An advantage of the tab bar on top is that it's always visible. I can glance quickly and find if that tab I'm looking for is to the left or to the right and use ctrl+tab or ctrl+shift+tab. Or maybe there's just a few tabs, so I can jump around with alt+1, alt+2, etc.
Having a menu that needs to be deployed makes the whole process slower -> I first have to open the menu, _and then_ I can start deciding which way I want to switch.
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you use the browser for hours a day it is, because there's this additional cognitive cycle of having to request information to be displayed first -- rather than have it always present.
Finally, the tabs on the bar on the top have virtually infinite surface and are super easy to click. You see, a 100x100px button has a defined surface where you have to point and click. The smaller the surface, the harder it is to click. But a button at the border of the screen has one dimension infinite: I don't have to aim accurately on the Y axis, I can move my mouse beyond the top of the screen and will still hit the tab.
I like always visible top tabs but personally ctrl+tab has always been bs. Hitting it 10 times then ctrl+shift+tab once more because I miscalculated has never been faster than using the mouse
Enable the Most Recently Used ordering. That way you won't have to press Ctrl+Tab more than once or twice, because most of the time you don't need to tabs at the back of the stack. Imagine if the Alt+Tab switcher worked like most browsers—it would be pretty useless.
This is not an option in Chrome, for some unexplicable reason (Chrome has marked it as wontfix)., and it's the main reason I use Firefox. It's possible to hack around it with extensions and opening the Chrome extensions settings XML file and manually setting the Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab shortcuts, but it's fragile and annoying to set up, and has some odd behaviours in certain circumstances.
I have always hated the orders you describe. Means you need to mentally keep track of how long since you used each tab, and there is no deterministic way of getting to a specific tab other than slowly tabbing until you randomly arrive there.
Do you feel the same way about Alt+Tab window switching?
There is a deterministic way: look at the pop-up that shows the thumbnail in the most-recently used (MRU) order. Just like Alt+Tab.
If you're tabbing through more than five tabs, it's probably faster to click, whichever method is used. But at least MRU ordering lets you easily switch between any two or three tabs. That is impossible with visual ordering.
If a keyboard kept re-arranging itself according to which key was most recently pressed, you'd be typing a hundred times slower than if it doesn't.
Taking in visual information is super slow. I feel like a lot of interface designers don't get this. It's great that it's there as a training wheel to teach you the movements, but having to rely on it even as an experienced user is a constant source of frustration.
> Do you feel the same way about Alt+Tab window switching?
It's a good question. It seems to work better for window switching because I'm switching more frequently and in a more predictable pattern. It's usually between 2 windows (code window and browser window) or occasionally 3 (code, browser, documentation/reference material).
Whereas it's rare to be switching in a consistent pattern between any 2 code windows. If a situation like that does emerge, I rearrange them so the two I need are side by side.
I think people usually have wayyyy more tabs opened than programs. I might have 5-6 programs so alt tab doesn't take long to circle through. I might have 20 tabs that I'm currently using, and it is not unusual to go above that (and I know many people having 50 or more). In that case it is very slow to go through them.
It's a bit weird at first, but think the Chrome extension "Most Recent Used Tab Stack" works ok. It keeps the tabs sorted by moving the current tab to the left. That being said, I also prefer Firefox -- mainly because of its container extensions.
Switching from Chrome the most annoying thing in FF was lack of tab switching with Ctrl+<number>. Fortunately there are extensions providing that. Works great for 5-6 tabs, especially when it gets into muscle memory (not sure if that's correct term in this case but what I mean is that brain "knows" that ctrl+1 will be X and Ctrl+3 will be Y and can switch between tabs without thinking of their actual numbers)
Personally I've used TabCenter Redux and now Tab Center Reborn, tabs on side allow to see titles no matter how many tabs we have open, easy scrolling and grouping while not waste vertical screen space, witch is rare on modern 19:9+ screens (while we do not need much space on sides, since most screens are big enough)...
A couple initial thoughts as a Sidebery user that keeps ~100 tabs open:
1. The whole point of vertical tabs is that horizontal browser space is "cheap." Why not keep the tab list visible? Having it be a dropdown adds an unnecessary step.
2. Horizontal (Sidebery style) pinned tabs that just show the site icon are much cleaner. I have a row (8-12 tabs depending on how wide I drag the tab bar)of frequently used sites pinned at the top of my tab list.
3. It doesn't look like you have right-click move to window functionality, which is critical for my workflow. If you add it, be sure to make it work with the Titler extension so you can work with window names.
I'm glad you didn't put energy into tab trees - I think they are a waste of space. I have a window for each general category of tabs.
I have >1000 tabs open and probably many that I haven't looked at in >6 months now (most are discarded using Auto Tab Discard). I
This many tabs causes every tab management extension I've tried to be unusably slow. Even the Firefox multi account containers popup usually takes around 2 full seconds to load, presumably because it's counting the number of tabs for each container (a feature I would happily disable if possible) via a horrendously slow API.
Try multiple windows. I use Tree Style Tabs extension, and have around 1,700 tabs open across three windows. Yes, it can be slow.. sometimes.. but for the most part.. everything is pretty smooth still!
Yes, it's crazy.. but this is essentially my bookmark system.
I take backups of the "session" so if something did happen, I can recover all of them. And every few years, I quickly go through them and start afresh. Bookmark what might still be relevant, and discard the rest. It works for me
How do you take backups of your session? Is there a built in UI, or another add-on? I’m a heavy user of tree style tabs and would love to be able to “save” a window with 100 tabs in a complicated tree, close the window, and be confident I could open it up again later with the tree structure intact.
I wonder if my extension would work faster for you. I built it to be quick and simple so i can find a tab visually across many windows. basic features: click on a link to go to the tab, groups the tabs by windows, shows the favicon next to it, shows the tabs that are making noise, and allows you to close the tab via middle mouse button. cmd(or ctrl on pc)-shift-e opens it up in a tab. I'd be curious if you do try it to see how fast it is.
I use Panorama Tab Groups. It lets me group tabs into domains like each project or specific research topics. When I select a tab group the only tabs showing in the window are those in that group. If I select a different tab group it switches to display those. Tabs are kept in memory and not reloaded when switching. I don’t know if I would try to manage 1000 tabs in any system, but it does bring some clarity to my tabs.
You might want to look into a plugin that will snapshot you tabs to a bookmark folder or html list so you can save the list and then close a lot of them.
I can only recommend TabStash for fellow tab hoarders. You still get all your tabs, but only a few are loaded, making your browser much more snappy. (It can basically save the open ones, or the ones you find worthy either simply by date, or by some named groups)
I migrated from Sidebery to Tab Stash [0]. I found the user experience to be a bit more streamlined; I don't find myself missing the tree-style structure, but the stashes it provides are a good replacement.
I guess I'm missing the point because it seems to me like almost all of this can be accomplished in native Firefox. If I want to search my open tabs I just type a % in the address bar with my query and it searches my tabs. If I want to search for a bookmark (which doesn't seem meaningfully different from a star) I use a * instead of %. ^ is for history. For recently visited tabs I can ctrl+tab. Clean is basically close all except pinned but it also includes the tab playing audio.
I've increasingly found that my use of tabs is closely related to the fact that back/forward navigation is unworkable in many cases.
The most typical case is that I am looking at a list of things, and I want to click on a result but if I hit back, I don't want to wait an eternity for the page to reload -- if it even does; more often than not something breaks in the back navigation and the results I was looking at are not longer available or the context has switched.
Basically I want cost-free backwards and forwards navigation, and tabs are how you do that. But essentially I want that hidden from me. I would much prefer if under the covers hitting back didn't navigate you away from a page, it just keeps the page you are on in a virtual tab in case you want to go back to it. Similarly, clicking a link shouldn't navigate away from the page you're on, but just put it in a virtual tab.
Browsers model back/forward linearly whereas the mental model I want is more tree-like. If I end up going back a few times and then click a link in the same tab, I lose all ability to go forward again. So a lot of my tabs are the result of using “duplicate tab” so I can take actions that destroy the back/forwards state without losing the original.
If we’re going to have a browser implement instant, reliable back/forward, I’d also like to see some simple way of choosing from all forward actions I’ve previously taken. Because my browsing is so often non-linear.
I would be happy to have tabs on the top, then tabs on a side for all tabs opened from the current tab. I find that wish there were a way to group tabs opened together, for example when I am exploring several datasheets at once to select a suitable part. Sometimes a new window works well enough but for complicated browsing that isn't really useful enough. At some point the branches get complicated but even 3 layers deep would be enough for me before breaking into new windows.
Strongly agree -- this is where tabs as artifacts becomes useful. I don't necessarily feel that we need to eliminate tabs in favor of "virtual" tabs but that we can contain the "tab explosion" problem. One thing I do frequently is do a middle-click-on-back-button to navigate backwards but keep the current tab open; the enhancement here would be that this would be a cost-free and non-context-losing operation.
I thought it was only me, but so much yes. Back/forward is so broken and unusable websites make it even worse. Going back brings you straight to the top which kind of sucks if there is endless scrolling. Websites making it hard or impossible to open links in new tabs are really annoying as well.
Firefox and other browsers use an optimization called the bfcache (back-forward cache) that is intended to do exactly that. However, lots of web developers write their pages in a way that defeats the bfcache optimization. Moreover, bloated large page sizes (including JS objects) will make the bfcache more likely to evict entries.
Compare using back/forward on a boring HTML site like Hacker News, and to something like say, the Google Search results page. What's funny is that Google itself has a page on how to optimize your website for bfcache implementations, with some Chromium-specific tweaks, but the left hand doesn't talk to the right at Google, so we're stuck with lots of full page refreshes on Google properties.
The reloading of the google/bing/whatever search results page on backwards navigation is infuriating. I've been looking for options to turn it off in firefox but no luck.
A browser/extension that saves a snapshot when you click a link. When you click back, the snapshot is magically[1] restored.
Hold my beer, I'm gonna try to "snapshot" with iframes or something.
[1] I don't know if it's even possible, since this goes beyond HTML, DOM, and memory; nowadays there might be a lot IO "open", e.g. webcams, sound, websockets, etc.
I typically keep one window for each “navigation group”.
Answering a single question, understanding a specific topic, finding the product I’m going to purchase (then purchasing it). That way I once I’m done I can close the whole window without looking at the contents of the other tabs (and risking (more) rabbit holes)
What would be the drawback to just show the page as it was without reloading? Too much memory consumed when retaining too much state from previous pages?
That is exactly how I have always used tabs. It lets you preload all your pages you want, and quickly inspect and dismiss them. On a google search, I might middle click 7 of the 10 links, and then immediately close 4 of them when they arent what I wanted.
On hckrnews.com I can first put my brain in "which of these is interesting to me mode", and then once they are all open, switch to reading.
I would prefer that a page like facebook, twitter, reddit only ever go back to the top when the refresh button is pressed. But since none of them behave as a web page should, it forces you to open everything in a new tab to preserve the page state. Middle click, close tab is the replacement for link click, back. And as others have said, browser back and forth is destructive. As you navigate you lose information. The link is still in history, but you have lost the relationship between what order things were navigated to and from, and which page led you to them.
There is a market for somebody to come around and completely redesign the browser chrome paradigm, replacing back/forth, history, tabs, and bookmarks with something more seamless that preserves state, intent, relationship, and time.
There should be multiple ways to open something. Super temporary, temporary, less temporary. There should be multiple ways to close something, remove from history, keep in history, minimize.
First, thanks for making this and putting it out into the world. As someone who always tends to end up with an unreasonable number of tabs, I'm always interested in more and better tab management options.
That said, I'm wondering how this compares with TreeStyleTabs (1) for tab management.
You might be interested in Sideberry (1) - it has tab groups as an additional instrument of organizing tabs, and automatically creates daily snapshots of hierarchy of tabs.
The right solution really depends on your use case. I'm perfectly happy with how tabs work, hardly every have more than 10 open.
Tabs are for pages i'm going to use in the next 30 minutes (or that have state i want to keep), bookmarks for things i need a few times per month, and pocket/readlist for stuff i might want to read in the future.
No need to waste screen real-estate on anything i'm not going to use soon. And there's always history if i need to find something I've closed but didn't save to my bookmarks or pocket.
I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF. Also, it uses some pop-ups that at times make it a bit cumbersome to use (still much better than FF without TST).
Since browsers are a place where we do a lot of work, I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers.
Yet, as many have said before, browsers do not seem to target power users: I cannot even change FF's shortcuts without recompiling the beast!
>Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF.
I didn't seem to have any issues getting the add-on installed in my Firefox. Yes, TST suffered from some instability when Firefox initially deprecated XUL and switched to the WebExtension model exclusively, but it seems to work fine now. It even picked up the theming changes in the latest update to Firefox seamlessly.
>I think this kind of approach to tabs deserves to land upstream in browsers
Edge comes close. It has the option to orient tabs vertically. However, it doesn't organize tabs in a hierarchical outline like TST does.
There’s also Orion, at least on Mac. It hasn’t replaced my daily driver (Brave), but I’ve been using it as a ‘container’ of sorts for LinkedIn and have found it to be pretty good.
Brave currently has vertical tabs as a flag-enable-able option, and if they add tree hierarchy, I probably won’t switch. But if not, I’ll likely move to Orion, which has been working well for me.
> I love the TST addon. Sadly it builds on an unstable API and is quite a bit of work to get it installed in FF.
The amount of nails FF has scattered in the road of moving the tab bar to the side is atrocious. At one point (in the halcyon days when the Firefox motto was "Your web, the way you like it.") tab placement was a user-configurable option in the preferences.
Then they removed that option, saying "Users can reenable the option with an extension."
Then they broke the extension for no good reason since, as you correctly note, with quite a bit of work is possible to install it.
I wish Firefox would get back to providing a functional browser instead of being a platform to install crap like "Pocket", "Hello", "Colorways", and whatever has flown beneath my radar.
I’m with you on the functional browser. I switched to Chrome for work because of how it does tab groups natively. I manage around 300 on-prem hosts, and I manage K8s and shit in two clouds, all with a fairly low rate of automation.
So I’ve got tabs open for managing VMWare, Foreman, two monitoring systems, two cloud providers, gsuite, and about eight spreadsheets at all times because that’s how we track assets and do IPAM. That’s like 20+ tabs that I bounce between all day long. I’m not going to use bookmarks to navigate this, I want a max of two clicks to get to the right tab. And so Chrome’s tab groups solve my problem perfectly.
Also, in my defense, since automating things and deploying an ITAM tool is kinda my job, I started here less than a year ago. My predecessors were let go when a new manager came in and found out that the Linux env was ridiculously insecure, and then they refused to make the env comply with some of the most basic security guidelines (like security patching more than twice a year). Then my counterpart left for a better job after three months, so I’ve been left alone to support an infrastructure that’s falling down around itself while also trying to secure and enhance it (i.e. rebuild everything).
I think I'd hate this. Every time you switch tabs, the order would change. This ruins the spatial organization I have in my mind. When doing research and opening tons of tabs, I have a general idea of where each tab is, letting me jump between pages quickly, even faster than using tab search.
There's a reason why when you zoom out to see all your windows on Windows (using win+tab key), Mac OSX (using mission control), or Linux, the order of the windows generally stays the same.
I want both. I want a stable ordering, which is roughly the order that I opened the tabs. And I want a recency ordering, to be able to quickly switch between the most recent handful of tabs I'm working with.
Fortunately, I have exactly that already. The native tab bar gives the stable ordering, except I ignore that because I'm a tab hoarder and only look at the Tree Style Tabs sidebar. Ctrl-Tab gives the recency ordering.
I certainly have complaints about how TST isn't able to provide all of the native functionality (eg the Send Tab To Device menu is empty, and the stupid native tab bar is still visible without a userChrome.css hack). But in terms of ordering, Firefox already gives me the two different orders I care about in a form that works for me.
I honestly have to clean up once I hit 5 or 6 tabs, so genuine question to those who keep many open – once you are having to search through a list, what's the advantage over just using history/bookmarks?
For bookmarks, I don’t want to have to manage a bunch of temporary bookmarks. With a tab I can just close it and move on, but if I had created a bookmark now I have to both close the tab and delete the bookmark.
Neat project, people have wildly differing browser workflows and it's interesting to get a glimpse of how the brain of this extension's author deals with the concept.
?? Firefox has an API for a Sidebar and yet they make it such a pain to actually switch to one.
I hear so many complaints about Mozilla for politics, etc, but my real complaint is that they haven't added a Vertical tabs option (which really should be the default on all browsers).
I love that you are rethinking tabs, I definitely see more people coming up with alternatives to this problem, eventually something will emerge as the new standard.
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing bad about the current implementation of tabs for the regular user, but when you are on 100-150 tabs then you know the tabs solution doesn't scale
But while we are on that subject: I don't want to manage all that mess (my history, my bookmarks, my read-it-later extensions, my stars, etc.).
Plug me an IA, a cortana, a Jarvis or a duck and let me ask it in plain language what I am trying to remember.
After some beeping noises it comes back with some answers, built from the stream of data that passed through my browser. And I mean the whole stream: video, subtitles of those videos, audio track, images in webpages, full text, etc.
Not just a list of URL I visited.
Wait, that's just Google@home, right ? Should I just live in Google search then ?
I've been using "Tree Style Tab" in combination with [1] to hide the old tabs and it's such a joy. I can group tabs by "topic" which is helpful when I'm working on multiple things in parallel which is pretty much always.
Treestyle tab is a must imo. You can even tweak some firefox config files to allow it to minimize to the icon width, then maximize when you mouse over.
I personally like the onetab extension very much. The best tab is no tab. The very notion of "tab management" is wrong. I just wish there were a way to synchronize the page via Firefox sync.
To provide a bit more context: OneTab closes (all, or specific) tabs and dumps the URLs in a stack, grouped by window or category to be quickly popped open/combed through at your leisure.
It's great for the times I get sidetracked and need to hold onto thirty pages of docs without keeping them open at all times; I use it as a sort of tab purgatory which I will probably not revisit (I have 1025 tabs saved at the moment ).
I remember a old addon for firefox that did as a "tiling window manager" of opened tabs...it was cool and useful, but now this addon does not run with the new addon api system.
What bothers me in modern browser UIs is the distinction between bookmarks and tabs. They are really the same thing. Bookmarks are just inactive tabs. And tabs are just bookmarks (that I haven't deleted). Closing a tab is the same as deleting a bookmark. Searching tabs or searching bookmarks - should be the same thing.
Just call them both "pages" and keep last N active in memory.
I'm wondering if smart history might be the end solution for tabs:
- Collapse history into start leaf and end nodes. The end nodes are your tabs/state. The steps to navigate to a node are less important for history. I don’t need to know the url of the Google page I used to get to fact X, what’s important is the fact. (The Google page won’t stay the same anyways)
- Opening a new tab starts a new history tree, with a possible parent tree.
This is very cool. Two things I wish:
* can it be a sidebar, instead or in addition to this popup? Then it could be up all the time, or how wide I want
* I wish it did tabs across windows - this only finds tabs in the current window, but I have multiple windows of multiple tabs open on my machine. (So of course I can't find anything, yes...)
If I'm researching something, I'll open more than 200 tabs. With Tree Style Tabs, each Google or Kagi search is a top-level tab, and each link I open from that gets opened in a sub tab. When I'm done, I'll store the useful tabs organized in an org-mode file - I have an Emacs script which grabs the currently-open tab URL and Title from Mozilla's sqlite database and adds them in org-mode link format to the current document (I can post it if anyone wants it). I can then close all that mess.
Sounds incredibly cool, to be honest I am a vim guy, but still is it your own script, is there any repo, can you share it? Also I was't aware that firefox stores open tabs in SQLite, can you point me what to type in Google to read more about it?
I misremembered, once the data was in an SQLite database but now it's easier to grab from the sessionstore backup file - it's compressed JSON. I then query it with jq and trim the newline - here's that part isolated with the format changed to provide a markdown-formated link:
By the way, I'm a longtime VIM user but have recently been converting all my notes to org-mode. Emacs with Evil is a good-enough VIM replacement for notes taking, and the org-mode format is absolutely terrific.
Tabs are my "this is interesting I might read it later" function.
For work, tabs are my way of not losing information someone sent during a meeting or something. I click the link in the meeting chat and then go back later. I use a tab manager to sort them by domain, so all the wiki pages end up together, all the quip docs, etc.
Then every few months I go through all the tabs and either read them, bookmark them, or discard them.
Maybe it's just for the benefit of screenshots, but it looks like I'd have to click or right-click to use the cool functionality – I love the idea, but I don't want to touch the mouse to interact with my browser tabs.
I'm actually surprised to have never seen a tab bar that works like the osX dock zoom effect, it seems like it'd be a great way to glance through a large amount of tab windows quickly
You've gotta be kidding me, yet another system for grouping things that makes navigation take twice as many clicks and mouse moves.
I really don't understand what's wrong with you people, first you came for the taskbars, now for our tabs. Will you never stop until everything's completely collapsed and hidden several clicks away? WHY?!? I can't believe this stupid trend that's forcing its way into all parts of UI these days. Yes, let's make everything useless because D E S I G N.
Tabs make sense for document viewers. Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore. They are full-fledged virtual machines for apps (only those that can be written in JS and use typesetting engine as a UI platform - which is nuts, but okay).
The point is, web apps, like normal apps, require proper window manager. Why the hell I should not be able to switch to app when popup alert is shown in another app? Why I can't put two apps side by side inside this VM? Why can't I switch between web apps opened in browser in a similar way as in KDE, Windows or MacOS (Stage Manager type switching would be great).
There so much space for experimentation here. But no, we keep pretending that web apps are documents that need to be shown in tabs.
App vs document is a false dichotomy. I don't know about your usage, but I tend to have a small handful of open tabs that are on the app end of the spectrum (chat, email, audio/video, that's about it), a magnitude more tabs that are on the document end (documentation, blog posts, news articles) and the same magnitude that are in-between (shopping, project management stuff, hacker news).
The app tabs are the ones that profit the least from the hypertext paradigm; other tabs tend to spawn new sub tabs which are more or less short lived. I use tree style tabs to manage that.
It's easy enough to use my actual window manager to manage the app style tabs, by putting them in their own window. But for the most part, this hasn't been necessary. The Firefox popout video player has been more useful than I would have thought, though.
There are websites that are very much like an app, like Gmail or Slack. 20 years ago, most people used standalone applications for these.
Other websites are not app-like at all: Wikipedia articles, blogs like substack, API documentation; these are documents. And they still make up a significant portion of my browsing -- so yes, my browser is still a hypertext viewer. YMMV, like I said, maybe you mostly have apps open; I don't.
And many websites are in-between: project management tools like JIRA and shopping websites like Amazon are document-based (tickets, product pages), but offer actions on top of those documents, like an app would have. They also have external links like, you know, hypertext.
And the latter is true for even the app-iest of apps, which makes it useful to have them in the browser (for the same reason, some desktop apps end up embedding browsers). And conversely, even the document websites have actions that are more or less central to the experience, e.g. Wikipedia has editing, blogs have comments.
So there isn't a clear line between app and document, that's a false dichotomy.
Yes, it's true that sometimes the line between document and app is blurred. But I would argue it's blurred exactly because we use things designed for document to make apps.
Take "links" for example. In web apps, practically every action item is a "link" - either a "<a href=" or <button " that opens another link. But it's not because these things are links - it's because there is no other option to do it without links. If all is you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail. In a normal app (made in a UI framework designed for that, and not in hypertext engine), instead of links you would use events or function calls or some similar concept.
Likewise, "external" links. You can open external links from normal apps. You don't need to make app a HTML page for that.
So it's not a false dichotomy. If you have ever used desktop/tablet/mobile apps that have blog/comments functionality, you unlikely to think about those screens and functionality "as a document". No, it's just another screen of the app, that renders pixels and handles user input. You only think about it as a document when everything you have is "HTML documents".
I totally think that slate star codex blog post I read is a document, even though there is an app-like comment function I don't use. And I totally think Wikipedia is a bunch of documents, even though there is an app-like edit functionality that I rarely access. And I totally think Google is a service for (among other things) looking up recipes, which I think are documents, even though they sometimes have an app-like button to re-calculate serving size.
On the flipside, I think Whatsapp Web is an app and not a document, even though I know that it's implemented in what was traditionally a document framework.
Wikipedia is definitely a good example of interlinked documents, indeed. Blog is probably too (editing blog is entirely different process, though, and needs an app — you wouldn’t call Adobe Acrobat “a document” )
What I’m trying to say that it’s hard to draw the line between documents and apps if all you have is a tabbed document viewer and you forced to build apps on a document typesetting engine.
Probably separate windows for the tabs deserving to be promoted to apps and a tiling window manager would achieve what GP wants. We have comments here on HN praising i3.
However the always open tabs I work with most of the time work better in full screen mode on my 15" laptop. Sentry, TeamCity, YouTrack, Bitbucket, AWS (more than one tab), Google Cloud Console, the web apps I'm working on. Little space for tiling.
> Side-by-side tab tiling is an interesting idea to explore, a lot of IDEs have done that for years.
Firefox had this as an addon before Quantum. I used it often, even with a tiling window manager, because the tab tiles didn't have their own toolbars/etc - it saved a lot of space. Its modern replacement isn't very useful, it just arranges multiple windows into tiles, each with their own toolbars/etc.
I use Panorama Tab Groups to group tabs by project. When I click on a tab group the browser window only shows the tabs in that group. Selecting a different tab group swaps in the other set of tabs. It lets me have understandable groups of 10-20 tabs per project/subject.
Nobody's preventing you from popping out tabs into separate windows. In fact, for a while KWin allowed you to tab any windows.. sadly that feature seems to have been lost somewhere around the Plasma 4 -> Plasma 5 transition...
Well, in the early 00's when Firefox was starting to become a thing and it introduced the usage of tabs, it really mattered whether something was a local app or something that's primarily the contents of another server fetched and displayed/processed on your computer. It was useful to think of the browser be the "Internet remote window".
Now, since basically everything is an Internet app, perhaps the distinction between local and remote isn't too important anymore for most people.
As a backend software engineer, most long-running terminals on my machine are are often remote connections, and I don't tend to use tabs there (and like to tile them with tmux).
Sounds like the the browser could behave much the same way for me.
> I disagree. They still very much fulfill that purpose.
There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades. It's whole purpose is to develop apps using this hypertext document rendering engine. You're not wrong by saying that browsers' main job is still rendering HTML documents. But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.
Here are tabs I have open at the moment:
- HN (board app, not a document)
- Soma.fm DefCon radion (music streaming app, not a document)
- Facebook (social network app, not a document)
- Eurosport Player (video player, not a document)
- research paper (PDF, document, but not HTML)
- another forum (board app, not a document)
- Canva (graphics editing app, not a document)
- Miro (whiteboard app, not a document)
So you're disagreeing that those apps are apps and not the documents?
> There is a thing called web-development, emerged in the last couple of decades.
As someone who does web development, and has been doing it for longer than the last couple of decades, that statement seems unnecessarily dismissive.
> But most of the web pages that people use day to day are not "documents", they are apps.
While I would agree that the quantity of web pages people visit today that are 'apps' is substantially larger than it used to be, I do think there are a lot more plain HTML documents in use (particularly in boring corporate environments) than many who frequent HN would think.
Of course, if you are going to call anything that executes a significant amount of Javascript an 'app', I am not sure I'm interested in the argument.
My original response wasn't arguing about what was most common anyway -- you said "Web browsers are not hypertext documents viewers anymore." I was just pointing out that they still do a lot of that (and for things that I would not consider to be an 'app'). Admittedly the line between 'app' and 'document' is a bit fuzzy in some cases, but there are enough cases where (in my mind) it is not fuzzy that I still don't see your original comment as accurate.
Yes, you can both run apps and open documents. What I'm saying is that "tabbed interface" makes tons of sense for documents, and not so much for the apps. But browsers keep pretending that all apps are documents and deserve to be put in tabs.
There are niche operating systems (it was posted on HN but I can't remember the name now) that consider application windows and tabs as being one and equal; you can even have one window that has tabs from different applications.
I mean "tabs" is just one of many forms of hanlding multiple windows. They make a lot of sense for document viewers and alike. My claim is that browsers are so much bloa..^Wbigger that that. There is no reason to limit web apps to that document viewers type of window handling.
Having a menu that needs to be deployed makes the whole process slower -> I first have to open the menu, _and then_ I can start deciding which way I want to switch.
It doesn't seem like a big deal, but when you use the browser for hours a day it is, because there's this additional cognitive cycle of having to request information to be displayed first -- rather than have it always present.
Finally, the tabs on the bar on the top have virtually infinite surface and are super easy to click. You see, a 100x100px button has a defined surface where you have to point and click. The smaller the surface, the harder it is to click. But a button at the border of the screen has one dimension infinite: I don't have to aim accurately on the Y axis, I can move my mouse beyond the top of the screen and will still hit the tab.