
A Study of Tabbed Browsing - luu
https://dubroy.com/blog/my-chi2010-talk-a-study-of-tabbed-browsing/
======
Stratoscope
This seems to be all about tabs _or_ windows.

Am I the only one who uses tabs _and_ windows?

I have one browser window always open with all my everyday communications:
Gmail, Google Voice, Calendar, a corporate Outlook webmail account, a Discord
team, etc.

Then if I do something different I open a new window for it. If it's an HN
break, I open a new window for the HN home page and start middle-clicking (or
Ctrl/Cmd clicking) each of the discussion and site links that look
interesting. Now I have a window loaded up with those tabs that I can either
look at or come back to later.

Time to do a Google search on a particular topic? New window for the search,
then middle-click the most promising results. Now I have a window grouping the
research on that topic.

So I end up with a number of windows for different activities or topics. Each
of those windows has several tabs that relate to that specific interest.

I have one friend who opens _everything_ in a single window with dozens of
tabs and no organization to them. I tried to demonstrate this system of a
window per topic with fewer tabs in each window, but it just didn't register.

It seems so easy though: New topic? Ctrl+N for a new window about that topic.
Then open tabs within that window just for that topic.

And when I'm done with a topic, I can close all the tabs related to that topic
in one fell swoop.

I admit this is a very naive question, but it seems like such a practical and
obvious approach - so why doesn't everyone do this?

~~~
hawski
I do the same on Chrome, but on Firefox there were Tab Groups. For the time
being it needs to be ported to Web Extension. Firefox also does not reload all
tabs on start, unlike Chrome. That's a thing that I don't like the most about
Chrome.

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-
groups/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/)

~~~
DrScump

       Firefox also does not reload all tabs on start, unlike Chrome
    

That's a choosable setting in Chrome -- resume where you left off, or start
fresh.

~~~
tbassetto
That's not exactly what he is talking about. Both browsers can keep the list
of tabs where the user left off.

But Chrome will actually load all the opened tabs, while Firefox will load
only the focused tab when starting. It will load the remaining tabs only when
they get the focus.

------
mhd
One problem with tabs vs windows is that it just looks at two "solutions" and
isn't approaching things from a use case perspective. Not that this is easy,
with people having wildly different browsing habits.

Thanks to the magic of the middle mouse button, I always was a heavy tab user,
opening "sub-tabs" in the background for plenty of link-heavy sites (like
HNews). In the early days I created lots of top-level windows and used Expose
for switching between them. After discovering TreeStyleTabs, I became a one-
window guy again.

So it seems I'm in the tab camp. But there's still the question why I need to
have that many tabs open in the first place? It's not like I'm heavily multi-
tasking. There's a good reason for opening those three zeit.de news articles
in separate tabs, but why do I need to retain the tab group with 13 react-
redux links or 27 interesting CPAN modules?

We've got a problem with browsing history. For long-time storage, there's
bookmarks. I'm using pinboard for this for unified access and tagging. But if
I file something there, it might be that I forget it, so I keep a tab(-group)
open.

Heavy tab users seem to be closer to using them as TODO items than mere window
management. So it might be a good idea to look at TODO/GTD/Calendar apps for
improving the stats quo. Not just filing vs. on-screen, but different levels
of priorities. Maybe a bit of "AI", where Clippy reminds you that you've got a
tab-group stored that contains this exact Stack Overflow article about
handling NULLs in Oracle. And from there, you have quick access to the browser
history "surrounding" those pages, even if it was a year ago. A "mega-
expose/Jurassic Park file explorer" view of saved tabs/bookmarks, where you
can drill down by tags, text etc.

The tech wouldn't be the big problem, probably doable with browser extensions.
But getting a good initial design for this is the difficult part.

And then you find out that some Hypertext paper from the mid-70s already had
all that.

~~~
Vinnl
One of the prime benefits of using tabs as TODO's that I experience is that it
is literally _zero_ effort to retain something on your TODO list, and
practically zero effort to remove something from it. This means I don't have
to worry about losing things I still wanted to keep track of, yet the amount
of things I retain that I no longer care about is limited. Yes, there's still
quite a lot of tabs that could theoretically be closed, but the cost of
keeping them open is not that high (at least in Firefox, where they simply
scroll out of view).

So I'm not sure how much of a problem it is. There is a history function in
the browser, but it's cluttered with things I don't care about that makes the
things I do care about hard to find. If you look at __that __as a problem,
then tabs could actually be seen as a solution to that.

~~~
gkya
> the cost of keeping them open is not that high (at least in Firefox, where
> they simply scroll out of view).

As a way to save some memory, if you haven't disabled history and set Firefox
up such that it reloads your session when you quit and reopen, you can just
restart it every now and then, and only the focused tab will get eagerly
loaded.

------
visarga
About revisitation: is there a tool that saves the contents of every web page
as I browse, and creates a searchable archive?

I think there is a much higher probability that webpages I have seen in the
past contain relevant information for future searches. It could be used as an
offline library, or as an advanced revisitation mechanism.

~~~
severine
Yes!

If you're on Linux or Windows, you can use the amazing Recoll:
[http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/usermanual.h...](http://www.lesbonscomptes.com/recoll/usermanual/usermanual.html#RCL.INDEXING.WEBQUEUE)

~~~
hedning
Ah, that looks promising, though it seems like the web extension uses a
download hack to communicate with the backend, requiring you to let firefox
download such files by default. They really should use the native messaging
api, that would also make it possible to search from within the browser, which
is kinda important for a good experience I think.

------
INTPenis
"Out of sight, out of mind".

If I close a tab, the chances of me re-visiting it drop to 0.

If I keep it open there is still hope.

Sad but true, even though I'm from the era of web rings and bookmark folders.

That's why I loved it when I noticed that Firefox didn't load all the tabs
when you restored your session. So you can have tabs dormant.

Funny side effect of dormant tabs and the modern fast moving internet is that
I sometimes find myself re-visiting tab after it has gone 404.

------
Jaruzel
I'm a Chrome user.

I found myself getting lost in a maze of tabs AND windows, especially when I'm
researching a topic. So I decided to go 100% tabs only. I achieved this by
changing all the shortcuts I use for launching Chrome to include the newtab
param:

    
    
      Chrome.exe <my-home-page> -newtab
    

This forces Chrome to re-use the main Chrome window (if it's already got one
open) instead of launching a new window.

It now means I'm now only lost in a maze of tabs. Right now I've got about 40
open, and the top of my browser looks like a Toblerone bar. :(

I've tried extensions that put the tabs on the side, but I don't like the
wasted real-estate when you don't have that many tabs open. So I've currently
settled on the AllTabs[1] extension.

Personally, I don't think the ideal solution has presented itself yet.

\--

[1]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alltabs/fffhmhcill...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/alltabs/fffhmhcillaopdbhllfffhfhbcnkioco?hl=en)

------
dima55
Speaking of which, does anybody know how to turn off tabs in firefox, and make
it instead open a new window when it would like to open a new tab? My WM
already has tabs.

~~~
FRex
In about:config set browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick to true and instead of
Ctrl + Click use Shift + Click on links to open them in new windows instead of
tabs.

Also uncheck "Open new windows in a new tab instead" in Options in GUI or set
browser.link.open_newwindow to 2 instead of 3 (it's the same thing) to make
pop ups open in new windows instead of tabs.

There might be an extension to remap the Ctrl/Shift shortcut or abandon tabs
altogether but I don't know of any.

Googling turns up results like [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/tab-mix-plus/) but it's of course not compatible with
Quantum.

~~~
dima55
Thanks. I think I already did most of those. But the tab bar is still there,
taking up space. And apparently I can't remap keys without an extension, or
something.

~~~
bovine3dom
You can disable the tab bar with a "user chrome" file such as
[https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/master/src/static/...](https://github.com/cmcaine/tridactyl/blob/master/src/static/userChrome-
minimal.css) (instructions at top of file).

Mozilla is making noises about disabling this eventually, but it works for
now.

------
keypress
I first encountered tabbed browsing on Opera, and the other browsers later
copied. I think it was actually cheaper in terms of resources than another
window. So tabs are a hack, that caught on because Window managers on many OSs
are so poor. And bookmark UI is so bad, that people prefer tabs. But if you
use multiple browsers and multiple tabs, you can easily get discombobulated. I
say that, but I can probably cope with about 10 tabs in each, if groups of
tabs are related.

I like the idea of a freeze tab/site for later. Like when you shop or are
filling in forms. But I'd love to see a better bookmark/history UI - and even
have that embedded a bit more into the desktop.

------
paulryanrogers
Small sample size (21) and only one who preferred windows over tabs. Still,
may be worth studying more.

I prefer browser tabs after resisting them for about a year. And I still
prefer separate terminal windows. So maybe I'm not the best judge.

~~~
fro0116
Speaking of terminals, I personally find that a combination of panes (i.e.
arbitrarily nested horizontal + vertical splits) and tabs is really the best
of both worlds.

Tile Tabs [0] was an extension that used to enable this kind of workflow for
Firefox, but with the WebExtensions transition I thought it'd be no longer
available, but it looks like I was wrong. There's a Tile Tabs WE extension [1]
now, that attempts to replicate the same experience using windows, but it's
not quite the same in terms of usability and space efficiency, and makes it
mostly pointless if you have a decent tiled window manager that can accomplish
the same layouts (which is what I have generally defaulted to ever since
losing Tile Tabs).

This and vertical tabs are the kinds of features that I wish were built into
the core of browsers because it needs a lot of UX attention to really shine.
While I'm glad vertical tabs seems to be getting first-class treatment from
WebExtensions, it's a shame that panes-based workflows appears to be getting
shafted.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-
tabs/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs/)

[1] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-
we/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/)

~~~
four-yellow
It looks like they’re working on panes

[https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7hs9tn/teaser_scre...](https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7hs9tn/teaser_screenshot_featuring_firefox_with_native/)

~~~
fro0116
Beautiful! Thank you for bringing this to my attention.

The Firefox Test Pilot teams have been coming up with some consistently
awesome features, and generally with great UX.

I can't wait to try out their take on panes!

------
zerr
I use tabs instead of bookmarks.

~~~
superkuh
Right. When you save session files full of tabs you get the history of the tab
(how you found it, what keywords, etc) in addition to the site itself. It's
very useful.

------
paul7986
Hating Firefox now as there isn’t a Tab Mix Plus for Quantum.

I need to click any link, bookmark or search to open a new tab! This how I’ve
browsed the net for ten or more years.

Anyone else frustrated about this and found a solution?

~~~
lexicality
Lots of people are frustrated with their tab extensions dying and I assume
most of them (like me) are now using the ESR release. (Note that Mozilla
penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing
history)

~~~
Vinnl
> penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing
> history

aka they don't support profile data migration between versions. "Penalise" is
needlessly polarising.

~~~
lexicality
On the one hand yes, but on the other hand prior to 55 it worked fine.

I feel like they could have saved that up for 57 as part of the cake icing.

~~~
Vinnl
Actually, they never supported backwards migrations: it just happened to work
relatively well. They even explicitly noted this in the release notes. And
it's easy to imagine that it would cost a lot of effort, especially with the
massive amount of changes in 57, to support something that would be used only
once by a relatively small number of users.

------
amriksohata
Am I the only one who doesn't group applications in Windows OS? I like to see
what I have open and access it with one click rather than maintain multiple
desktops and hidden apps under icons

~~~
wingerlang
If you're using keyboard as your sole method of changing apps and windows that
doesn't matter anyway.

------
planetmaker
Did anyone notice that the study is about 7 years old? Maybe user behaviour
changed somewhat since....

