is basically close all except pinned but it also
| includes the tab playing audio.
| dandanua wrote:
| For the navigation of recent history there is the Tab Session
| Manager extension.
| madacol wrote:
| Oh I wished searching tabs (%) weren't broken by Mozilla's
| extension "Firefox Multi-account Containers"
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Too much is broken by that extension, I uninstalled it.
| quesera wrote:
| I use Multi-Account Containers all the time, in every
| profile, on every machine.
|
| So I wonder: what features do you use, which are broken by
| this extension, and which I am therefore missing out on?
|
| (Aside from GP's searching tabs with %, which I didn't know
| was broken but does have a workaround in Sidebery)
| krono wrote:
| Neat project, people have wildly differing browser workflows and
| it's interesting to get a glimpse of how the brain of this
| extension's author deals with the concept.
|
| This might benefit from using Firefox's Sidebar API:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/Add-ons/Web...
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| ?? Firefox has an API for a Sidebar and yet they make it such a
| pain to actually switch to one.
|
| I hear so many complaints about Mozilla for politics, etc, but
| my real complaint is that they haven't added a Vertical tabs
| option (which really should be the default on all browsers).
| mdtrooper wrote:
| I remember a old addon for firefox that did as a "tiling window
| manager" of opened tabs...it was cool and useful, but now this
| addon does not run with the new addon api system.
| barbazoo wrote:
| I've been using "Tree Style Tab" in combination with [1] to hide
| the old tabs and it's such a joy. I can group tabs by "topic"
| which is helpful when I'm working on multiple things in parallel
| which is pretty much always.
|
| [1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-
| fo...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Treestyle tab is a must imo. You can even tweak some firefox
| config files to allow it to minimize to the icon width, then
| maximize when you mouse over.
| stewbrew wrote:
| I personally like the onetab extension very much. The best tab is
| no tab. The very notion of "tab management" is wrong. I just wish
| there were a way to synchronize the page via Firefox sync.
| jrmann100 wrote:
| +1 for https://www.one-tab.com/
|
| To provide a bit more context: OneTab closes (all, or specific)
| tabs and dumps the URLs in a stack, grouped by window or
| category to be quickly popped open/combed through at your
| leisure.
|
| It's great for the times I get sidetracked and need to hold
| onto thirty pages of docs without keeping them open at all
| times; I use it as a sort of tab purgatory which I will
| probably not revisit (I have 1025 tabs saved at the moment ).
| shahar2k wrote:
| I'm actually surprised to have never seen a tab bar that works
| like the osX dock zoom effect, it seems like it'd be a great way
| to glance through a large amount of tab windows quickly
| deafpolygon wrote:
| People with over 100 tabs open.. how? Why?
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| I'm the RCA guy so I have a lot of research projects in my tabs
| :)
| dotancohen wrote:
| Research.
|
| If I'm researching something, I'll open more than 200 tabs.
| With Tree Style Tabs, each Google or Kagi search is a top-level
| tab, and each link I open from that gets opened in a sub tab.
| When I'm done, I'll store the useful tabs organized in an org-
| mode file - I have an Emacs script which grabs the currently-
| open tab URL and Title from Mozilla's sqlite database and adds
| them in org-mode link format to the current document (I can
| post it if anyone wants it). I can then close all that mess.
| fikama wrote:
| Sounds incredibly cool, to be honest I am a vim guy, but
| still is it your own script, is there any repo, can you share
| it? Also I was't aware that firefox stores open tabs in
| SQLite, can you point me what to type in Google to read more
| about it?
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| How?
|
| Sideberry for vertical tabs - Horizontal tabs make zero sense.
|
| Titler for window titles and then different windows (7-10) for
| general categories.
|
| The lame issues:
|
| Sidebery doesn't recognize the window titles so moving tabs
| between windows is a pain.
|
| The fact that vertical tabs are not the firefox default and
| that FF makes it so difficult to remove the horizontal tabs.
| jedberg wrote:
| Tabs are my "this is interesting I might read it later"
| function.
|
| For work, tabs are my way of not losing information someone
| sent during a meeting or something. I click the link in the
| meeting chat and then go back later. I use a tab manager to
| sort them by domain, so all the wiki pages end up together, all
| the quip docs, etc.
|
| Then every few months I go through all the tabs and either read
| them, bookmark them, or discard them.
| quanticle wrote:
| First, thanks for making this and putting it out into the world.
| As someone who always tends to end up with an unreasonable number
| of tabs, I'm always interested in more and better tab management
| options.
|
| That said, I'm wondering how this compares with TreeStyleTabs (1)
| for tab management.
|
| 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
| ta...
| cies wrote:
| I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is
| quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. Also, it uses
| some pop-ups that at times make it a bit cumbersome to use
| (still much better than FF without TST).
|
| Since browsers are a place where we do a lot of work, I think
| this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in
| browsers.
|
| Yet, as many have said before, browsers do not seem to target
| power users: I cannot even change FF's shortcuts without
| recompiling the beast!
| quanticle wrote:
| >Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of
| work to get it installed in FF.
|
| I didn't seem to have any issues getting the add-on installed
| in my Firefox. Yes, TST suffered from some instability when
| Firefox initially deprecated XUL and switched to the
| WebExtension model exclusively, but it seems to work fine
| now. It even picked up the theming changes in the latest
| update to Firefox seamlessly.
|
| >I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land
| upstream in browsers
|
| Edge comes close. It has the option to orient tabs
| vertically. However, it doesn't organize tabs in a
| hierarchical outline like TST does.
| cies wrote:
| > Edge comes close.
|
| Did not know that. Edge is basically MS branded Chrome,
| right?
| quanticle wrote:
| At this point, yes. At one point Edge had its own
| rendering engine, but MS chose to abandon it, and just
| use Blink instead.
| gnicholas wrote:
| There's also Orion, at least on Mac. It hasn't replaced my
| daily driver (Brave), but I've been using it as a
| 'container' of sorts for LinkedIn and have found it to be
| pretty good.
|
| Brave currently has vertical tabs as a flag-enable-able
| option, and if they add tree hierarchy, I probably won't
| switch. But if not, I'll likely move to Orion, which has
| been working well for me.
| RunSet wrote:
| > I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API
| and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF.
|
| The amount of nails FF has scattered in the road of moving
| the tab bar to the side is atrocious. At one point (in the
| halcyon days when the Firefox motto was "Your web, the way
| you like it.") tab placement was a user-configurable option
| in the preferences.
|
| Then they removed that option, saying "Users can reenable the
| option with an extension."
|
| Then they broke the extension for no good reason since, as
| you correctly note, with quite a bit of work is possible to
| install it.
|
| I wish Firefox would get back to providing a functional
| browser instead of being a platform to install crap like
| "Pocket", "Hello", "Colorways", and whatever has flown
| beneath my radar.
| j33zusjuice wrote:
| I'm with you on the functional browser. I switched to
| Chrome for work because of how it does tab groups natively.
| I manage around 300 on-prem hosts, and I manage K8s and
| shit in two clouds, all with a fairly low rate of
| automation.
|
| So I've got tabs open for managing VMWare, Foreman, two
| monitoring systems, two cloud providers, gsuite, and about
| eight spreadsheets at all times because that's how we track
| assets and do IPAM. That's like 20+ tabs that I bounce
| between all day long. I'm not going to use bookmarks to
| navigate this, I want a max of two clicks to get to the
| right tab. And so Chrome's tab groups solve my problem
| perfectly.
|
| Also, in my defense, since automating things and deploying
| an ITAM tool is kinda my job, I started here less than a
| year ago. My predecessors were let go when a new manager
| came in and found out that the Linux env was ridiculously
| insecure, and then they refused to make the env comply with
| some of the most basic security guidelines (like security
| patching more than twice a year). Then my counterpart left
| for a better job after three months, so I've been left
| alone to support an infrastructure that's falling down
| around itself while also trying to secure and enhance it
| (i.e. rebuild everything).
| ako wrote:
| The right solution really depends on your use case. I'm
| perfectly happy with how tabs work, hardly every have more than
| 10 open.
|
| Tabs are for pages i'm going to use in the next 30 minutes (or
| that have state i want to keep), bookmarks for things i need a
| few times per month, and pocket/readlist for stuff i might want
| to read in the future.
|
| No need to waste screen real-estate on anything i'm not going
| to use soon. And there's always history if i need to find
| something I've closed but didn't save to my bookmarks or
| pocket.
| sozforex wrote:
| You might be interested in Sideberry (1) - it has tab groups as
| an additional instrument of organizing tabs, and automatically
| creates daily snapshots of hierarchy of tabs.
|
| 1: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
| quanticle wrote:
| Thanks for the link. I've installed Sidebery, and it's
| definitely more customizable and flexible than TreeStyleTabs.
| wussboy wrote:
| I love Sidebery, but only recently discovered the tab
| grouping feature, and I love it.
|
| I also us multi-account containers and would love to find a
| way to make the little ribbon of color on the edge more
| prominent.
| quesera wrote:
| > would love to find a way to make the little ribbon of
| color on the edge more prominent
|
| I use a bit of userChrome.css for this. I think this is the
| important part: .contextual-identity-marker
| { width: 40px !important; left: 0;
| opacity: 0.6; }
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| I pin all of my tabs that use a container and so the color
| strip goes across almost all of the icon and it is quite
| visible.
| focusedone wrote:
| Hadn't heard of that before but it looks amazing. Thanks for
| posting the link!
| johnchristopher wrote:
| Looks cool ^^.
|
| But while we are on that subject: I don't want to manage all that
| mess (my history, my bookmarks, my read-it-later extensions, my
| stars, etc.).
|
| Plug me an IA, a cortana, a Jarvis or a duck and let me ask it in
| plain language what I am trying to remember.
|
| After some beeping noises it comes back with some answers, built
| from the stream of data that passed through my browser. And I
| mean the whole stream: video, subtitles of those videos, audio
| track, images in webpages, full text, etc.
|
| Not just a list of URL I visited.
|
| Wait, that's just Google@home, right ? Should I just live in
| Google search then ?
|
| Ah, I don't know. /rant
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(page generated 2022-11-15 23:02 UTC)