
The Inventor of the Browser Tab - sharmanaetor
http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/meet-the-man-who-invented-tabs
======
dredmorbius
This:

 _I think tabbed browsing gets out of control when users don’t have good
bookmarking systems. I have friends who end up with 50 tabs open at a time.
They want to return to a given page at some later date, but don’t have a good
method of saving those for later or remembering to return. On mobile, that’s
solved reasonably well with apps like Instapaper and Pocket. But on desktop,
that problem doesn’t seem to be solved. Bookmarking systems can feel to heavy
or permanent. And if you have been around a while, you know bookmarking apps
tend to come and go (ie Delicious and Kippt)._

Tabs (and I love them) are a poor solution to the horrible state-management
challenge of browsers.

What I _want_ is to maintain a list _of current references_ , preferably _with
some spatial context_ (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the
relationship is between pages in my browser session.

 _What I do not need is for every last single page to be open at the same
time, sucking down memory, CPU cycles, and worse: playing videos and /or
making noise._

That state-management is missing. Bookmarks aren't really it -- they're a
quick-reference to stuff you want to go back to, and as with any storage
locker or closet, suffer from the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in
the ass to go and sort through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out
the junk.

Browser history isn't it either: it's _too_ comprehensive, is insufficiently
contextualized, doesn't record context (other than, maybe, relative time). On
mobile devices it's a chore to sort out where in your history a given page
was. Site-supplied titles are often absolutely worthless for finding content
(though as I glance up at my browser's window title I see that HN is actually
pretty good for this).

There's a space between the comprehensive listing of everything you've
visited, and the highly organized catalog, that's missing in the browser
space. Effectively: the current workspace, with the papers and books with
which you're currently working open in front of you.

I've been playing with this stuff for decades and it's still a frustration.

~~~
Gambit89
You might be looking for the Tabs Outliner Extension for Chrome. I've been
using it heavily for the "middle-state" of saved and not open, but not
bookmarked; now I'm looking for a "meta Tabs Outliner"-esque program, but I
can't quite articulate my needs...

> What I want is to maintain a list of current references, preferably with
> some spatial context (tree-mode browsing is great for this) to what the
> relationship is between pages in my browser session.

Tabs Outliner puts every tab as a leaf in a tree, and you can nest leaves and
affect the visual ordering on the tab bar at the same time - you can also do
this reordering while the tab isn't even open! This is good for a while, but
for me when I have thousands, it's lacking in some retrieval sense: I guess I
want to query for just these tabs that have connections, and cross-reference
research annotations on these sets of connections.

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

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

~~~
dredmorbius
Hrm....

My first impression on watching this is that it's not quite what I'm looking
for (tabs open, list grows, they stay loaded) ... but the ability to close
tabs then re-access them looks promising.

The outline part is useful.

OK, this _might_ actually be helpful.

The labeling feature would be handier if I could tag/label sets of tabs.

I'm giving this a shot.

Thanks!

~~~
Gambit89
> The labeling feature would be handier if I could tag/label sets of tabs.

You can! Instead of tagging each tab, you can rename the containing window's
"Window" text, as if it was a manilla folder. Windows can also be contained in
(named) Groups, allowing for hierarchical categories. Bottom-up tags can be
accomplished by adding a note as a tag (I like using #hashtags to
differentiate from plain text). In terms of retrievability, Ctrl+F doesn't
discriminate!

> the clean-out problem: it's a goddamned pain in the ass to go and sort
> through the stuff you've tossed in there and clean out the junk.

I forgot to mention a workflow video for that:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvlK1ttZ3dI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvlK1ttZ3dI)

The dev has mentioned elsewhere that this extension is not (yet) designed to
organize, but rather to get a handle on the tens/hundreds/thousands of tabs
one may have open. It's done it so well that I have a lot of ad-hoc 'fuzzy'
categories and random notes inside my outline I would love to be able to
manipulate and build into a grand scheme or other. To use an analogy, it's
like a great grafter/sieve to separate the wheat from the chaff, but there's
no cooking oven.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yeah, I'm learning.

I'll still say this wasn't _quite_ what I had in mind, but it may well be good
enough in terms of tabs management (there's still the content presentation,
but that's another story).

I've been watching the vids, and they're _really_ helpful.

I've given this tool mention on my subreddit (comment so far, story likely to
follow) and on G+. After tabbed browsing and competing with vimperator,
probably the biggest revolution in browsing I've encountered in 17+ years.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_browsing_a_lousy_bandaid_over_poor_browser/chetplk)

[https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/B43j...](https://plus.google.com/u/0/104092656004159577193/posts/B43jhoXQuNQ)

------
samatman
I wish tabs were truly first-class citizens in the modern browser. I'd like to
be able to select with shift and command, just like files, a subset of tabs to
transfer to a new window, the ability to save and restore tab environments by
name, perhaps even email an entire window of tabs to another user.

~~~
ANTSANTS
Chrom(e|ium) can do some of these things! You can use shift and control clicks
just like in a file browser to select tabs, then drag the whole selection to
another window, or off to the side to create a new one. Easily movable tabs +
a tiling WM makes it surprisingly easy to keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open
(very useful when you're trying to research multiple topics in depth at the
same time).

It's my #1 most missed feature in Firefox, where you can move tabs
individually between windows, but not in a group. Trying to split off a group
of related tabs into its own window is so painful that I often just kill them
all and manually navigate back to them in the new window. It's a shame that
they wasted so much effort on the Tab Group feature just to abandon it,
instead of adding a tiny bit of functionality to the existing tab interface.

~~~
mmorris
AFAICT, the Chrome multiple tab drag to separate into a new window doesn't
work on Mac OS X, only on Windows (and Linux?). This one really hurts me every
time I need it on the Mac.

What's even more frustrating is that multiple tab select works (at least, UI-
wise it appears to), but then when you actually drag the tabs out only one
comes along.

~~~
ihuman
You are also still able to close multiple tabs at once. Besides selecting, I
think that's all you can do.

------
quotient
This doesn't impress me. Tabs as an organizational concept have been around
for a century, and they were most frequently used to organize sheets of paper.
Of course they'll get used to organize web_pages_ as well. I see the
"invention" of the browser tab as a totally obvious and inevitable porting of
a particular technology to a related field.

The guy who "invented" the mobile phone keyboard did not do anything special
by realizing that you could apply a keyboard to a small computer, and
similarly, the guy who realized that you can organize digital pages with
digital tabs didn't do anything special either.

~~~
sumedh
> I see the "invention" of the browser tab as a totally obvious

Anyone could have done it but nobody did except that guy.

------
nfoz
Tabs should be a mechanism of the windowing system and not of the web-browser
or other specific applications, IMO.

~~~
nwg
Agreed, application-level tab support is a short term win. I wouldn't want to
use a browser without them, but i would rather it was all a well thought out
part of my main interface.

------
glomph
For my money the person who invented middle click opening things in a new tab
without switching focus was the significant one.

------
randomfool
I find the timeline a bit murky- I could have sworn I was relying on tabbed
browsing in Mozilla m12 in 1999-
[http://beta.slashdot.org/story/8938](http://beta.slashdot.org/story/8938), it
was the single feature that caused me to switch.

The 1995 date in the article definitely preceeds 1999, but the path to getting
it into Mozilla does not seem correct.

~~~
kirun
The linked "directly responsible" more or less meets my memory - MultiZilla
first, Mozilla main later. The MultiZilla site of the time confirms it, the
history links point to a 2001 start which would make 2002 in Mozilla itself
reasonable.

[http://web.archive.org/web/20010603123052/http://multizilla....](http://web.archive.org/web/20010603123052/http://multizilla.mozdev.org/index.html)

------
metastart
I wish his browser NetCaptor (why not NetCopter?) had ridden the wave of
massive growth via tabbed browsing that got Firefox & Maxthon really big --
Adam deserved it.

(...I also wish Adam used our Epic Privacy Browser instead of Chrome :-(

