
Browser tabs are probably the wrong metaphor - treve
https://evertpot.com/tabs-are-the-wrong-abstraction/
======
TeMPOraL
Tabs are not bookmarks.

I can tell you exactly what made me use tabs instead of bookmaking sites:
opening a bookmark means making a new connection, new round-trip, loading,
parsing and rendering a full page. Having a page open in a tab means it's
already there, in exactly the state you left it in. It will still be there if
the Internet goes down. It will still be there after it comes back up. It will
be there tomorrow, it will be there next week, after hibernating and waking up
your computer a dozen times in between. It will be there even if the page is
already removed on the server.

The difference between a tab and a bookmark is like between a book on your
desk vs. in a public library. In the latter case, when you need it, you have
to go there and fetch it - not only taking time, but also possibly failing, as
it might not be there anymore.

Is it a perfect interface? Not really. What I'd really like would be this, +
in addition a bookmark feature that actually freezes and snapshots the page
I'm on - to get the same behaviour as tabs, only persistent. It shouldn't be
hard for browsers to do, given that IME at least some browsers displayed this
behaviour at some point when restoring pages after browser crash.

~~~
Mirioron
I wish browser tabs also snapshotted the page if you close it and open it
again. I have space on my harddrive. Use it.

~~~
organsnyder
That's an extremely difficult problem for browser makers to solve in a generic
way: the state of client-side scripts might not lend itself to such a
snapshot, and the browser has no way to account for changes that have been
made server-side in the meantime (including new versions of the page content,
scripts, stylesheets, API endpoints, etc.). Your proposal reminds me of Java
object serialization, which I've rarely seen used in an effective way (and
only when the code and runtime environment are tightly controlled).

Webpage makers already have the tools they need to do this: the page URI can
be manipulated client-side to store state. And they can specify which content
should be cached for use in the future without a trip to the server—including
full client-side app functionality.

~~~
julianlam
Server side changes are moot (1), because in order to properly do state
saving, you have to save more than the assets in a simple cache, but also the
entirety of the DOM as of that particular moment and the state of the js
engine.

I couldn't even imagine supporting that in an app I wrote, much less in a way
that works for every website everywhere!!

(1) moot in the sense that it ought to act to server side changes much like
any static pages would become out of date when backend updates are made. If
the api endpoint goes away, then it errors, it's not the responsibility of the
browser to keep the app evergreen, imho

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _because in order to properly do state saving, you have to save more than
> the assets in a simple cache, but also the entirety of the DOM as of that
> particular moment and the state of the js engine._

Sure, it should do precisely that, IMO. Serialize it and dump it. All of this
is in browser cache AFAIK anyway, so it's not like it's some completely novel
programming exercise.

As for keeping up with the server side - I don't care. The "sync to the server
state" button exists, and is called "Refresh" button. Nothing needs to be
implemented by website author. In fact, I'd prefer if websites didn't have a
say in this at all - or else someone will find a reason to screw with the
mechanism.

------
frio
I'd love to see more publicly available research and experiments in changing
the desktop metaphor. We see stuff that makes tweaks around the edges (new
context menus, unifying file/cloud presentation, tiling window managers) but
very little that radically changes the way we actually _interact_ with
computers.

For my ideal work desktop, I want to have tools assigned per task that I can
easily assemble until that task is achieved. As a spitball idea: Cmd-space,
type in "research open sourcing my kindle", and get given a browser and some
sort of note collector. Collect the various things from the session into my
note, refile the entire stack as a project, and move on to the next task. In
the future, I can access the actual project and receive a workspace with
terminals, an IDE or whatever else I need to Get the Thing Done, archived
versions of the sites I opened, etc. Ideally, the environment would be
designed to reduce distractability.

That still doesn't feel like a complete idea, but every use case the author
has for tabs -- "this is a quick session", "I don't want to lose this page",
"I need to remember this in a week" \-- seem like they'd be very hard for
_browsers_ to do well. Instead, a browser more closely integrated with the OS
(which might go a way towards fixing Electron resource consumption to boot)
and a uniquely designed desktop environment might be better.

~~~
wlib
While it is only a design concept, Mercury OS [1] might interest you. When I
first came across it, I was blown away by the idea. It basically makes the
user intent first class rather than the application/program. What I mean is
that instead of finding a program or application to execute your intention
indirectly, you declare your intent to the OS. Then the OS maps your intent to
a series of actions which are executed by hooked-in pseudo-functions. It
erases the boundary between applications by being almost like an interactive
visual version of a declarative programming language. You should read the
article rather than trouble yourself with my explanation though...

[1] “Introducing Mercury OS” by Jason Yuan
[https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX](https://link.medium.com/USD9Pj6svX)

~~~
frio
Thanks, I'll take a look!

------
ChrisSD
The trouble with bookmarks is they take conscious effort to create and
maintain.

The trouble with history is that it's a soup of every random page you've ever
visited.

The trouble with tabs is they're a collection of web pages you at one time
thought you might get back to, roughly sorted by the time in which you first
opened them.

~~~
m463
The way history is always implemented is also not helpful.

Say you browse sites A B C D E, then later you go back and browse D, then B.

History seems to be recorded as A C E D B

But recording A B C D E D B might be more cluttered, but more helpful as well.
It shows you the decisions you made to browse from one thing to another.

This compaction method also seems to happen across days, destroying the list
of everything you browsed on tuesday in order.

~~~
patrick5415
Completely agree. I don’t really understand the motivation for this
behavior—surely they are not trying conserve disk space? I’d really like the
history to just be like a log file. Even better if I could search within a
specified time window.

~~~
dx034
Chrome shows the history as ABCDEDB. Just searches within time frames aren't
possible.

I find the history in Firefox much less useful, one of the few areas I find
Chrome superior.

~~~
Mirioron
But chrome deletes your old history.

------
dmoreno
As a side note looks like Adobe has a patent(!) on tabs... And it expires
today!

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528](https://patents.google.com/patent/US5546528)

~~~
DonHopkins
Hurray!!! Indeed it is!

>2019-06-14 Application status is Expired - Lifetime

Wow, thank you for catching that and pointing it out, so I can celebrate just
in time! How did you happen to coincidentally run across that fact today? ;)

(I have always believed was illegitimate and invalidated by a lot of prior
art, but I didn't realize that its death date was imminent.)

~~~
akovaski
Google patents always shows the current date for that line. It actually
expired back in 2014.

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US991876A/en)

~~~
DonHopkins
Oh, Google... You mean I should have started rejoicing five years ago??! Well
better late than never.

At least I don't have to have my Cotton Gin Patent Expiration Party on the
same day as my Tabbed Windows Patent Expiration Party.

------
ximm
I used to have many tabs open myself. Not so much for different tasks, but
more for "i don't have time for that now, I will read it later".

Now I use a firefox extension called "Bookmark Stack" for that. I can easily
add the current page to a stack and later restore it. Since it is a stack, the
most recent entries are always displayed first. Since these are bookmarks,
syncinc is also easy.

I wrote that extensions myself, but there are others like it. Since using it,
I rarely have more than 10 open tabs. That may not suite every workflow, but
it definitely helped me.

~~~
alanbernstein
This sounds like a good idea, I'll give it a try. Do you find your stack
growing consistently? That's what I'd expect for myself.

~~~
ximm
Yes, the stack is growing (currently somewhere around 200). However, I think
in terms of resources it's better to have a lot of bookmarks than to have a
lot of open tabs. Also there is almost some kind of gamification to try to
reduce the number.

------
spenrose
There's an old joke about four-wheel drive on cars: instead of getting stuck
right when you go off road, it ensures that you'll get pretty far into the
woods before getting stuck. IHMO that metaphor applies here. Like the Web,
Google, and even the WIMP interface before them, tabs were invented to manage
information overload but "succeeded" only in pushing the problem out a layer:

"The most sophisticated and efficient users of Google today find that “trying
to navigate the growing deluge of data [just within their scientific field]
has become a second job.” The United States’ library of scientific papers for
health and medicine adds new ones at a rate of two a minute, year round. Like
Memex and the Web, Google has solved the problem of published work burying
itself unread by pushing it out to a vastly wider layer, one we will perhaps
never manage to tame. We have not escaped [Vannevar] Bush’s quandary:

Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought [find
that] truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the
inconsequential. … publication has been extended far beyond our present
ability to make real use of the record."

[http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-
knowledge/](http://whatarecomputersfor.net/the-worlds-knowledge/)

------
faitswulff
An aside, but on firefox you can use the URL bar to search your open tabs by
prepending your query with %

This works across windows as well. The other one I use even more is ^ which
searched browser history. Quite handy.

------
downtide
The history here, is that Opera introduced tabs, and they were cheaper in
terms of resources. Tabs in Windows were cheaper than many windows. Then tabs
became a sort of replacement for Bookmarks, because bookmark UIs are so so
bad. That's my take on it.

Gnome 3, started out suggesting that it would be a semantic desktop, allowing
groupings associations of activities. That fell by the wayside, so the best
thing left is to use something like virtual desktops to separate
projects/workflows. But then you are pushed into multiple windows likely with
multiple tabs.

I use multiple browsers on multiple devices, and bookmarking isn't that nice.
I see why people end up using browser syncing and end up in vendor traps. On
desktop, I can easily copy paste urls. Perhaps into my own mini-shared db for
read it later style groupings. On mobile copying URLS is hell for me.

Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best use
a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the heart of
your desktop. It would need to be more than 'recently used/accessed'.

I have tried running Firefox with the bookmark manager open and the history,
but it has been really poor performance wise, and it's just not a nice
interface.

Looking at my tabs today, I have a small grouping of shopping tabs, of things
I might be interested in ordering. From about three weeks back. I know if I
throw these into bookmarks, and even tag them, they'll still be lost. I should
probably have dealt with that there and then. I tend to build up tabs in
Firefox, once I hit the width of the browser with tabs and they scroll it
becomes UI hell for me. So I try to confine to about 12, but that's easier
said than done. And as said I run multiple browsers, at least four on mobile
and four on desktop. Throw tabs into the mix and it gets ugly. But if this was
reduced to something like a simple list of URLs, with some grouping shared
between machines that I could relaunch easily, probably in the same browser I
was using previously they'd feel much more manageable. And less crufty.

Going back to the shopping example, that's task focused. And it might be
accompanied by a few notes written in another app, and I might want to share
that with my partner via email etc. Associations have to beyond one piece of
software.

~~~
292355744930110
> Imagine throwing tabs away. If windows were cheap again how could you best
> use a Window manager to manage them? It feels like this should be at the
> heart of your desktop.

Sounds like you are describing surf[0] and tabbed[1] from suckless.

[0] [https://surf.suckless.org/](https://surf.suckless.org/)

[1] [https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/](https://tools.suckless.org/tabbed/)

~~~
downtide
Thanks for the pointers.

------
aiyodev
This seems like a good place to ask. There was a Firefox extension called
(edit: not sure if it was Tab Mix Plus or something else) that was
discontinued after Firefox 57. It was super productive and still haven't
haven't found anything like it to replace it.

To be clear, I'm talking about grouping tabs but I'm not talking about the
current Firefox feature called "Tab Groups". You had a row of tabs that showed
the web pages open in the current group. And you had a second row of tabs that
allowed you to switch between tab groups. You could close a tab group and
close all the tabs within the group.

Has anybody found an alternative even if it's in a different browser? I
dislike having multiple browser windows open.

~~~
morsch
Tree style tabs (Firefox) works in much the same way, assuming you have a
parent tab for each group.

I routinely start a research task from one tab, say a search query, open all
interesting results in sub tabs and close the parent tab including all
children (ie the group) once I'm done (or I collapse the group when I intend
to resume later).

~~~
aiyodev
Thanks! I'll give that a try.

------
Traster
Man, okay so clearly we all agree there's a problem and it sounds like we all
have different ideas for a solution. One of my pet ideas - that I'm yet to see
a real implementation of - is a Hacker News comments section style history.

Each new session would start a new comments section.

Each new manually opened tab would be a top level 'comment' (with timestamp).

Each pageload would be a paragraph in that 'comment'.

Each new tab opened via a link would be a 'reply' to that comment quoting the
'paragraph' it was opened from.

That seems like a good metaphor to me because it solves the traceability of
"How did I get to this page". It doesn't solve the UI of tabs though, though
maybe it makes it less necessary to keep tabs open.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Tabs Outliner seems to match some of these ideas. I've had it installed some
years ago, but didn't end up using it that much.

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl)

~~~
vxNsr
I use it, but not often enough to make a real dent, my issue is that it isn't
integrated into the browser, it's a feature that with some UI tweaks could
really make everyone a poweruser, the concept itself is powerful but the un-
extensibility of chrome (and browsers in general) holds it back from being a
true first party app.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Agreed. And it's one of the reasons why I dislike the trend of the browsers
being increasingly locked down and non-modifiable. Soon, even to recreate this
plugin you'll have to run a parallel fork of a browser.

------
huffmsa
I think it's equivalent to having books open to a page and set to the side of
a work area.

Whereas a browser bookmark is like it's analog cousin, a mark stuck in the
book and returned to the shelf.

Tabs allow for better singular focus than stacked windows. I use desktop
workspaces/multiple desktops in much the same way I use tabs. If I have
multiple monitors, I'll put a group of related applications together in a
workspace, but rarely will I put more than a single application on a monitor.

Eg editor on one screen, terminal on the next and a browser (UI work) or DB
interface on the 3rd. Which is the same way I organize my kitchen when
cooking. Recipe on one side, prep in the middle, output on the other.

------
spython
I just have to link to my blog post on browser tabs:

Open tabs are cognitive spaces -
[https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/](https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/)

I think the next step would be to try and solve context switching between the
spaces, making it less of a conscious task.

~~~
DonHopkins
Oh, just what we need on Hacker News: another Spaces -vs- Tabs War! ;)

Xerox PARC harmoniously researched both spaces AND tabs:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_space)

[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-0-585-29603-6_2)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1w9_cob_zw)

------
andrewstuart
I usually have at least 6 browser windows open with at least 10 or more tabs
each.

I wish there was a better way to do it.

I work on projects for a few days or hours at a time, and maybe only 10 of
those tabs are relevant to a given project.

I'd like to be able to somehow only have the relevant tabs for my current
project or train of thought.

Someone suggested I use the people profiles in Chrome which seems a good idea
but obviously not good enough cause I'm not doing it.

~~~
wazoox
Tree Style tab does this and more. You can pin permanent tabs on top, and keep
the others neatly organized in a hierarchical tree.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Tree Style Tabs is the biggest thing anchoring me to Firefox - the reason why
I _can 't_ switch to Chrome.

------
aequitas
I really hope this concept takes off:
[https://refresh.study/](https://refresh.study/)

~~~
AstralStorm
I'd skip the context sensitivity part. The browser is not a high grade AI that
knows what you're doing nor should it attempt to be one.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
you mean the different "spaces" in the video for work, thesis, etc.? i don't
think that's AI driven, it looks like the user manually puts a tab into a
space and tabs open in the current space by default.

------
luhn
I used to use an extension called Tab Wrangler [1], which would close tabs
after being inactive for a period of time. I felt this dealt with the problem
of too many tabs surprisingly well—Tabs would quietly disappear as I forgot
about them. If I needed a tab back (which was more rare than I would think),
Tab Wrangler could show me a list of tabs it had recently closed.

I've switched to Firefox a while back and unfortunately cannot find an
equivalent, so I'm back to manually wrangling.

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
wrangler/egnjh...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
wrangler/egnjhciaieeiiohknchakcodbpgjnchh)

~~~
YaxelPerez
Seems like it's been ported to firefox already:
[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tabwrangler/)

------
Gibbon1
I feel like what I want is really a 'view' rather than bookmarks.

Create/label a collection of tabs as a view. When you can name, 'work',
'bills', 'house', hobbyX, hobbyY, hobbyZ.

Open a view and it'll open all the bookmarks associated with that view. Edit
views by simply dragging and dropping tabs into them.

Even better would be to include files and documents as well.

~~~
chowes
Check out [https://workona.com/](https://workona.com/). Been using it for work
recently and really enjoying it.

~~~
captainill
Been really enjoying workona as well. Have found myself recommending to folks
on my team. I organize my tabs into their “workspaces” which map to the
strategic and tactical projects I’m juggling. Helps me switch btwn contexts

------
pcurve
I recently found in surprisingly difficult to explain the concept of browser
tabs to my relatively computer unsavvy 72 year old mother. She can do web
searches, read online news articles, and watches Youtubes, but browser tabs
were a struggle for some reason.

~~~
abacadaba
Perhaps relate it to tabbed folders in a file cabinet?

~~~
stan_rogers
...or good old-fashioned recipe cards. Most card files were arranged with
tabs, but a box of recipe cards would be more than familiar to anyone my age
or older. (You'd pretty much have to have lived out of cans and/or on
restaurant meals to have avoided them.)

~~~
jpindar
Or a rolodex or a card catalog in the library... these are where the idea came
from.

------
Jordanpomeroy
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I find that my usage of the web is more
like a mind map. In other words, a tree or a directed graph.

I open a tab to accomplish something. From there, I reach out in some
primordial/human-brain breadth first search of links in order to accomplish my
goal, branching off of branches and coming back up to some parent only to
branch again.

For people like me, a linear set of tabs is indeed the wrong abstraction for
the way I use the web.

~~~
raihansaputra
Do you use any extensions to get the browser to fit your usage?

~~~
grumdan
Tree Style Tab for Firefox is incredibly helpful to me for this kind of usage:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-
ta...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/)

------
jules
People use tabs as bookmarks and as history and back button. Users want
bookmarks and history and the back button, but apparently the tab feature is
better at this than the actual features.

Maybe browsers should embrace this instead of fighting it. Make tabs better
suited as history and bookmarks. Users reflexively middle click and then go to
that tab because they don't want to lose the page. The problem is that you
lose the pages that you visited in the first place. Maybe the default
behaviour of a link shouldn't be to navigate away from the current page and
hide the current page behind the back button (where you'll eventually struggle
to get back to it) or in history (which also isn't easy to get back to).

Maybe the default behaviour of clicking a link should be to open a new tab, so
to speak, but to focus it while attaching it as a child to the tab it came
from, thus creating a tree of history. Closing a tab just means hiding that
part of history. Viewing history is just unhiding those closed tabs.
Bookmarking is just reorganising that tree of tabs.

------
hjk05
Trying to solve a problem that isn’t actually a problem. Tabs work fine. “But
your using the tabs sort of like bookmarks” is like complaining someone is
using a fork/knife combo to eat pasta and wanting to therefore redesign a
knife that works more like a spoon.

~~~
social_quotient
What if the spoon didn’t exist yet? And people were just using the fork and
knife.

~~~
TeMPOraL
People would invent spoon anyway to eat soups.

As for pasta, I never understood the whole spoon & fork thing. I tried it,
it's not helpful. I do fine with just a fork, thank you.

~~~
technothrasher
Yeah, I never understood the pasta spoon thing either. I just don't see how it
helps anything when you can simply use the plate as a backstop for the fork to
roll the pasta correctly and not have hanging strands.

Apparently in Italy, the spoon rolling technique is only used by children.

------
Mirioron
> _I don’t think I would remove the tab altogether, but just show me the last
> few things, treat them as emphemeral and provide an option to explore my
> current and previous session(s)._

I would never use a browser that did this. I have many tabs open. I've even
started using several (!) browser windows and profiles to have more. Being
able to easily go back to previous stuff I've opened is really nice, even if
it takes me a year. If I had to use bookmarks instead, then they'd probably
stay there. I have many bookmarks that are about 10-15 years old. I don't
think I'm ever getting back to those, because they aren't a constant reminder
like browser tabs are.

------
DonHopkins
Tabs on the left and right edges of the windows work much better than top or
bottom tabs, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a lot more
tabs, and actually read their labels.

Users should be able to decide which edge and position each tab is attached
to, and move them around and group them as desired.

These are the tabbed windows I developed for the multi-window version of
UniPress Emacs 2.20 in 1988:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_\(interface\)#/media/File:HyperTIESAuthoring.jpg)

Users could move the tabs to any edge of the windows in the NeWS PSIBER Space
Deck, in 1989:

[https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-
oct...](https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-shape-of-psiber-space-
october-1989-19e2dfa4d91e)

Figure 3 shows the class dictionary of Object, and the instance dictionary of
the NeWS root menu:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.g...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*y5wrMJUyP69L4_9r.gif)

Figure 7 shows some digit editors, step editors, shift editors, a boolean
editor, and a canvas editor:

[https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.g...](https://cdn-
images-1.medium.com/max/800/0*5srS0w6nxQwTSCmq.gif)

The tabbed window manager for The NeWS Toolkit let users drag tabs to any
position along any side of the window:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4)

Previous HN postings about tabbed windows:

Side tabs are great, because text is wider than it is tall, so you can fit a
lot more of them on the screen, to manage more windows. (2014):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8042726)

"As if all that wasn’t enough, there’s also the matter of tabs. Tabs are a
couple of decades old now, and, like much of the rest of the desktop and web
environment, they were initially thought up in an age where the predominant
computer displays were close to square with a 4:3 aspect ratio." Tabs are at
least three decades old now, and they weren't originally restricted to just
one edge of the window (2018):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16875730)

~~~
imglorp
Hi Don! Tabs aside, NeWS got so many things right, and not just at the UI but
the underlying idea of code instead of bitmaps.

I wonder if we were going to start afresh with Wayland/X11 now, bare hardware,
what place do you think the NeWS lessons would have? Would a modern NeWS be on
top of PS or is there something better now?

~~~
DonHopkins
Hi Imglorp!

Simply use a standard JavaScript/WebAssembly/WebGL/Canvas/HTML based web
browser as the window system itself! And use WebSocket/SocketIO/RTP/HTTP
instead of the X-Windows or VNC protocols.

Microsoft kinda-sorta did a half-assed inside-out version of that with Active
Desktop, but Internet Explorer wasn't powerful or stable enough to do it
right, and it didn't eliminate and replace the whole Win32 / MFC layer, which
misses the main point.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop)

There was recently this discussion about a browser based Mac window manager
project (now offline), and there have been others like it (Slate), but the
ideal goal is to completely eliminate the underlying window system and just
use pure open web technologies directly on the metal:

Show HN: Autumn – A macOS window manager for (Type|Java)Script hackers
(sephware.com):

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18794928](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18794928)

Site archive:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190101121003/https://sephware....](https://web.archive.org/web/20190101121003/https://sephware.com/)

Comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797587)

>I was also quite inspired by Slate. Unfortunately there hasn't been any
activity with it for about 5 years or so. It's great you're picking up the
mantel and running with it, because the essential idea is great!

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818)

>Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window
management and accessibility to check out:

------
eludwig
What I would love is an extension (either FF or Chrome) that allows me to
reuse an open, matching tab when I choose a bookmark. For example, I find
myself opening a bunch top-level Google News tabs. In a window with 40 tabs,
at least 6 or 7 are the top-level Google News page (or NYT homepage). I would
love to be able to select my bookmark and have it find an already existing tab
that contains an exact match and bring that tab forward.

This would reduce (for me) a large amount of tab flotsam. Maybe there is
already a way to do this?

~~~
mattnewton
For me, the chrome search bar also searches my open tabs, and I frequently
navigate that way. Is that close enough?

~~~
eludwig
I generally find myself using my favorites menus rather than the url bar. Not
sure I could get used to that. Thanks for the suggestion though!

------
ggm
If you use a tiling WM, the immediate question which comes up is : can I
switch this to a clean single-desk view, or is this neccessarily a tiled plane
of n things, and this is one of n?

Tabs, are an attempt not to have to switch desktop, or tile the plane. Its a
"stack" metaphor, with the least cost exposure of the underlying stack, as a
shuffled hand of cards fanned out.

Hand of cards, vs one piece of paper per desktop but many desktops, vs I cover
the one desk, but all things have to balance the space.

------
kirubakaran
This is exactly what I'm working on solving!
[https://histre.com/](https://histre.com/)

Automatic bookmarks based on the signals you generate from browsing, history
laid out as a tree, tabs remembered with temporal grouping so you don't have
to keep them around. Notes and tags, with everything searchable, shareable,
and easy to publish.

Next up, unification of them all.

------
mikojan
Why would users who do not even understand bookmarks understand anything
beyond just keeping dozens of tabs they think they might need

------
lordlimecat
I'm not clear why the author thinks that his dislike of others usage patterns
means that there's a problem in need of solving.

If his friends and family are happy with using tabs that way, this seems like
a very poor reason for browser vendors to change things up to show them the
light of his workflow.

------
ggregoire
Browser tabs are the wrong metaphor when used with only 1 window. If you keep
unrelated tabs in different windows it makes way more sense and the number of
tabs stays relatively low.

An obvious use case is to have a window for your work and another one for your
personal stuff. You can also open a new window when you start googling stuff
about a specific topic (let’s stay “how to do x in Python”). Then, when you
got your answer, you just have to close the window with all its tabs.

------
rgoulter
I'd think part of the challenge of coming up with the UX of "the right
metaphor" is the discoverability and intuitiveness of the solution.

Tabs are really obvious. You can do a bunch of stuff with tabs and there UI is
so apparent that it doesn't get explained.

Apparently the usability threshold for people with 100s of tabs open is (a
modern browser's) bookmarking. Any superior solution would need to be more
obvious than bookmarks and easier to use than bookmarks.

------
chrisbrandow
First tabbed browser = Netcaptor

~~~
taneq
Huh, I always thought Opera was the first tabbed browser but according to
wiki, BookLink Technologies' InternetWorks browser was the first, followed by
Netcaptor three years later.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_\(interface\)#History)

~~~
V-2
Opera popularized them. The notion that it invented them is a very common
misconception though.

------
Pete_D
I daydream sometimes about having a browser where tabs behave more like
buffers in vim or emacs - that is, with no tab bar or particular ordering on
open pages, but with them just hidden in the background, with some kind of
about:pages interface (like emacs ibuffer-mode) where I could sort/filter them
and bring individual ones back to the foreground.

(Split panel view would be nice, while we're at it.)

------
saketmehta
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned Edge. As far as tab management is
concerned, it is superior to both Chrome and Firefox.

~~~
downtide
Can you add a brief explainer?

~~~
rgoulter
I've used Edge for the last couple of weeks.

There's a button on the top-left which collects the current tabs in the window
and puts them aside. They can be restored later.

Personally, I've only used this by accident. But I could see it being useful
for "I know I want to come back to these tabs later (e.g. tomorrow), but I
want to close the browser / do other things now".

~~~
downtide
That sounds like a way to save a browser session that comprises of tabs.
Perhaps a better UI. Many browsers have had the ability to
group/tabs/bookmarks. But it's usually quite clunky.

------
jasode
_> One thing that kind of interests me is that every now and then I spot
someone with a ridiculous number of tabs open. [...] Maybe commenting on their
poor organizational skills, _

I often hover above 50+ tabs open. Every week or so, I catch up enough on the
backlog to close some tabs and reduce it to less than 10. But I soon head down
another rabbit hole of internet research and it's back up to 50+ open tabs
again.

The bookmarks UI has extra friction because is a _separate area_ that I don't
want to "manage" and that effort isn't worth it unless the webpage is promoted
in my mind to "reference status". Having dozens of open tabs is just an easier
and a more seamless experience. I often cycle through open tabs with Ctrl+PgUp
and Ctrl+PgDn similar to cycling through active windows with Alt-Tab.
Bookmarks UI don't have a "cycle" mode.

Another problem with booksmarks is that the bookmark_links are not _open_. The
booksmarks manager UI only show the title of the webpage but not what _full
page rendering is_. Titles are often meaningless.

Of course, I could manually type in a better title when saving the bookmark...
or... just simply not close the tab and consider it part of a "queue" to read
later in a few hours or days. It's lazier and easier. Plus the full page
already completely rendered visually reminds me _why_ I wanted to read it
later. Bookmarks UI obscure the _why_.

For the webpages I consider as reference material, I do bookmark those. E.g.
weather page for a specific zipcode or a specific Youtube channel.

Examples of webpages being categorized into different mental organization
buckets:

level 1: throwaway content: a trail of leaving a bunch of active tabs open is
easier to get to than the friction of navigating the bookmarks UI

level 2: reference material that changes: bookmarks for things like weather
page, current US Treasury yields, etc. Bookmarks are also useful for
syncing/import/export across devices since bookmarking services sync at the
level of "bookmarks" and not "open tabs".

level 3: reference material archived: webpage saved locally as .MHTML or .PNG
-- to ensure I have a copy even if the url is lost from digital rot. Others
might use Evernote or Zotero to archive webpages.

I do agree that Chrome squishing the tabs into tiny vertical slices makes it
harder to use. I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a dock on
the side. This would work well for widescreen monitors since many webpages
would show useless whitespace on the sides when the browser is full screen.

~~~
legooolas
> I wish they had an option to show open tabs list in a docked on the side.

Vertical tabs extensions exist on Firefox, and are one of the major reasons I
have stuck with Firefox for a long while.

edit -- I use this one : [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs-reloaded/)

------
Shorel
I remember when Opera (around version 4 or 5) was known as "The Tabbed
Browser".

