Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open.
I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature.
Shameless plug.
I made the ContainerTabsSidebar firefox addon[0], which is inspired by the TST. It groups tabs based on firefox privacy containers, which means every container has an isolated cookie store. I'm a tab hoarder and developed it to work for such "use-case".
It's very similar to the groups presented, but displays tabs vertically.
Very cool. I use Container Tabs so I can be logged into multiple AWS accounts simultaneously and this will be cool because they're sort of contexts. I wish I could see whole-desktop contexts but I'll settle for this.
Is there any other restriction/benefit in containers? I use the 'first party isolate' config option, and never really need e.g. different accounts logged in to same site, so as far as I'm aware there's no point?
I recently switched from an unmaintained tabs sidebar to 'Sidebery' which is quite nice in an 'overriding UI like it's made by Adobe' sort of way, which has got me using trees, and even tried containers (since unlike previous one it supports changing them and shows a coloured dot for which a tab is in) but I don't think it's gaining me anything.
With the first party isolate, mechanisms such as oAuth would not work. So the containers are less restrictive, but still allow you to have two sites with the same cookie context.
I've been using first party isolation for quite a while on desktop and Android and the only websites I experienced issues with are the Atlassian login and the Trello GitHub powerup.
Everything else, including tons of single sign in/OAuth websites, work without any issue.
Yep, ditto Atlassian. There's a big thread of people complaining about it on their forums too.
Unfortunately of course it'll always be a minority, and won't affect whether even those people (have to) use Jira or whatever, so not really any incentive for Atlassian to fix it.
Thank you for this - just what I needed! Tree-style tabs always seemed like a bunch of tabs thrown together with no organization, but your extension gives it the context that the user explicitly defined in the form of containers. I use multi-account containers a lot and this extension is just the supplement that was needed. Plus, being able to switch between container-tab view, bookmarks, and history is just the right thing to have.
I like this because it organizes my tabs in the same way I do mentally... however it doesn't actually reorder my tabs. What I mean is, Ctrl+Tab surfing through my tabs doesn't iterate the list as it is displayed sequentially.
I am planning to add automatic tab sorting to the plugin. There's a github issue for this exact problem. I just didn't have time to implement this feature. ;)
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I see in your review comments that I'm supposed to be able to add custom container names in the options... but I'm not finding them. Do I have to add through CSS?
It's not. But please make an issue on github[0] and if there's enough demand I will think about implementing this :)
Contributions are also welcome, though the codebase currently needs a bit of a refactor.
Tabs are bookmarks that can keep their state. Normal bookmarks have only the URL, and any parameters that go in the URL, but discard the rest, like your position on the page, your navigation history, or what you are doing in a PWA.
Tabs don't discard data, bookmarks do. Sometimes you just want the landing page and a bookmark is fine, other times you want the extra data and a long-lived tab is needed.
Tabs and bookmarks still feel pretty different. To update a tab, you activate the tab and then click links as usual. To update a bookmark, you activate the bookmark, click links, delete the old bookmark, create a new bookmark, and drag the new bookmark to the old one's location in the bookmark list (unless I've missed a shortcut here). Tabs feel very dynamic and are useful as a list or queue of work-in-progress, and bookmarks feel very static and are useful as a permanent list of important resources.
I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as Chrome's profiles functionality. I tried it out for a week, but it's not quite as robust as Firefox container tabs.
I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs.
This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.
Here's the bug [1]; apparently someone made it so on purpose [2].
In related issues, I'd like switch to tab to be consistent so that ctrl-clicking on an awesomebar result always opens it in a new tab, instead of depending on whether it found a tab or not.
You need a space after the '%', which always confused and annoyed me. But TIL: the special character doesn't need to be a prefix! It only needs to be separated from other characters using a space. Makes much more sense now.
I just wanted to post the same thought- I want tabs, bookmarks and history to be connected to the context of the tasks I am doing- sometimes I am investigating a problem and open 20 tabs and I want my browser to record this (perhaps how long I stayed on the site) and present this info to me in an intelligent way.
I've though about this a lot and the big problems in the way of this are state and loading time. The state is a problem because keeping a tab open is the only way to preserve most of its state (scrolling, forms, etc.) and the loading time to cold-load a page makes bookmarks much less appealing for things that are related to what I'm currently doing. After those two issues are fixed, the rest is just UI.
I think Edge has some pretty neat UI for this kind of thing with whatever that button on the top left of the tab bar is called, but I haven't actually used it much since everything else about Edge is a hot mess.
If we could somehow dump the whole tab state to disk and restore it later, that would basically solve both of the above problems. But looking at the memory footprint of modern browsers, I doubt that's practical.
State is why we use tabs instead of history. A lot of this thread is about what to do with tabs once they are opened, not analyzing why they open the way they do.
Back is unreliable. The page might reload, dynamic pages like reddit will generate new results or reorder them. The safe thing to do is click all links in new tabs and then come back to the original link page. Right clicking the back and forth buttons hides a ton of relevant information thats not visible without a context menu, AND its broken into two context menus. I have to remember which button to right click.
Even on a google search, its easier to middle click all 10 results and then close 9 tabs once i dismiss them than it is to click back 10 times and try navigating between each step. And if i run into a site i like, now im in the sticky situation of wanting the current tab open, and the previous tab in history open. Which one do i want to inherit the navigation history? Thats part of the reason its easier to ignore history near completely (only using it for specific linear non branching navigation.) Its significantly less thinking, mouse movement, and task switching. Step 1 open all links, step 2 analyze links. Not a back and forth.
I open tabs to replace all history navigation. I keep tabs open as short term bookmarks until they can be closed or bookmarked.
Do you have a solution for automatic archival? I'd like to have every single page I've been to archived, with awesome search. I've so often wanted to find a page I remember to have read, but simply cannot find it anymore. The archive would be "my known subset of the internet", a checkbox that sadly is missing in Google.
In my case, I found that the whole concept of managing tabs just becomes moot at some point. The only extension I use to deal with the load of tabs I have open is funnily enough vimium.
When you press <shift-T> the omnibar opens and you can search your open tabs and immediately jump to them, all without leaving your keyboard. This is way quicker than manually going through your tab list and searching for the right one.
Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice.
If you have 2 tabs or 2000 tabs it doesn't matter, going to a tab it's always a sub-second operation.
It is kinda native, at least in firefox: CTRL+L opens the address bar and on there you can search between open tabs. In my opinion it just needs some small UI improvements because at the moment the visual indicators to differentiate between open tab, search, history item, favorite in the results are not clear enough and the results are (or appear) mixed.
I think the "problem" is not always that you know which tab you want and just want to open it. Sometimes the "problem" is getting an overview over all your open tabs, a tab searcher wouldn't help too much there.
I'm a vim loyalist, I use Surfingkeys for Firefox, but I have to say that for a lot of non-power users I understand the GUI aspect helps keep their mental model of what's happening on their machine. This problem can have many equally acceptable solutions depending on the user.
My personal experience was that neither Firefox’s pioneering alternative to what Chrome announces here (tab groups), nor tree style tab extension were convenient enough to use. With tab groups you obviously very quickly neglect trying to group newly created tabs and even if you, it’s not very helpful (except for sand boxing - that’s a nice thing to have). Tree style tabs were just a pain in the ass, it was constantly causing my tabs to jump around when I opened them, it seems like it was trying to reorder my tabs in the horizontal tab bar so that the ordering would mimic the tree leaves while the vertical tab bar was just useless to me, maybe simply because I could not get used this layout.
I ended up using stash tab extension, as I often have to concentrate on researching one specific thing and while I do that I don’t need any other unrelated tabs to be open, this allows me to retroactiavely group all opened tabs into different stacks and name each of them and then just stash them away like you’d do with git stash, they don’t take up any memory after that and I can return to the entire stash at some point by clicking a single button that will effectively do a git pop of the stash.
I just killed the horizontal tab bar after installing Tree Style Tabs (it's a quick trip to edit a profile CSS file and is quite well documented on the TST github page). The tree tabs are really all you need.
Tree tabs work just as well with 5 tabs as they do with 50 (or, heck, even 500). I use them as a mix of short-term bookmarks, active browsing contexts, trains of thoughts, etc. It has quite fundamentally changed the way I browse around the Internet, and I can simply never use Chrome or Safari the same way again.
I often similarly need to research some particular thing a bunch. With tree tabs, one parent tab contains the main context, and every time I open a new link in a new window it will appear as a child. In the end it's a big tree of tabs with one root tab, with the tree giving a nice hierarchical organization based around where the tabs came from. TST gives you the ability to group multiple tabs together ("stacking" them), and then you can rename the group and collapse it (or, for more permanence, bookmark the entire tree).
> I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think.
I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them
Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end
Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root
The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it
Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top
It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature
Is there a reason you can't already do this with windows (which are a visual grouping of tabs)?
You're right that cycling through tabs and making individual decisions on closing each one has a high cognitive load. Closing an entire window is much easier.
A while ago I realized this, and started to front-load that cognitive effort and make sure that the "root" of each "subject" gets opened in a new window (or at least detached early enough once I realized that I was branching off into a new subject).
An example of the root of a subject could be an item in an issue tracker, and that window could also contain tabs for code search windows, Google searches on that topic, Stack Overflow answers, etc. Once I'm done fixing the bug, I just close the entire window/subject/group, without thinking about each individual tab.
The front page of HN is also usually the root of a subject. I'll open tabs for articles and comment pages, and then close the whole window once I'm done with my break and want to go back to work. If there's something particularly interesting that I want to save for later, I'll detach that tab and close the rest.
For the C++/RAII people, this is kind of like making sure that every object has an owner, and that memory is freed when those objects go out of scope. This is a lot easier than manually doing a mark-and-sweep over all your tabs :)
That's a great point. On my end, I do all my tab management by maintaining separate desktops for different broad topics (school, work, personal). Then I'll have different windows (history seminar, security engineering). And then it just becomes a whole mess and I keep very rough "version control" through note-taking apps.
I used to compress dozens of tabs into a bookmark folder with a date and topic, but now I just have dozens of those folders collecting dust. I often end up in the same situation you do when I mass-close tabs, except I might have to actively open so many tabs to do so that it actually becomes a strain on my computer.
All that said, I'm fully aware this is mostly my fault for being a tab collector/hoarder.
Edit: right now, at the end of the semester when I don't have much school work content open, I still have six Chrome windows. Yesterday I culled about 20 arxiv PDFs I had slowly accumulated since last August (lol).
I am not sure if this will work for you, but you can move the tabs next to each other and click on a tab, press shift, then select another one and all tabs in between will be selected. Press Ctrl-W and it will close all of those tabs at once.
Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible.
It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.
As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a piece of software is the keyboard shortcuts it supports. More keyboard is usually better.
Another feature which I like is tab pinning. It's esp. useful if you're playing/running something in the background (YT music, Jupyter notebooks, etc.)
Finally, I tend to use "session buddy", which is another extension that saves the current state of tabs. I can save them and quit Chrome. Later, if I'm looking for a certain tab, I can just search for it in session buddy's saved sessions.
Session Buddy has been very helpful for me also! I can get dozens of tabs out of my face in seconds if I need to really focus on one or three things exclusively.
It's not super often that I go back through the tabs I store, but the peace of mind of knowing where they are is wonderful. I used to do this with text files (shudder).
Not sure what to tell you... If I remember correctly, the last time I restarted Firefox was to update it, around the 5th of May (I have version 76.0). Generally speaking I don't restart it (or the laptop) except for that.
No addons other than uBlock Origin, TST and LastPass.
For TST in Chrome I've been very happy with Tabs Outliner (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...).
As well as a great tree, you can mix live tabs/windows with frozen ones that don't consume RAM, and this is all reliably persisted across restarts.
Tabs Outliner is a separate window, since Chrome extensions can't add sidebars, so rather than using it as a tabbar replacement I tend to have multiple windows with less than 10 tabs, and open Tabs Outliner when I want a coherent overview (e.g. to quickly skim through my tab titles before closing them in bulk).
As a "tab collector" myself and after having tried some vertical tab implementations, I have been wondering why mainstream browsers choose to ignore this problem.
I wanted something which would let me quickly query open tabs, search my history and bookmarks and all without touching the mouse. So I released an extension which does exactly that[0] and here's a screenshot[1].
Surfing the web can me more intuitive. Chrome's upcoming tab grouping feature shifts the burden completely to the user and doesn't necessarily save the user any clicks.
It looks like the Chrome designers went for a quick win, letting the user nest tabs, so that they will no longer complain about the browser being unusable after 30 tabs or so. I think they're missing the job to be done.
Honestly, I don't think any of the available interfaces are ergonomic enough for a serious tab collector like me. But there's another application in which I also collect hundreds - sometimes thousands - of open pages: Emacs. And there are solutions there that help you manage the load just fine.
Here's the UI I'd love to have for my tabs:
1) All tabs are hidden by default.
2) A keyboard shortcut (or a UI button) brings up a list of tabs (tree-style, not flat) that I can do an incremental, fuzzy search on by immediately starting to type. The default selected tab is the one next to the current one, in the order of opening.
3) Another keyboard shortcut brings a keyboard-driven tab management interface, that looks like this (with apologies to mobile users):
MRL Name Age Domain Category Full URL
--- ---- --- ------ -------- ----------
Coming to Chrome: a new... 30m news.ycombinator.com HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175207
↳ Emacs: introduction to... 15m youtube.com Video https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k
Messenger 2d messenger.com IM https://messenger.com/t/zuck
static mesh editor bounds 1d google.com Search https://google.com/search?<lots of line noise>
↳ [HELP] Could someone... 1d reddit.com Reddit https://reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/<stuff>
↳ QJX2FGt.png 1d i.imgur.com Image https://i.imgur.com/QJX2FGt.png
< lots of other entries>
In that interface, I want to be able to sort and filter by any of the visible column, mark them directly or by a pattern-match on any of the columns, and then issue commands like: unload marked tabs, delete marked tabs, reparent tabs under a different one, show all marked in a new browser window (or transfer to an existing one), bookmark selected tabs, add/remove tabs from "permanent session", download marked tab(s), etc.
Or, in Emacs terms, 2) is the equivalent of "switching buffers" with any of the (many) incremental search completion plugins, and 3) is the equivalent of ibuffer (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k).
I'm tempted to start working on an extension like this.
I'm also a Tree style devotee. Besides the organizational super-powers I find it helpful on wide laptop screens where vertical space is at more off a premium than horizontal.
As a fully paid up member of the tab collectors club, I mourn the demise of Tab Mix Plus. Not found anything which beats it, although some of the tree-style tab solutions are not bad.
I used to use tree style tabs too but it is too slow and laggy. I've trying alternatives and settled on Sideberry as of now. It's way faster albeit a little buggy. Some major bugs have been fixed and I'm very satisfied. I would recommend trying it.
The idea is not bad, but I agree that it does not scale well. I try to keep all the tabs related to a specific task/project in a Firefox window and have multiple windows, one per taks/project.
However, it quickly becomes tedious to open the set of windows (with relative tabs) and software need for a certain task/project (shameless plug #1, see this previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823).
To at least avoid closing windows, but not to have my desktop cluttered, I minimize them (on a Mac), but then I find it difficult to reopen the exact window I might need. To mitigate this issue I (shameless plug #2) did a small app that shows a big cover so that it is easy to find the window when minimized. It still is under development, so lots of bugs and few features. If you want to give comments, its https://cver.vernizzis.it/ :-)
In old Firefox it was possible to have multiple rows and variable width tabs. So there was no horizontal overflow and tabs could have been wide enough so that title fit into each. I wonder if it's possible to get this back.
Design-wise, it's still a more sane layout than the single row scrolling on overflow. It's also the solution most other programs and GUI toolkits use, with browsers being the exception I can't explain.
There are lots of tree style tab fans in here, I am one of them. Hey, guys!
I am curious how you organize other things. Do you think in trees in other places (like using Dynalist or Workflowy for notes)? I think many more concepts are fundamentally hierarchical and should be exposed to the user as such (trees everywhere!). What do you think?
Yep, my todo lists are all trees. Even when I'm writing a document, I first put the table of contents as a tree and then fill in the different sections :)
I have one exception, though. Mind-mapping.
I will use mind mapping tools for todos and notes. But for real mind mapping I use full blown graphs.
Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.
Vivaldi browser supports it out of the box, and vertical is even the default iirc. It's thank to it I got used to vertical tabs and I cannot go back.
While it has the drawback of making tabs hoarding easier, just having some tabs open for documentation, GitHub, test pages, quickly brings me to a point where horizontal tabs' title are irrelevant and I have to guess tabs by their favicon.
On top of that, most screens are 16:9 and we're reading almost exclusively vertical websites and horizontal tabs take up vertical screen space.
Last time I tried Vivaldi, the vertical tabs were not 'tree style'. By that, I mean they were all listed directly underneath each other rather than indented to show from where they were open.
Do they indent like this? This is a really important aspect of tree style tabs because it adds another dimension of information. It also means that I can just minimise that tree of HN tabs down when I'm looking at something else.
It's my one complaint about Vivaldi's implementation, yep: you can "stack" tabs, but this creates an absurdly tiny target space to click between tabs, and there's no way to create tab trees instead. It would be lovely to be able to create them, because I often create trees of tabs when browsing sites like HN: I pop tabs open behind HN as I see interesting links, and then click down the tree to go through the sites themselves.
> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open.
Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much.
I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription.
Also I note that Google's web page breaks using the down-arrow key to scroll, so that's just another piece of reflexive shittiness Google are forcing on web users.
I noticed the broken down-arrow scrolling too, in both Chrome and Firefox. Shame on Google for this anti-accessibility. Up-arrow, page-up/down still work, which is strangely asymmetric.
My personal Tree Style Tab record is over 600 simultaneous tabs. It ran without a hitch and it was still easy to navigate. I would never use a browser without vertical tabs in trees.
I dislike tree style tabs because a typical website is built for consumption by users sitting in the middle in front of it. This is especially annoying when using a laptop and suddenly every website is off center to the way you sit/use keyboard and trackpad because of the tab sidebar.
Hiding the sidebar is no option either because
a) with most extensions the site would flicker because the tree is not an overlay but takes away real space from the viewport
b) and if it is an overlay, learning the spatial tab structure is much harder if its not visible at all times
It's interesting that the default Firefox behavior is to use tab overflow if too many are shown in the top tab bar. You need to scroll to get spatial understanding and this is the main reason I am not using Firefox.
Chrome OTOH will allow many more tabs to fit (with smaller icons/tab handles) and eventually cuts off the icons if it doesn't fit anymore. At the very least it gives you a better spatial overview of where you put which tab
full disclosure:
I have currently 37 open chrome windows with 550 tabs on a MacBook with 16gb RAM. This works extremely well because of the The Great Suspender extension.
I have not yet found any other way that helps with organizing tabs and is better than OS X spaces + separate windows + a fixed horizontal tab bar.
I have great spatial awareness over projects (OS X spaces), time (order of tabs) as well as content separation (chrome windows)
Apparently I am what the article calls a tab collector :)
Well you need to enable the option. If that fits you, it's pretty convenient. On Mobile tabs just get to accumulate and I don't have time/interest to close them all.
Firefox also has a drop-down at the end of the tab bar that lists all the tabs in the window. I used to use TST, but have fallen away as the native functionality (between the drop-down and the awesome bar) suffices.
That’s a great addon. To be honest this would work great in a piece of software my company creates. Our clients can add there own custom tabs, this would help greatly...
I switched to the FF extension “tree tab”. it’s more our less the same, but it has groups (like these chrome groups) you can select on the left side of the tree tab
I wasn’t aware of Sidebery, but it looks way better than TST. How is the performance? With TST I notice it doesn’t “hibernate” older tabs (only if you restart FF).
EDIT: Damn! I'm blown away by Sidebery. The amount of customization and native looks is awesome. There is only a slight problem when compared to TST: It does not preserve tab grouping when parent tab is closed.
There is another extension called Auto Tab Discard that integrates with TST. I'm going to check out Sidebery too though...TST is a little rough at times.
I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
i use it for frontend development (most users use chrome) and also chrome's deep intigration with my android phone (send tab, password manager, sync etc). i know it's a tradeoff for privacy but the whole google ecosystem works together so that's the call I'm willing to take
This seems to be a mixture of the "collections" feature from Firefox Mobile (Beta/Preview) and Firefox's container tabs, but without the security / isolation benefits.
From what I can tell, the main benefit seems to be in relation to identifying similar-looking tabs. It's unfortunate that they didn't bake in the same security and isolation benefits of Firefox's container tabs, or the "put aside and come back to it later" functionality that (old) Edge and Firefox Mobile's "collections" bring.
I'm also not sure how adding _more_ to the tabstrip will improve utility in Chrome, where tabs so quickly become impossible to manage because the strip doesn't scroll.
A bit tinfoil hat, but could it be an attempt to head off Firefox Containers which would be a threat to Google Cookie collection? That's certainly my main use case for containers, using Google Music without telling the rest of the web about my Google account.
This looks very useful, but it combines valuable profile management work with disabling various web features per the author's opinions. Sadly, disabling those features by default makes it significantly easier to fingerprint users using this script (which is precisely the opposite of its intentions).
So I forked it and set those features to be disable-if-requested rather than disable-by-default, so that people who just want to manage separate profiles have an option that doesn't make them easier to fingerprint:
Forking to switch a bunch of command line arguments around seems excessive to me. You can simply write a wrapper script that passes the arguments in the way you want them to be passed.
Enabling those options does nothing to improve fingerprinting resistance, it's a completely bogus argument.
Disabling them however, in combination with the recommended extensions that are in the README plus custom user agent handling, does bring tangible benefits.
Finally, fingerprinting resistance isn't mentioned once in the README. It's simply too hard a problem for me to claim that this simple script intends to solve it. You can however use the script as a foundation that you can build custom strategies on top of. More than adequate for that purpose.
Forking permits me to efficiently git rebase against upstream when there are changes, using rerere to remember easy conflict resolutions. A wrapper would not work as two of the options cannot be removed from the command line (and the author refused a PR that would have permitted such a wrapper).
I am the author. Flash support in Chrome is going away soon (but even if it didn't) I am not going to be publishing any code with support for that crap baked in. However, it is understandable if you disagree.
Re: referrer option, as I explained, it's a nop. So no point in having extra code for that there either (I really should remove it).
I had to use Flash two weeks ago to get a food handler’s permit online due to pandemic and terrible horrible choice from a list of 20 options, so I am unusually positioned to disagree from personal basis. I do agree that it should die and I can’t wait for it to do so either!
But the point is don't have to give the easy stuff like cookies away for free to mice like Google. They are still going to beg for milk either way, because they are greedy, but you don't have to be hospitable and keep feeding them cookies. (I mean the number of dumb ReCaptcha's I've had to do has gone way up since sequestering Google apps to their own container. Gross.)
It looks like what Opera was doing over a decade ago. IE8 also introduced coloured tabs based on tabs opened by others.
Firefox tried something similar to collections for those "tab collectors" with their Panorama (which is not available anymore these days), which was basically a visual 2d layout of tabs within groups. That's what got me the popup "are you sure you want to close 200 tabs" whenever I accidentally hit the close button.
All earlier attempts by non-Opera browsers seem to have failed so I wonder how long it'll take before Google takes this feature away. They're not a company that keeps new products or ideas around for long if they don't take off. I wouldn't get too used to having it.
It seems to me I’m in the minority by being a minimalist here? I have at most 10 tabs open. Same for Sublime Text open files. I regularly close all but one tab/file just to reset my cognitive load. This does force me to rely on the history from time to time, which I must say is a true pain in Chrome. You can’t even search or filter by date. Also, revisiting a page will move it up the top of the list, which is annoying because I lose all previous instances of when I visited the page.
As for the grouping of tabs, there’s always been a way to group them: a new window. I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window. I guess this new feature tries to solve the same problem.
> I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window
There is! Press CTRL while clicking individual tabs OR press SHIFT while clicking the first and last tab you want to move to a new window. Selected tabs appear slightly brighter. Then, just drag. This works in Chrome and Firefox.
I wish I could upvote you twice.
Whenever I need to separate my tabs from the main window I have to adjust them individually, which is a real pain if you have more than 10 tabs open.
I also rely a lot on the history and that's why I dislike Chrome. It looks like they make the history a pain in the butt on purpose just so that people rely on google to find what they need. I keep my history for a full year in Safari and it's quite easy to search for past websites
My behavior is completely different depending on the tab UI. I'm a minimalist on my desktop: as soon as I'm unable to read at least 10 or so characters of each tab title I start feeling a little restless/cramped and go through and close all the unneeded tabs. This usually happens a couple times a day. I feel a tinge of stress whenever I look at a tab collector's browser window.
OTOH on my phone where the "tabs" aren't prominently shown in the UI I have hundreds of "tabs" going back months/years. (Occasionally I'll look back at them and it'll bring back some memories of when I was researching a certain topic or on vacation somewhere, which can be nice...)
I'm with you, I hate having huge numbers of tabs open, in both IDE and browser land. Some of the devs on my team end up with 30-40 files open in Visual Studio at a time and it just loses me.
I'm curious, wouldn't you read the info and process it in your mind, and then close the tab when done? If it's something you will need to reference again later, then bookmark it? Like you know... a book. Put it back on the shelf or have hundreds of books open on the floor.
I do not understand tab people. I do have a meticulously organized bookmark system though. Do tab people use bookmarks much at all?
I haven't used bookmarks since the De.licio.us days. Most of the time if I do close a tab and need the information again, I know what to search to find it again. The searching in bookmarks is not as good as Google search. And I've been down the route of trying to meticulously organize bookmarks, and I find that in the midst of opening a bunch of tabs while "researching" something, that doesn't happen and so things are just a mess. Or when looking for them the original categorization doesn't match so I don't find it when looking at folders (same reason I prefer labels like in GMail over email folders).
No because it's more transient. I'm diving into a topic, opening a few different sources, then following links from those sources into further tabs. But I try to roughly group them in windows so I can just close out the window when I'm done with the topic.
I usually try to reset things a few times a day, and get back to one or two open tabs for the task at hand.
It’s seems many people who go the other extreme don’t use desktop apps but rather have to have a tab for Jira, a tab for Asana, a tab for email, a tab for chat (or three), a tab for music, etc. I use desktop apps and keep most of them hidden with notifications off; My brain kinda falls apart when there are too many things open at the same time!
Tabs are also a replacement for history. Going to hn, google, reddit, techmeme and opening 10 sites at once, instead of click, scroll, back, find next, click, scroll, back, find next.
Opposite to you, if I don't have at least 20 tabs open the tab bar looks naked and weird. I only close when they get to icon size, and am not happy about that. I would like to keep many of them because they are leads I might need later.
I have a dream. What I really want was likely not possible when tabs were invented, but should be now.
I want least recently used tabs to automatically fade away, but still be fully known and searchable the way that 'search my computer' or 'google search' works. With search filters like last hour/day/week/month. And it seems like history should be kept per tab, not altogether.
This way I keep a minimal-to-medium number of active tabs, but have all those magical things-to-do, pseudo-bookmarks, or other things that cause open tabs to grow and grow available via a quick search interface, auto-magically.
I use Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but I have mixed feelings about it.
It should help me visually find tabs, but truth of the matter is that it doesn't. Horizontal tabs become useless after 10 tabs opened, indeed, but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.
Opened tabs also consume a lot of memory. It's why I now use Auto Tab Discard, which works, but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.
What does help me in finding tabs is tab search via the address bar. In Firefox it works great, you can also prefix your query with a `%` to limit your search only to opened tabs.
Chrome also provides a way to search open tabs. It's not as good as Firefox's and you have to enable it yourself, but it's fine [2].
Your situation sounds similar to my own. The following two extensions have helped me solve the '30 tabs' problem:
TabSearch does the same thing you're doing with the search bar, but with fuzzy searching and more customisability which makes finding tabs a bit easier.
Close Discarded Tabs is a very simple extension I wrote for myself that acts as a sort of garbage collector for Auto Tab Discard. You can customize Auto Tab Discard to discard tabs in a way that purges irrelevant tabs to your liking, and then if you notice the list of tabs looks a bit overwhelming, just click the trashcan and all the discarded tabs are closed. If you want to make sure you don't close a tab you wanted, just quickly scan through the list and click any that you want to keep.
> but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened.
> but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying.
I use Vim Vixen [0], which has a "b" command (for "buffer") to search all tabs in the current window by URL and title. Also tags "last tab" with #, so you can easily jump back and forth using the command. Pretty sure other such vim-style addons have similar features.
The focus on groups and visible thumbnails makes it easy to pick out the tabs I want visually. I'm not sure how well it holds up once you get to 100s of tabs, but for my average of around 20-40 or so (spread over several windows) it works well, and does a good job of helping to maintain context separation.
Maybe I'm wrong (EDIT: seems I'm wrong!), but I feel like the people with dozens of tabs open (guilty) aren't the ones who use organizational features?
Also, it's a hidden feature, but you can already Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group.
Wrong! I have a very sophisticated system for managing my tabs. I'm very breadth-first when browsing the web and I also switch contexts a lot. Tabs are like a big Todo list for me.
For a while, I would get really frustrated when chrome would crash and close all my tabs, but recently I found a ln extension that keeps track of my tab history as a big tree! Yippee!
I use tabs exactly the same way! I also use windows for context switches. Right now on my work machine I have one personal window, and 5 other windows of 10-20 tabs each.
Closing a window after doing all the "TODOs" is insanely cathartic
One Firefox extension "Tree Style Tabs", popular with dozens-of-tabs folks, has near a quarter million users. I imagine they will be objecting that tab groups don't go far enough :)
And it addresses gkoberger's concern that people who are messy with tabs won't bother to organise them, because it organises them for you: opening a link in a new tab automatically makes it a child of the tab that had the link.
My exact thought! I have numerous tabs open, and have zero interest in fiddling with an approach like this. I don't think this can ever be faster than opening a new tab, for me. Safari on iOS added a feature last summer to auto-close tabs after a certain age, and I love it.
I'm just thinking out loud but I wonder if there was an easier way to visually identify certain tabs that seem related. Right now all I have is the favicon but there are so many favicons that look similar its difficult to tell them apart.
I love how Internet Explorer would colour-code tabs that were opened from another tab (open in new tab). It worked really well for search engine results; opening a bunch of results in new tabs would visually group them together by coloring those tabs differently. Similar in concept to Chrome tab groups, except completely automatic, which is super useful.
It was easier to keep track of same-site tabs because they tended to be in different colour groups, or all in the same group, and I think IE had a minimum tab width that was actually usable.
If I remember right, you could also move an unrelated tab into a group by dragging it between two tabs in the group, although this seemed like an unintended feature.
Move them where? I'd love to be able to right-click and move to a designated browser window because I use window titler so each window has a subject name. In firefox you can only move the tabs to a new window.
> Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group
Wow, thanks for this. I know most of Chrome’s hidden features. Don’t know how I missed this one. I tend to reorder tabs and then use “Close tabs to the right”.
In Chrome, I always stop one tab before all favicons disappear (at this point tabs lose almost all their utility). In Firefox, where tabs scroll instead of being squeezed, I end up having ~100 tabs open before I decide it's time to kill some of them, as it takes too much time to scroll the tab list around.
What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.
I implemented tabbed windows for NeWS, UniPress (Gosling) Emacs, and the HyperTies hypermedia authoring tool in 1988, and shipped them in a commercial product (UniPress Emacs 2.20).
They were written in object oriented PostScript, as an extension of the NeWS window manager, so you could apply them to the windows of all NeWS applications, and they were especially useful for UniPress Emacs (which was the first version of Emacs to support opening multiple windows, so you ended up opening a LOT of them at once, which the tabs really helped with).
The Wikipedia page describes my earliest implementation of tabbed windows for NeWS in 1988, and has a screen snapshot of tabbed windows and pie menus with UniPress Emacs and HyperTIES on NeWS:
And later at Sun I re-implemented tabbed windows and pie menus for TNT (The NeWS Toolkit), and we implemented an ICCCM X11 window manager for X11/NeWS that could consistently apply tabbed windows with pie menus to all X11 and NeWS windows.
Here's a demo of tabbed windows for The NeWS Toolkit (which we could wrap around X-Windows too):
This posting describes different versions of tabbed windows, including PSIBER with tabbed windows for PostScript objects that you can impale on a "spike" that represents the PostScript stack, the tabbed pie menu X11/NeWS window manager:
These discusses the advantages of putting tabs on the side (and enabling users to move them around the any side: top, bottom, left or right), instead of just the top:
Very impressive. I wish this had become a common feature of GUIs beyond the browser.
One thing I liked a lot about the Windows95 GUI when it was introduced were the tabbed property and settings. They kind of went by the wayside as a general concept though they survive in places (not that I’ve had much experience with Windows over the course of the past 20 years or so).
On the topic of moving tabs, I was a BeOS user and one thing that I enjoyed enormously (albeit in an infantile and purposelessly inchoate manner) was sliding the yellow title tab around by holding (if I remember correctly) the shift key. It wasn’t ever developed into something useful but it was fun and suggested it would be made into a useful feature.
I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?
Some window managers can't. Browser work around with tabs. It's fine for most of the users, it's missing opportunity for some. At least I was not able to disable tabs completely.
What I would like, is Emacs/Vim-style buffers. When you don't have one open, it's completely invisible. When you want to switch to it, you perform an incremental search for its title. No need to hunt for things on the screen. A lot faster and a lot more tidy wrt what's currently visible on the screen. No distractions.
I’m not arguing for the multi-window alternative. Indeed in MacOS I quite like the tabbed interface for applications. It just amuses me how when the problem re-arose, we solved it differently than we had previously.
Tabs is a form of "Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface"?
Windows MDI is a nested window manager. Tile and Cascade, move and resize, maximize, minimize. That is gone. Windows stay maximized, title bar eaten by buttons and tabs.
Also I can look on the link I post and Ctrl+F "Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface"
> Microsoft Word 2003: MDI until Microsoft Office 97. After 2000, Word has a Multiple Top-Level Windows Interface, thus exposing to shell individual SDI instances, while the operating system recognizes it as a single instance of an MDI application.
Interestingly, the oldest archive of that addon page says version 4.14 was released three weeks after that XKCD strip - so excepting that it probably didn't have all the features of xmonad, we did have tiled browsing before XKCD suggested it.
Unfortunately, it's among the many killed off when legacy extensions were dropped. There is a webextensions version now, but it's not very useful - all it does is open and position multiple windows, instead of doing tiling within the same window.
LOL "tab groups" AKA "windows". You can have this life today! When you have a tab that doesn't fit in with the others, pull it into its own window. When you're done asking google a question, close the window to close all the tabs associated with it. Use cmd-` to cycle through windows and expose to find a specific one!
I am happy to see them doing something new with tabs, I'm just sad that so many people seem to have stopped using the oldest GUI metaphor in the book in favor of monolithic browsers.
I'm always very happy to see UX innovation, so kudos to Chrome for that.
However, I just don't quite see the point of this particular feature.
If you only have a handful of tabs open (like the 4 in the example), you hardly need to bother to categorize them.
While if you have a ton of tabs, you can already use different windows (one for personal, one generally for work, one for a specific project, etc.). Shift-selecting and dragging multiple tabs at once makes it pretty easy.
What "tab collectors" seem to universally like truly is tree-style tabs, so you can see the titles of your 40 tabs and see which one opened which. I suppose I can just hope that maybe they're taking baby steps toward that?
As a hoarder, tabs act somewhat as low-effort bookmarks: instead of having to explicitly bookmark sites, I have to explicitly not-bookmark them (i.e. close the tab). In other words: "organising" my tabs is the default and takes no extra effort. Additionally, when I'm done with something, cleaning up is really low effort as well: I close several tabs in a row, and can relatively quickly judge which ones to close.
In other words: this just seems way too much effort for me...
Reminds me a little bit of Vivaldi's Tab Stacking feature [0]. Yet, it looks less useful, especially for tab hoarders as mentioned in the other comments here. But progress is progress and maybe we'll end up with something better than the Tab Stacks in the end.
See this is a good idea but suffers from a UX problem: it is just way too cumbersome to create a new group and add new tabs.
When I am on a roll I just want to hotkey a new tab open an start typing a search query for something. ctrl-t and type is just too fast and keeps me in the zone.
What if they added a new hotkey for opening a new tab in a new group? ctrl-g is taken, so something like ctrl-shift-g? Whatever it is, you get the point. Open a new tab in a new group. All tabs opened from a group stay in that group.
So, say I open a new tab group to search for something in google. I then read through the results and middle-click several items to open in new tabs. All those tabs should stay in the group. That way I can easily jump around to other tab groups and see what group had all the references to my question. I can then do this for several topics and keep things straight.
Shamesless plug: I've built a tiny WebExtension for Firefox that I believe is the fastest way to jump between tabs ever, with the keyboard. It's for those of us who have more than 15 tabs open.
You basically click a one key, and then fuzzy search through your tabs until there's only one option left, and the tab opens. Alternatively you enter the tab number and it opens. It's probably one of my most useful weekend projects.
This is actually really nice! While I don't have a lot of tabs open at once, dragging my mouse over and clicking is really tedious. Even though the Firefox address bar allows you to switch to already open tabs, it's still not seamless. This is great for noticing the name at a glance and switching quickly.
Yeah, but it never worked for me. For some reason it lists only a fraction of my open tabs. Also my extension allows me to jump faster between tabs using their tab number, and easily close tabs by prepending a zero to their number.
Don't feel too bad about your tab hoarding, I'm at 3 windows with 4630 tabs and I'm pretty sure I'm closer to a stress test than a user. Chrome can't function with 1/20th of mine and Firefox runs smooth and fast. Restarting with loading all the session data takes seven or eight seconds total. It can't just be the different multi-process models so I'm pretty sure that the Chrome team can do better.
I think I found my kindred spirit! I have one Firefox instance presently at 3 windows and 3379 tabs and another with 10 windows and somewhere north of 2300 tabs. I wouldn't dare do this under Chrome/Chromium.
On my system at least, I've noticed that Firefox does get less responsive around 8000+ tabs. Mostly it's just the start up that complains.
Sometimes I'll get annoyed and mass-bookmark/close tabs (filed under date of closure). Do you ever do that or do you usually filter through things on an as needed basis?
For finding things I just use search in Power Tabs. Filtering down usually leaves me with a list I can scan through quickly. When it comes time to clean up I cheat by using that as well - filter my tab list, then select individual or groups of tabs to close. Generally I'll start by closing all tabs from news sites like the NY Times and WaPo under the assumption that they're probably stale, then clear out a bunch of HN tabs, and most often then switch to digging through the github ones to see what's actually relevant anymore. StackExchange and Reddit tend to get slashed pretty hard as well. Basically filter, viciously select, then close and I can blow away a thousand tabs in a couple of minutes.
The highest I've ever gotten was around 6000 on old Firefox for Linux and I did see some slowdowns then, but that was on a seven year old laptop.
Oh, there are kindred spirits here. I've recommended this on other tab-related discussions but Tab Stats is one of the few Firefox addons that have been worth using as a tab hoarder. Allows me to see which pages are open in multiple tabs and then deduplicate them if needed, or just looking at (or closing) open tabs based on domain.
(I'm not affiliated with the creator and it's not without its own annoyances, but still easily recommendable to anyone with thousands of tabs open)
I don't find it too tedious to go through and nuke things I know aren't useful long term (they're usually shunted to a separate throw away window for this reason!), but there's no easy solution for tab deduplication. What you've linked looks like it fits the bill!
Session restore is definitely not designed to scale up that high. I'm impressed that it works. If you're curious you should take a look at the session store data in your profile directory sometime, it's probably at least 50mb of javascript-encoded tab info and browsing history. (Yes, your per-tab navigation history is stored too)
Are you referring to the (previous.jsonlz4|recovery.(bak|json)lz4) files under sessionstore-backups? If so, you're very close: Uncompressed, they're around 40MiB. Each of my tabs doesn't store much history since they're usually opened and looked at--or saved for a later date with no further navigation.
I had assumed based on what I introspected from my profile directory the real bottleneck in my (ab)use was probably the JSON parser and/or my CPU. On my hardware, 8000 tabs seems to be the point where the hang detector fires, which I'm guessing is probably determined by dom.max_chrome_script_run_time? Sounds like you're telling me it's time for a CPU upgrade!
Anyway, I don't know if it's an interesting data point for you, but the only time I've had Firefox's session restore fail was if I killed my X session immediately after closing Firefox, presumably before it has a chance to save state. Even then, I've been able to restore it to an earlier state using some incantation of JSON from sessionstore-backups without losing much. Again, strictly a user-induced failure.
When I say that Firefox is the most stable and robust browser out there, that's not an exaggeration. If anything, it's an understatement. What's more, it's always getting better and improving. Since I see from your bio that you're a dev or contributor, I want to personally thank you for your efforts. Your work doesn't go underappreciated by us, even if we're less than kind to it. :)
I remember the browser wars. Consequently, I will always use Firefox. The internals exposed to idiots like me via the profile are pretty easy to reason about. I like that.
My Safari had 1K+ Tabs and I finally spend some time last week closing those down to 150Tabs. Normally Safari dont work as well as Firefox with that many Tabs, the trick is to restart Safari from time to time ( So Tabs are not Active ). AND do NOT press the Tab Overview Button. Which somehow reloads all the tabs, make your Mac insanely slow and would kill your SSD. As you wont have enough memory it literally page hundreds of GB if not TB to your SSD.
Reported this to Apple a few times and never heard anything back. I really wish there is an option where Tab Overview is just a list of tabs and doesn't load them up.
I think most of us are using Tabs as a sort of live reading list or Bookmarks. And as anyone may guess, never really got to finish it. Ok now I wrote that I should try to clean those 150 tabs down to at least a few dozen.
Man, I know I have a problem, and I thought it was bad at about 700 tabs across 25 windows (virtual desktops are enablers for the window count). But seeing this thread I clearly need to up my game/download more memory.
In principle yes. The problem is that they loose their topicness and quickly become "oh this was the closest virtual desktops to where you were in the grid with an empty space." This is largely because I made the mistake of originally implementing the transition system as a grid (this was 5 years ago or so). Since then I realized that I basically want a button that will let me create a new topic space, and then remove that space automatically when I close the last window in it. Figuring out how gc stale topics (I can recreate them from memory) and/or discover which topics already have spaces is the hard part (I have had the ability to display topics on desktops via conky for years and that doesn't seem to have helped).
I have also thought about trying to decouple how spaces are associated per monitor, but couldn't figure out a way to interact with such a system that wouldn't leave my brain lost somewhere in even higher dimensional virtual spaces than it already is!
Reading your comments put into words a behavior pattern I didn't fully recognize I'd adopted, though certainly not to the extreme as you (or with the direct intent).
I noticed that my tab + window use started to balloon when it occurred to me that rather than dividing virtual desktops by task (one for dev, one for email/general browsing, etc) I could start moving browser windows from each instance to different locations based upon whatever I was doing (or for that matter, application-specific tasks). It's an exceedingly simplified (and admittedly very dumbed down) version of what it sounds like I understand you're doing, but the strange thing is that I found expanding your mental state across virtual desktops with the granularity of a browser instance/window/set of windows is an oddly freeing phenomenon.
It's a sense of euphoria I don't think the average Windows user will fully appreciate even with the integration of virtual desktops in Windows 10 since most are typically not familiar with it!
I agree that the feeling is quite freeing, and very effective for sandboxing activities to prevent distraction, the only trade off is when I have run a garbage collection workflow to reclaim space (usually completely adhoc). In fact writing this now, it seems to me that it almost completely removes the need for careful and deliberate use of the interface, you can do what you want nearly at the speed of thought because the mechanics don't get in your way. The trick is that you have to engineer the action space that you are in to prevent certain kinds of thoughts such as "I wonder if I have new email" from expressing themselves as finger presses. (Side note: this makes me think that there are going to be some really hard to solve problems when someone finally gets the brain computer interface hardware working, because determining what thoughts to transform into actions and what thoughts should just remain thoughts is a fundamental problem for the brain itself.)
Rearrangement of the contents of virtual desktops and the desktops themselves is a topic in and of itself. The emacs world has a lot of tooling around this as well (see for example [0]), and the are a number of patterns/workflows for managing/composing/recombining workspaces that would surely translate other window managers since they deal with essentially the same issues.
For me the issue tends to be that it is easier and faster to create a new window of whatever kind wherever I am to answer the immediate need than to find the right one to answer it in, so I just open a new terminal window, jump to where I need to be, do what I need to do, and then ... forget to close it. Similar issue with dragging a browser window around with me wherever I go. One answer to this might be to slightly modify the behavior of the "open new instance of this program" key to act instead as "jump to most recent instance of this program, or if it does not exist, create it and jump to it."
One thing related to gc is that I started to work on but did not manage to complete, was the ability to snapshot the layout of all windows across all desktops in an x session. That would allow effective patterns to persist across restarts without the need to come up with a way to specify how things should be arranged. It would allow them to be arranged by whatever means, saved, and restored. I'll probably get back to it at some point.
As a note, anyone with the inclination can do this kind of thing in any language as long as it has xlib bindings.
Tab minimalist here... It won't help the others. They just don't pay attention to tabs. It's like a mental blind spot for them... Maybe an outright disorder. They just keep opening new tabs every chance they get. I once sat over someone's shoulder and watched them continue to click the same link in a message over and over again to look at a JIRA while we were debugging something. Every time, it just opened up a new tab. And they just didn't care. That was how to open up that bit of info. 10, 20, 30 tabs... They just kept piling up. I almost lost my mind This is a techie, mind you, not some random office worker. It was mind boggling.
What Chrome really needs is an auto close feature. Default to like 10 tabs max, with the option to increase for power users. Oldest tabs without any activity get whacked automatically. The world would save gigawatts of power overnight.
You'll create an infinite number of tabs if you have the following rules:
- if you will open multiple links from a page, keep that tab, and then open each link in a new tab
- each tab is a train of thought -- don't overwrite a tab's train of thought, always open a new tab to keep your trains of thought distinct
- only close a tab once you know that train of thought is fully complete
- don't interrupt your current train of thought just to evaluate if an earlier train of thought is complete (and therefore whether you should then close that "tree" of tabs)
AKA garbage collection for your mind, that only allows you to run stop-the-world when no other processes are running
That's exactly how it is with me. Also it is often more convenient to open a new tab and search again for something then to find it in one of already opened tabs.
It would be perfect if beside Google search results the browser would show tab results (with full FTS) and history results. I would prefer to have it there instead of search bar's completion.
Then if tabs would really be just history of opened tabs the browser could do some LRU GC.
Firefox location bar searches through your open tabs and it was way too annoying, had to disable it. So I guess I actually missed another rule:
- your current train of thought always needs to be in the rightmost tab OR it can be the leftmost tab if you have a current working set with like just 5 tabs
the latter of which is what then leads to an infinite number of windows...
Which is why on top of the built-in "close all tabs" and "close all tabs to the right", I also installed plugins for "close all other windows" and "close all others tabs and all other windows".
Others already wrote about Firefox tab groups and containers. I do use containers but I use a different way to group tabs.
I'm using Ubuntu with Gnome shell customized to look like the old Gnome pre 2014, or was that 2012? I have a virtual desktop per customer and one Firefox window per desktop. One "customer" it's my own pet project of the moment and another one is where I keep my email, WhatsApp web and Telegram desktop and other social media in their own private container tab. So I group per window and I need less functionality from the browser because I rely more on the OS.
I believe that Gnome calls those desktops Activities but I disabled nearly all of the Activities related stuff. I have hotkeys to move to desktops and I use them like old school virtual desktops, a fixed number of them. IMHO yhe less the screen moves the better it is.
When I feel I have too many tabs Open, I simply close the entire window. I don't understand tab hoarders. I've watched them use browsers and they almost never revisit those hoarded tabs. They actually start from a new tab and search or type in a URL when they want to go back to previous tabs.
Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and keep a max number of tabs visible.
The problem with history is it loses spacial relativity. How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs.
Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls, by understanding their distance from each other and the rules of how they open.
Another thing tabs do, is allow you to designate what NOT to return. If you use something like GoToTab [1], it will specifically NOT return results that have been closed. Merging everything to history doesnt give you that separation between "not relevant in the future" and "maybe relevant in the future."
> How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs.
> Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls,
I recommend Tree Style Tab [0], which fully preserves this relationship. When one tab opens another, the child tab automatically becomes a child in the tree, making the whole thing very self-organizing. Also being a tree, the parents can be expanded/collapsed, if there's a group you're putting aside for the moment.
That's for Firefox, at least. It looks like there's a few that other people have made for Chrome [1][2], but I can't speak to how well they perform.
But how does that preserve the relationship after I want them to no longer be tabs? The convert tabs to history or tabs to bookmarks destroys that relationship data.
I can't see any benefit really to this new feature they announced without what you're suggesting.
If they add the ability to collapse groups, then I would probably use it, otherwise I can keep my tabs just as organised without a need for some colour hints.
Same. I was really excited first when I saw this feature. After installing it, I barely use it now.
It helps a bit for a first overview, but my tab bar is still super full.
From the screenshots it seems they give space priority to the name of each tab group instead of the tabs themselves (when space was already at a premium). In one example, 3 tabs were barely intelligible yet the group name was fully visible.
It would be better to have:
- An alternate short name or icon that is automatically used when there is no space (common?).
- Relocated tab group name, e.g. small text “above” the tabs instead of stealing space from the tabs.
- An option to have no name at all, relying on other distinctions only (some people are color blind so you always need a non-color option; maybe different patterns of border lines, or shapes?).
As much as I like this, why is it so hard to have tab management that just works? I have six pinned tabs that I always want up. Important things like Gmail, Calendar Drive. Stuff that should never change. I don't want to have to remember to open links in a new tab from pinned tabs. It should know that pinned means pinned.
Perhaps if they enabled group persistence? I'm hoping this rather obvious feature is in there.
My solution has been to use a tab manager with a saved session that I can always recall when my pinned tabs break (such as when Chrome crashes, and loses my session entirely).
One of the great features in Chrome is that you can open your recently closed tabs with CTRL+SHIFT+T. This will bring back an entire window full of tabs and even works between reboots. I usually have a dozen tabs open and when I reboot, I simply open up Chrome again, CTRL+SHIFT+T, and I am right back where I was.
I liked what IE ... 8? has done abck in the day where opening a new tab from another one will create a colored group, so you kinda have automatic grouping that allows you to tell at a glance "Oh those all belong to the same tvtropes tab rampage, but I'm looking for that other thing now I was looking at before".
Nothing can beat Tree Style tab in Firefox. You can make "folders of tabs" and whole hierarchies. For "tabs collectors" like me who have 40 tabs always open this is a must.
My current setup : I have 5 pinned tab on top of the tree.
Below I have a "github" group of tabs.
Below I have a set of tabs opened on different parts of an app I'm working on.
Below is a group of documentation tabs.
Below is another group of articles I plan to read at some point.
Below I have the HN tab, with a tree of articles and comments.
I can't imagine going back to horizontal tabs. This is just much too good.
This is nice, but what I really don't get is how come the most popular browser in the world in 2020 not have an native option to go through the tabs in the most-recently-used order.
This is major productivity improvement compared to ctrl-tabbing the tabs in their physical order. IIRC, multi-tabbed IDEs figured it out somewhere in the 90s and it has become a de-facto standard since then. But nope, Chrome doesn't support it, making the Ctrl-Tab hotkey effectively useless if you have more than a handful open tabs.
I only wish that a) it would visually display the tab history the way Firefox does, and b) being able to shorten the Normal switch backward timer, so I could use that only.
This is my number 1 pet peeve with chromium browsers, drives me crazy that they won't implement this properly. It doesn't look like the new Edge will either (no reaction on MRU features requests). Every few months I go check https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5569 to see if someone sane decided to reopen the issue but no luck until now.
I'd love if a browser supports horizontally and perhaps vertically splitting the browser window/tab like you can in iTerm or tmux or terminator and let us view multiple pages at once in a single browser window area. Whichever page is active owns the address and toolbar.
I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to be using any new tab organization feature, if it requires me take explicit action to get the benefit. If I was reasonably capable of organizing my browsing, I wouldn't currently have 468 tabs open to start with...
In my experience, Chrome has never been the browser for people who want to open more than a handful of tabs and keep them around for sometime. It becomes sluggish and makes the whole system sluggish. I see similar issues with the new Microsoft Edge (based on Chromium) and Brave (also based on Chromium, but somewhat better).
“Tab collectors” is a derogatory term to describe anyone who needs to do some research on some topic and needs to open up tabs, links from them and figure out the topic(s) they’re dealing with. Yes, this can devolve into a collector situation if not managed well. But not everyone who has a need for it has to be insulted this way, especially from technical users, where daily work can easily turn into opening several tabs and windows at once.
That Google Chrome isn’t designed or optimized for heavy usage will not go away just because they throw a new feature to group tabs. You may be able to group them, but will the browser be any less sluggish with the addition of this feature? That’s what I’m interested to know. For users of a few tabs, tab groups may not be as useful since they’d already be doing the grouping with windows. For users with many tabs, tab groups isn’t going to be useful as long as the browser can’t handle many tabs.
I have tried it already and it is of no use for me. I want a way to group tabs in different Chrome windows and assign the Chrome window a name, so that I can have: Work Window, News Window, Personal Window, Communication Window, etc. and in each of the windows the related tabs. Today I can do that, but each "chrome-window-icon" shows with the name of the tab that is open, and not the "chorme-window-name" (Work window, etc). In Windows 10 I used an app to rename the instances of Chrome but I cannot find a solution under Linux (Ubuntu).
Chromium can easily handle five hundred or more tabs on my machine. It's certainly a RAM hog, but that's to be expected. Maybe it's swapping on your machine? Firefox does a slightly better job when you have more than a thousand tabs open, but they both benefit from a tab suspender extension.
I just want the title bar back, above the tabs, on the mac. It's so frustrating trying to move/select the window with a tiny sliver available to click on.
Does both traditional <Alt-left click-drag> and <Alt-middle/right click-drag> to resize as known on X11.
Edit: Whoops, Windows only, sorry. But the same problem exists on Windows too, and I'm sure a corresponding solution exists on Mac. On X11, of course, it's built in.
You can also drag any window from any side by dragging perpendicular to the resize direction. It’s still small but I never heard anyone complain about precision there.
And then there’s window manager if you’re a power user.
I also think you can move any window with three finger via system settings.
Top right isn't always visible when trying to click a window to bring it forward
> You can also drag any window from any side by dragging perpendicular to the resize direction. It’s still small but I never heard anyone complain about precision there.
Interesting, I hadn't seen that before. It's still a small space and annoying to grab, but it's better than now knowing about it.
> And then there’s window manager if you’re a power user.
Not sure what you mean here.
> I also think you can move any window with three finger via system settings.
I use a mouse and full keyboard. I've never been able to interact with the mac well without them.
I mean automatic tools to move windows. I use BetterTouchTool with a lot of custom gestures to handle my windows. With this I mean for example swiping with 5 fingers to the left moves and resizes the window to take up 25% of the screen on the left side. And so on so forth. I rarely drag my windows around anymore, it's second nature at this point.
> I use a mouse and full keyboard. I've never been able to interact with the mac well without them.
With BetterTouchTool (I just tried this) I can set e.g. fn+mouse click to toggle a move state on a window. So the window you tapped (anywhere within) will now follow your mouse until you click again.
It can also simply teleport your window to wherever you fn+clicked.
There are unlimited options within this app by itself.
I'll check it out, thanks. Though I still think just leaving the title bar alone would be a simpler solution. Plus, it means you can see the title, which is nice.
I use about a gazillion tabs. My biggest problem is losing them, or having to re-open them after a restart. Though sometimes a fresh start can be relieving.
My next biggest problem is running out of memory when running other programs alongside Chrome. Perhaps it's due to how I like watching YouTube a lot, which seems to suck my RAM dry. I have 16 gb RAM, but even then I sometimes get hiccups, and the culprit seems to be Chrome. Not sure what to do about it, aside from closing tabs.
I know it's probably a bad habit to open several programs as well, but using the Adobe package together with a browser is kind of a must, at least if you're juggling several projects at once. Same for programming, but Sublime Text is hardly a resource hog.
If this works between sessions, and perhaps even between computers, AND it saves memory, then I'm sure I'll fall in love with it. I've had other solutions suggested to me, but installing yet another plugin is not appealing to me. Though after reading this thread, I think I'll perhaps give Vimium a try.
The Vivaldi web browser[0] found a great solution to this problem years ago. Tab stacking, tab tiles, and native tab hibernation. I've been rocking it for 3+ years now, and I've got to say it is the best browser out there.
It’s sad that operating systems gave up, before even trying to, to properly organize content with windows managers.
There’s really no good reason why browser needs to have tabs, and have that exclusive ecosystem, not available to rest of the apps on the system. I’d love to be able to group and manage my windows as easily as tabs.
The concept is totally flawed. Having 10+ tabs open is as chaotic as it was before. Too bad, Google missed a chance to solve a problem many people seem to have. At least here on Hackernews I am reading from time to time that people have the same problem I have – tab hoarding.
So far only one third party extension helped me with this – Workona [1]. It makes it possible to switch between tab groups. The downside is that the company behind it has a complete overview of browsing behaviour and at some point they want a monthly fee (6$ / month) for the unlimited account, which I am going to pay if no better solution comes around.
I also tried Firefox tree view, but it is missing the feature to switch tab groups.
It is even worse in Firefox, half my history is just outright missing. It is like it only saves the final page each tab was open to instead of anything I browsed using that tab in the interim.
Not to mention the UI for Firefox's history is pure garbage of the worst kind. The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad, the fact that it isn't a screen and some kind of dumb pop-out /thing/ that cuts off content is terrible. No time-stamps either, or way to organize the flow of browsing (e.g. under what tab/window it was open in).
If it worked correctly it would still be bad. But it doesn't work correctly making it the worst part of Firefox right now, it has been broken for over a year.
PS - The history-missing bug is still active as of right now. Half of the pages I visited this morning just outright aren't listed at all. I was searching on google using a site: modifier and middle clicking open dozens of tabs, almost none are listed only the root searches.
> The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad
History is never more than 2 clicks away:
- Open Library button, click History
- Open History menu (macOS)
However, yes, core browser functions seem to be stuck to what they looked like in the year 2000 for most browsers. Only Safari basically tries to reinvent its UI every couple of years.
Really? Chrome's history search tools are very good, and it's just a SQLite file. I've only had to break out the SQL queries once, but it allowed me to find something very specific. Take a look here: https://gist.github.com/dropmeaword/9372cbeb29e8390521c2
It would be great if the browser history showed a tree of what URL I opened from what other URL. It would make it easier to backtrack my work at times.
Chromium Edge is getting vertical tabs, and from the screenshots it looks like a decent implementation. At the end of March, the blog post said it was coming to the Edge Insider Preview "in the next few months".
Who is this for? I don't see anyone who can use it. If you have less than 10 tabs you don't need to group them, and if you have more than 10 you will spend your time having them in the good group.
And at the end what is the benefit oh having groups?
Anyone who keeps many tabs open and is a keyboard centric user, how can they use chrome?
In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab.
I'd expect chrome to have an option to change this, but no, you need add-ons, and those just offer other hotkeys.
Nowadays, I keep my tabs open in, if I need another identity (like my work-related account in a cloud provider), I use opera. Chrome is only for: any site that only works in chrome + debugging my own web development activity
Firefox containers finally "clicked" for me and that's what I use for identities now. I have my personal container, work container, and work-login-as-admin container. It's great. I can open a twitter link as my work twitter or personal twitter with a right-click.
> In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab.
Coincidentally, this drives me nuts with Firefox and is always the first option I disable. If I open 10 tabs from a single page, I want to be able to cycle through them with the keyboard easily. Having CTRL+Tab go to the most recent tab completely ruins that.
That's what I do, but I still keep only a small number of tabs open in each of a small number of windows. But FYI you can just drag the tab(s) down and they'll form a new window.
hah, me too. In addition I move groups of windows to different virtual desktops to further organize my thoughts. Nice thing on Windows is that Alt-Tab in a virtual desktop only switches between applications in that desktop. So once I switch to a particular "context", I only have to work with tabs/windows in that flow.
I need a tab to have more than just a favicon for context, so this works for me.
It looks cool as a person who has at least 20 tabs open in Chrome almost always but it would be much better if we could also use different profiles in the same Chrome window.
As they demonstrated, people usually would like to use labels such as work, personal, etc. but it's not really useful if I can't log in my GSuite and personal Gmail in the same Chrome window.
I'm in the tab collector category, but after I read something I don't need it sticking around in my autocomplete. If I want it saved I add it as a bookmark.
Could you fix this bug. Namely, please do not discard open incognito tabs without confirming with me.
I am sure I don't discard them accidentally (by closing the browser or something) as I am quite careful not to throw away my reading. I wish Chrome would do the same, and be more careful about just throwing away whatever I'm reading.
I feel this is as good a place as any to leave my comment so it is noticed.
Everyone I work with seems to always have about a million tabs open at all times, myself included. Maybe they’ve figured out a way to manage them, but for me, it’s hard to keep them from becoming anything other than a disorganized mess. I use a couple of plugins that really help like the Great Suspender for managing memory use, and the this looks like it will definitely help.
The thing that puzzles me is that this seems like an obvious step progression in tab management - but it’s also the first real move to help people with a widespread challenge that’s been around for many years. Is this the rate of improvement we should expect from Chrome?
I feel like the hidden that feature that allows you to select and move multiple tabs is severely underrated. I'm a tab hoarder but not disorganised, I tend to work on multiple things at a time and what I'll do is everytime there's more than 4-5 tabs on a specific project, I'll move them to a new window and hide the rest. That way, I'm not bothered by the other subjects in my view and the current "workspace" is still easily manageable.
I fail to see the point of this change this late in the browser history as it would surprise me if powerusers didn't already have their own way of managing tabs
My greatest problem with Chrome and tabs is its tendency to “forget” pinned tabs when restarting. I’ve lost pinned tabs quite a few times and don’t trust Chrome to keep them. This never occurs with Safari and Firefox in my experience.
Cool, something similar exists in Firefox (with an extension). Still not going to switch to Chrome, though. I have the Chrome browser open once or twice a week because, as one can imagine, gmail works better in Google's browser - but once I finish fully migrating everything to protonmail and my own @ I'll have no reason to ever use a google product again (run a NAS I can access remotely, collaboration in Microsoft Office works "good enough" and tbh I prefer the version controlling for what I need it for, DDG is at least at parity with Google search and is frankly better for images).
I just wish the OSes would alt-tab through all tabs in all apps instead of just top level windows. Yes, other forms of tab organization might be useful but my productivity would go up more if I could more easily swap between the last 2-8 things I did in a consistent way.
As it is sometimes alt tab works, some times it doesn't. It all depends on what the last few things I did were and is therefore infuriatingly inconsistent.
I tried "Witch" on MacOS to fix this but it's got its own set of issues since it's having to hack around to do its job.
This looks nice but in my experience, it is unrealistic to have Chrome with many tabs open on a laptop. The machine would slow down, drain the battery and force me to close tabs before I need to classify them. Did that change too?
IMHO a feature as a tab limiter would be more productive for me at least, forcing me to close or archive tabs before opening new ones. I have ancient tabs of great finds that at some point I need to decide what to do with but never come around and don't really remember what was so great about that tab.
I've been trying to control my tab hoarding in Chrome by limiting the amount of open tabs with the xTab extension[1]. It seems to help, even though I can bypass it by opening another window. As a side effect of this my browser windows tend to be organized by topic.
I hope this does not change the usability of large numbers of tabs in Chrome, which are still completely usable when they shrink down to Favicon size.
In contrast to Safari, which never shrinks tabs below ~1 inch and instead changes the tab bar to an awful horizontal scrolling/carousel view.
Safari tabs are completely unusable past around 15 tabs when it starts hiding and resizing the tabs on the edges. It's the main thing preventing me from switching from Chrome to Safari.
It uses the concept of "tasks" to organize tabs. Still haven't really tried it, so can't really recommend, but since it's not really well known (I guess) I thought it was worth sharing.
- Export Tabs as list. Format could be something like URL;TITLE[;GROUP][;...]
- Import list as Tabs: The inverse
Then I could use existing tools (xsv,fzf,vscode,excel) to do whatever I like with my tabs.
Some things may be lost (cache, scrolling position...) but I wouldn't care as they don't work anyway with modern websites.
I don't see anything here that isn't possible with OneTab except that the tabs are all open. At least with OneTab I can (manually) move tabsets between Chrome and Firefox as well as between machines: https://www.one-tab.com/
Tested this out a few months ago, got real excited when I saw they had a beta thing for it but was let down that you couldn't collapse and expand tab groups down to just their titles. The functionality should even be there-ish already, since pinned tabs collapse down to just the site's favicon.
What I would find very helpful is if Chrome on macOS could reopen all its windows on their original spaces—rather than all on the same space—when it needs to restart to install a new version.
Having all Chrome windows from many spaces for different tasks re-appear all on top of each other is quite frustrating.
It looks good when it's only few tabs, when you have more than 20 tabs you don't even see a favicon. I don't understand why tabs don't have minimum width. In firefox you always see favicon and first tree letters and there are arrows that help you scroll through tabs.
Control+N a new window for each mode is what I currently do. Then Super+<backtick> to cycle through them (if you’re on a Mac)
It’s not perfect though. If you accidentally open a few tabs in the wrong mode there’s no easy way to transfer them. And I’ll often forget that another window is open in the background
I find tabs in Safari and Chrome fairly difficult to navigate when using them (I have many open and scrolling through loads isn't that useful); I find Safari's overview mode (pinch out on iPad or Mac) far more useful because you can see what you're after.
What's a good browser for personal use nowadays? I have Firefox on my desktop but on mobile the experience is very lacking, with many pages downright breaking. I'm currently trying out brave which seems to at least block ads and tracking.
I am a tab minimalist, but still i am looking forward to this. Been using this in the official release for a while now (activate it via chrome:flags). Only thing i am missing is persistency (keep the group if tabs are closed) and some kind of collapsing.
This is great. With this comes to Firefox. I guess Firefox has a kind of similar feature (Containers), but this new Chrome feature looks way nicer, even though it might not have containerization.
For the love of god, google, please give me vertical tabs. It's been years. I'm happy using Firefox or Vivaldi, it pains me whenever I have to open Chrome.
The way to deal with tabs for me is to be a "tab ascetic". Majority of the time I have only a single tab open. Sometimes 2. With 3 it gets uncomfortable.
This works for Google because they want you to only use Chrome. That's how Google engineers work.
For the rest of us, it's a reminder of how increasingly troublesome it is that window managers are tied to the OS, and (on 2/3 of the major OSs) locked down so any third parties that want to innovate here are limited to doing it only for their own application.
This looks like just the sort of thing Dan Ingalls meant when he said "We in computer software insist on stepping on the toes of those who came before us instead of climbing on their shoulders".
As a tab collector this is useless to me. I rather have a way to automatically move certain domains to specific, separate windows to keep things organized.
I'm with you. I don't like it when I have more than a few open at a time. I also don't like having unread email or chat messages because of the same impulse. They're to-do items that haven't been done yet so I deal with them and move on.
Is this a new method for Google to keep tracking cookies active? I know many people who leave tabs open for months. Using tabs for “read later” seems questionable, performance wise.
That actually seems like rather convenient, if I were emacs user on Mac, I would give it a try.
That said, you gotta agree that this time google actually adds functionality that might be useful to some, unlike more common scrap-important-adblocking-api-to-screw-everyone.
I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...