
Stop abusing tabs. Love, Firefox - g0atbutt
http://codesketch.com/?p=1179
======
fragmede
I actually use separate windows for this purpose. Tabs have been draggable
between windows for a while now. Drag the tab off, you have a new 'group'. The
system task bar keeps an ordering, so I have spacial recognition.

Also, at one point, I was curious, so installed this plugin so I could stop
counting... <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4422/>

There's also tree-style-tabs... <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/5890/>

~~~
zach
I discovered tree-style tabs a few months ago and love them. However, I find
myself running Chrome for its superior performance on my Mac. Is there a
grouping tab manager anyone can recommend for Chrome?

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thejash
I laughed when I read this: "I just counted. I have 17 tabs currently open"

Am I the only person that sometimes has literally hundreds of tabs open? I
love tabkit, but a hundred or two tabs seems to be the limit with that
approach. I'm definitely looking forward to Tab Candy...

~~~
gnosis
I regularly have over a hundred tabs open in Opera.

I also found this part of the article funny, "I found myself abusing tabs.
Sometimes I would leave tabs opened for days, just chewing at my system
memory."

Wow.. tabs open for days? Try months! Once every few months or so, I go back
through my open tabs and clean out the ones I don't care about, and ones that
are actually worth bookmarking.

On rare occasions, Opera will crash and get in to a state where it can't
restore the tabs I had open. That's a real disaster... but at least it lets me
start from scratch with my open tabs.

I would like my tabs to be better organized, but wish the organization could
be automated somehow. Even bookmarking sites and organizing my bookmarks is
just too much of a hassle sometimes (though I do do it with some really
important stuff). With open tabs, I rarely bother.

~~~
plorkyeran
I have a few tabs that have been open for _years_. After the first time Opera
corrupted my autosave.win file I wrote an autobackup script for it (and these
days it's automatically committed to a git repo every hour then backed up with
the rest of my git repos).

------
markpercival
I'll preface this with, I don't have a better solution, so kudos to the FF
crew for trying something new. That being said:

I don't find this compelling at all. Do I really want to spend part of my time
browsing, by sorting and organizing my tabs into folders?

Did this ever work for email? I'm pretty happy with the Gmail model of
searching instead of organizing, although that probably wouldn't work for
tabs.

~~~
Qz
The idea is that you organize it as you go, rather than repeatedly wasting
time every time you have to figure out which tab a page is on by scanning the
tab bar.

As other people have stated in past threads, there's plenty of room in the
idea for automated organizing to be implemented later.

------
Ygor
This seems like a natural step forward in the browsing experience, and I for
one am looking forward to it. But, at the same time, doesn't it look like tabs
are starting to step into the domain of bookmarks more and more. What is the
difference between an old group of unread tabs and a standard bookmark folder?

The problem I see with this is performance. Currently, Firefox tends to get
really slow on Linux with multiple tabs open.

~~~
Qz
Here's a hint: there's no difference between bookmarks, open tabs (read or
unread), and page history.

~~~
jfields
There is a very big difference to those of us who don't have persistent
Internet connections. Because of a rather unique social situation, I spend a
lot of my time house-sitting at the home of a family member who died recently.
I have DSL at my own home, but that place has nothing except electricity,
water, and gas.

The result is that I tend to grab a large number of pages from my home
connection on my laptop, keep them as open tabs, and read through them when I
am away from home. An RSS reader like Brief (a Firefox extension) is also
useful for this method of short-term information storage.

My conclusion: an open tab (or a page successfully saved to disk) is something
you can use whenever you want, but a bookmark is something you can only reach
when you are connected to the Internet.

------
vault_
I guess I'm in a minority here. I rarely have more than 5 tabs open. I can
honestly not fathom ever needing to use more than 50.

To the people who use gigantic numbers of tabs, what does your browsing
workflow look like where you end up with that many?

~~~
kelnos
For me at least it's a combination of stuff I notice that seems interesting
but don't have time to read at present (yes, one would think a delicious
account with a "toread" tag would make the most sense), and stuff I find
useful and think I'll want to refer to again Real Soon Now. This just grows
over time, as the longer I leave something on my to-do list, the smaller the
possibility is that I'll ever get to it. Yes, I recognize that I have a
problem, but I'm not particularly motivated to try to fix it :-P.

Every now and then I go all "inbox-zero" style on my browser and close
everything and start fresh, but it pains me a little when I do this.

On my work machine, I usually have 5-7 windows open, each with 25-35 tabs.
Usually each window has stuff related to what I'm working on on that
particular workspace. On my personal machine I usually limit myself to 1 or 2
windows (I don't have an external monitor attached to my personal laptop like
I do with my work laptop), and I go anywhere from as low as 20 tabs to as high
as 60. Usually on the higher end, though.

Having said all that, I'm not sure Tab Candy would be something I'd use. The
video of it makes it look excessively cool and awesome, but I feel like that's
a level of organization my brain isn't wired to do on a regular basis.

------
die_sekte
I have "Mindfulness In Plain English"
(<http://www.kusala.org/udharma4/mpe.html>) currently open. I'm not sure, but
I think I've had this open for more than one week. Reading it should help me
with concentration. This seems somewhat ironic.

~~~
g0atbutt
I do things like this all the time. Frankly I'm surprised it has taken this
long for a solution to come up. Perhaps it's only power users that run into
this issue? I'd love to see some data on how people typically use their
browsers.

~~~
die_sekte
I know that my mother (apart from being a teacher, a very normal internet
user) also has quite a few tabs permanently open, but that's mostly facebook
and similar sites; she spends less time reading long articles than I do.

In other words: This is a problem that mostly power users who shifted all of
their reading to the web face. I, for example, now only read about 6 physical
books a year, but spend a lot more time reading online. I probably read the
equivalent of a small book every day, it's just that this happens in the
browser and thus instead of stacks of unread books I have heaps of unread
tabs.

------
Goladus
Only 17 tabs? Although I'd love to be able to organize tabs better, I don't
care about that nearly as much as I care about the performance of my system
when that many tabs are open. (a) Memory usage (b) risk of some plugin or
javascript on a page causing firefox to start eating 99% of my cpu.

Theoretically those two problems can be solved concurrently, but still--
favicons, hotkeys, and the ability to drag and drop solves most of my problems
with tab organization. I use alternate windows only when really necessary.

What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can
run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible.
One process will be for the relatively safe, familiar, and stable, text-
oriented type sites with minimal advertising (hacker news, gmail, wikipedia,
python.org, clojure.org, paulgraham.com, etc.), and the other process will be
for heavy sites, new/risky sites, or otherwise problematic sites (eg if I have
a youtube tab open I can't ctrl-PgDwn past it, when I hit that tab I have to
stop and use the mouse-- a pain in the ass).

While Chrome's process-per-tab model is really nice, they're still all tied
together and there's a risk of losing everything sometimes.

~~~
carussell
_What I'd really like is to have a second, isolated firefox process that I can
run alongside my main one with as much functional independence as possible._

What's stopping you from running a separate process?

~~~
eagleal
Firefox is a single-process application, and won't let you start another one
(at least sharing the same user data; you can run a different build, but you
can't share/use the same user data).

~~~
carussell
Given that you're looking for "functional independence", I don't understand
why you'd want it to run on the same profile. Share your bookmarks and history
between them with Firefox Sync, and tailor your selection of add-ons to the
types of content you'll be viewing with each one.

------
tl
When I used Firefox I had up to 15 tabs open.

When I switched to Chrome, I found that a few changes in behavior of tabs
allowed me to maintain up to about 75 tabs.

When I enabled No More Tabs, (a piece of advice from a recent article posted
on HN) I dropped to 5 tabs and I really haven't felt a lot of loss over the
change.

When I browse with my iPad, I use 1 tab even though the device supports more.

I suspect the anything related to "tab management" is solving the wrong
problem.

------
amatheus
Well, I'm pretty sure I'm in minority here. After abusing tabs for a long time
I decided to switch back to windows and I must say I'm very happy. Now when I
Command-Tab in Safari I get a new window. These windows pile on the desktop,
so eventually I must do something about them, either read, bookmark, when it's
something I want to read soon I just drag the page icon to the desktop. And I
think that's better for me personally than having hundreds of tabs open.
Usually I'll go clicking and filling the desktop and at some point, start to
read and close the accumulated windows.

But I try to avoid web applications for mail, rss and anything I can find a
decent desktop app, so maybe my way of dealing with windows wouldn't apply to
someone who wants to check gmail all day.

------
city41
I never understood why everyone left this task to the browser. Your window
manager's job is to manage windows, why not let it? I'll have at most 2-3 tabs
per browser. But A simple cmnd-tab or use of expose and I can do everything
Firefox is doing here, except even better.

------
g0atbutt
I wonder if Google will compete with this in Chrome. For that matter, I wonder
if a similar feature will make an appearance in Chrome OS. It would have the
potential to be a subtle, but important tweak to the desktop paradigm.

------
notahacker
Any innovation in this space is welcomed by a chronic tab abuser like me.

That said, I was pretty disappointed when they started talking about
identifying why you wanted to revisit a particular tab group and then failed
to take the next logical step of adding in timed notifications...

The spammy sounding recommendation feature and sinister-sounding tab groups
that could be shared in real time sounded like options I'd want turned off by
default too.

------
starkfist
I have nothing to add to this conversation. However, I have to say that the
comments about having tabs open for years, or hundreds of tabs open at once,
make me a bit nervous. Like when I use someone else's computer and they have
thousands of files on the desktop. I usually just slowly back away.

------
rodion_89
Hmm.. it seems like people are using tabs to deal with a problem that
bookmarks have already solved. Someone on here said they have one or two
hundred tabs open for months. Is that really necessary? Couldn't tabs
organised in folders solve that problem and increase your computers
performance?

------
swah
Could work, but I'm sure almost no one will take the time to name a group, so
you want to do that automatically (which you can do by finding out what those
pages have in common)

------
whimsy
Bartab ( <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/67651/> ) is a good
stopgap solution.

------
sliverstorm
Sure, I'll have 2-5 and sometimes 10 tabs open. But 50? 200? "Save to read
later" (as in later than in 20 minutes)?

I just use bookmarks.

~~~
danohuiginn
Opening tabs is faster than closing them. When I'm trying to track down some
information (say, understanding a bug) I'll generally open 3 or 4 tabs near-
instantly (variously-worded google searches, checks on the appropriate
bugtracker or forum, etc), then keep on opening new tabs until I track down
the answer. Once I solve the problem I forget or don't bother to close the
tabs -- it's a PITA selectively closing tabs, and they don't do much harm.
Instead I'll do a close all every now and again, when I reach a point where
there aren't any that I want open. But by that point it's quite possible that
I will have worked up 100+ tabs.

[I know there are extensions to more easily close tabs; so far it just hasn't
been worth the effort to choose and install one]

------
Zakuzaa
You'd downvote me to hell but I once had ~700 tabs opened all at once in 5
different browsers.

~200 is normal.

