Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open.
I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature.
Shameless plug.
I made the ContainerTabsSidebar firefox addon[0], which is inspired by the TST. It groups tabs based on firefox privacy containers, which means every container has an isolated cookie store. I'm a tab hoarder and developed it to work for such "use-case".
It's very similar to the groups presented, but displays tabs vertically.
Very cool. I use Container Tabs so I can be logged into multiple AWS accounts simultaneously and this will be cool because they're sort of contexts. I wish I could see whole-desktop contexts but I'll settle for this.
Is there any other restriction/benefit in containers? I use the 'first party isolate' config option, and never really need e.g. different accounts logged in to same site, so as far as I'm aware there's no point?
I recently switched from an unmaintained tabs sidebar to 'Sidebery' which is quite nice in an 'overriding UI like it's made by Adobe' sort of way, which has got me using trees, and even tried containers (since unlike previous one it supports changing them and shows a coloured dot for which a tab is in) but I don't think it's gaining me anything.
With the first party isolate, mechanisms such as oAuth would not work. So the containers are less restrictive, but still allow you to have two sites with the same cookie context.
I've been using first party isolation for quite a while on desktop and Android and the only websites I experienced issues with are the Atlassian login and the Trello GitHub powerup.
Everything else, including tons of single sign in/OAuth websites, work without any issue.
Yep, ditto Atlassian. There's a big thread of people complaining about it on their forums too.
Unfortunately of course it'll always be a minority, and won't affect whether even those people (have to) use Jira or whatever, so not really any incentive for Atlassian to fix it.
Thank you for this - just what I needed! Tree-style tabs always seemed like a bunch of tabs thrown together with no organization, but your extension gives it the context that the user explicitly defined in the form of containers. I use multi-account containers a lot and this extension is just the supplement that was needed. Plus, being able to switch between container-tab view, bookmarks, and history is just the right thing to have.
I like this because it organizes my tabs in the same way I do mentally... however it doesn't actually reorder my tabs. What I mean is, Ctrl+Tab surfing through my tabs doesn't iterate the list as it is displayed sequentially.
I am planning to add automatic tab sorting to the plugin. There's a github issue for this exact problem. I just didn't have time to implement this feature. ;)
I'm probably missing something obvious, but I see in your review comments that I'm supposed to be able to add custom container names in the options... but I'm not finding them. Do I have to add through CSS?
It's not. But please make an issue on github[0] and if there's enough demand I will think about implementing this :)
Contributions are also welcome, though the codebase currently needs a bit of a refactor.
Tabs are bookmarks that can keep their state. Normal bookmarks have only the URL, and any parameters that go in the URL, but discard the rest, like your position on the page, your navigation history, or what you are doing in a PWA.
Tabs don't discard data, bookmarks do. Sometimes you just want the landing page and a bookmark is fine, other times you want the extra data and a long-lived tab is needed.
Tabs and bookmarks still feel pretty different. To update a tab, you activate the tab and then click links as usual. To update a bookmark, you activate the bookmark, click links, delete the old bookmark, create a new bookmark, and drag the new bookmark to the old one's location in the bookmark list (unless I've missed a shortcut here). Tabs feel very dynamic and are useful as a list or queue of work-in-progress, and bookmarks feel very static and are useful as a permanent list of important resources.
I'm pretty sure it's the same thing as Chrome's profiles functionality. I tried it out for a week, but it's not quite as robust as Firefox container tabs.
I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs.
This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.
Here's the bug [1]; apparently someone made it so on purpose [2].
In related issues, I'd like switch to tab to be consistent so that ctrl-clicking on an awesomebar result always opens it in a new tab, instead of depending on whether it found a tab or not.
You need a space after the '%', which always confused and annoyed me. But TIL: the special character doesn't need to be a prefix! It only needs to be separated from other characters using a space. Makes much more sense now.
I just wanted to post the same thought- I want tabs, bookmarks and history to be connected to the context of the tasks I am doing- sometimes I am investigating a problem and open 20 tabs and I want my browser to record this (perhaps how long I stayed on the site) and present this info to me in an intelligent way.
I've though about this a lot and the big problems in the way of this are state and loading time. The state is a problem because keeping a tab open is the only way to preserve most of its state (scrolling, forms, etc.) and the loading time to cold-load a page makes bookmarks much less appealing for things that are related to what I'm currently doing. After those two issues are fixed, the rest is just UI.
I think Edge has some pretty neat UI for this kind of thing with whatever that button on the top left of the tab bar is called, but I haven't actually used it much since everything else about Edge is a hot mess.
If we could somehow dump the whole tab state to disk and restore it later, that would basically solve both of the above problems. But looking at the memory footprint of modern browsers, I doubt that's practical.
State is why we use tabs instead of history. A lot of this thread is about what to do with tabs once they are opened, not analyzing why they open the way they do.
Back is unreliable. The page might reload, dynamic pages like reddit will generate new results or reorder them. The safe thing to do is click all links in new tabs and then come back to the original link page. Right clicking the back and forth buttons hides a ton of relevant information thats not visible without a context menu, AND its broken into two context menus. I have to remember which button to right click.
Even on a google search, its easier to middle click all 10 results and then close 9 tabs once i dismiss them than it is to click back 10 times and try navigating between each step. And if i run into a site i like, now im in the sticky situation of wanting the current tab open, and the previous tab in history open. Which one do i want to inherit the navigation history? Thats part of the reason its easier to ignore history near completely (only using it for specific linear non branching navigation.) Its significantly less thinking, mouse movement, and task switching. Step 1 open all links, step 2 analyze links. Not a back and forth.
I open tabs to replace all history navigation. I keep tabs open as short term bookmarks until they can be closed or bookmarked.
Do you have a solution for automatic archival? I'd like to have every single page I've been to archived, with awesome search. I've so often wanted to find a page I remember to have read, but simply cannot find it anymore. The archive would be "my known subset of the internet", a checkbox that sadly is missing in Google.
In my case, I found that the whole concept of managing tabs just becomes moot at some point. The only extension I use to deal with the load of tabs I have open is funnily enough vimium.
When you press <shift-T> the omnibar opens and you can search your open tabs and immediately jump to them, all without leaving your keyboard. This is way quicker than manually going through your tab list and searching for the right one.
Seriously, I don't understand the discussion here. It's a solved problem, and the solution is what vimium does: press a key that opens a tab searcher and digit a bunch of characters related to the tab you want to go to, and you get presented with an ever-shrinking list of tabs (favicon, title, hostname, ..) that match your search as you type. Enter, maybe one or two arrows movements to select the final choice.
If you have 2 tabs or 2000 tabs it doesn't matter, going to a tab it's always a sub-second operation.
It is kinda native, at least in firefox: CTRL+L opens the address bar and on there you can search between open tabs. In my opinion it just needs some small UI improvements because at the moment the visual indicators to differentiate between open tab, search, history item, favorite in the results are not clear enough and the results are (or appear) mixed.
I think the "problem" is not always that you know which tab you want and just want to open it. Sometimes the "problem" is getting an overview over all your open tabs, a tab searcher wouldn't help too much there.
I'm a vim loyalist, I use Surfingkeys for Firefox, but I have to say that for a lot of non-power users I understand the GUI aspect helps keep their mental model of what's happening on their machine. This problem can have many equally acceptable solutions depending on the user.
My personal experience was that neither Firefox’s pioneering alternative to what Chrome announces here (tab groups), nor tree style tab extension were convenient enough to use. With tab groups you obviously very quickly neglect trying to group newly created tabs and even if you, it’s not very helpful (except for sand boxing - that’s a nice thing to have). Tree style tabs were just a pain in the ass, it was constantly causing my tabs to jump around when I opened them, it seems like it was trying to reorder my tabs in the horizontal tab bar so that the ordering would mimic the tree leaves while the vertical tab bar was just useless to me, maybe simply because I could not get used this layout.
I ended up using stash tab extension, as I often have to concentrate on researching one specific thing and while I do that I don’t need any other unrelated tabs to be open, this allows me to retroactiavely group all opened tabs into different stacks and name each of them and then just stash them away like you’d do with git stash, they don’t take up any memory after that and I can return to the entire stash at some point by clicking a single button that will effectively do a git pop of the stash.
I just killed the horizontal tab bar after installing Tree Style Tabs (it's a quick trip to edit a profile CSS file and is quite well documented on the TST github page). The tree tabs are really all you need.
Tree tabs work just as well with 5 tabs as they do with 50 (or, heck, even 500). I use them as a mix of short-term bookmarks, active browsing contexts, trains of thoughts, etc. It has quite fundamentally changed the way I browse around the Internet, and I can simply never use Chrome or Safari the same way again.
I often similarly need to research some particular thing a bunch. With tree tabs, one parent tab contains the main context, and every time I open a new link in a new window it will appear as a child. In the end it's a big tree of tabs with one root tab, with the tree giving a nice hierarchical organization based around where the tabs came from. TST gives you the ability to group multiple tabs together ("stacking" them), and then you can rename the group and collapse it (or, for more permanence, bookmark the entire tree).
> I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think.
I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them
Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end
Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root
The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it
Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top
It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature
Is there a reason you can't already do this with windows (which are a visual grouping of tabs)?
You're right that cycling through tabs and making individual decisions on closing each one has a high cognitive load. Closing an entire window is much easier.
A while ago I realized this, and started to front-load that cognitive effort and make sure that the "root" of each "subject" gets opened in a new window (or at least detached early enough once I realized that I was branching off into a new subject).
An example of the root of a subject could be an item in an issue tracker, and that window could also contain tabs for code search windows, Google searches on that topic, Stack Overflow answers, etc. Once I'm done fixing the bug, I just close the entire window/subject/group, without thinking about each individual tab.
The front page of HN is also usually the root of a subject. I'll open tabs for articles and comment pages, and then close the whole window once I'm done with my break and want to go back to work. If there's something particularly interesting that I want to save for later, I'll detach that tab and close the rest.
For the C++/RAII people, this is kind of like making sure that every object has an owner, and that memory is freed when those objects go out of scope. This is a lot easier than manually doing a mark-and-sweep over all your tabs :)
That's a great point. On my end, I do all my tab management by maintaining separate desktops for different broad topics (school, work, personal). Then I'll have different windows (history seminar, security engineering). And then it just becomes a whole mess and I keep very rough "version control" through note-taking apps.
I used to compress dozens of tabs into a bookmark folder with a date and topic, but now I just have dozens of those folders collecting dust. I often end up in the same situation you do when I mass-close tabs, except I might have to actively open so many tabs to do so that it actually becomes a strain on my computer.
All that said, I'm fully aware this is mostly my fault for being a tab collector/hoarder.
Edit: right now, at the end of the semester when I don't have much school work content open, I still have six Chrome windows. Yesterday I culled about 20 arxiv PDFs I had slowly accumulated since last August (lol).
I am not sure if this will work for you, but you can move the tabs next to each other and click on a tab, press shift, then select another one and all tabs in between will be selected. Press Ctrl-W and it will close all of those tabs at once.
Totally agree. TST was the primary reason I stuck with FF for so many years, even when Chrome was faster and more broadly compatible.
It seems silly that they would have “invented” a tool for tab hoarders that is obviously less useful than a thing that already exists and is currently not available on Chrome.
As a tab collector - who often needs to open +1 Chrome windows full of tabs - the best solution to my tab management needs has been the "Vimium" extension. Sure, it's not a tab manager, but with home-row key bindings, I can easily switch to different tabs. I have used Chrome's groups feature too, but that requires more mouse clicking and doesn't support keyboard shortcuts. For me, the main criterion in choosing a piece of software is the keyboard shortcuts it supports. More keyboard is usually better.
Another feature which I like is tab pinning. It's esp. useful if you're playing/running something in the background (YT music, Jupyter notebooks, etc.)
Finally, I tend to use "session buddy", which is another extension that saves the current state of tabs. I can save them and quit Chrome. Later, if I'm looking for a certain tab, I can just search for it in session buddy's saved sessions.
Session Buddy has been very helpful for me also! I can get dozens of tabs out of my face in seconds if I need to really focus on one or three things exclusively.
It's not super often that I go back through the tabs I store, but the peace of mind of knowing where they are is wonderful. I used to do this with text files (shudder).
Not sure what to tell you... If I remember correctly, the last time I restarted Firefox was to update it, around the 5th of May (I have version 76.0). Generally speaking I don't restart it (or the laptop) except for that.
No addons other than uBlock Origin, TST and LastPass.
For TST in Chrome I've been very happy with Tabs Outliner (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...).
As well as a great tree, you can mix live tabs/windows with frozen ones that don't consume RAM, and this is all reliably persisted across restarts.
Tabs Outliner is a separate window, since Chrome extensions can't add sidebars, so rather than using it as a tabbar replacement I tend to have multiple windows with less than 10 tabs, and open Tabs Outliner when I want a coherent overview (e.g. to quickly skim through my tab titles before closing them in bulk).
As a "tab collector" myself and after having tried some vertical tab implementations, I have been wondering why mainstream browsers choose to ignore this problem.
I wanted something which would let me quickly query open tabs, search my history and bookmarks and all without touching the mouse. So I released an extension which does exactly that[0] and here's a screenshot[1].
Surfing the web can me more intuitive. Chrome's upcoming tab grouping feature shifts the burden completely to the user and doesn't necessarily save the user any clicks.
It looks like the Chrome designers went for a quick win, letting the user nest tabs, so that they will no longer complain about the browser being unusable after 30 tabs or so. I think they're missing the job to be done.
Honestly, I don't think any of the available interfaces are ergonomic enough for a serious tab collector like me. But there's another application in which I also collect hundreds - sometimes thousands - of open pages: Emacs. And there are solutions there that help you manage the load just fine.
Here's the UI I'd love to have for my tabs:
1) All tabs are hidden by default.
2) A keyboard shortcut (or a UI button) brings up a list of tabs (tree-style, not flat) that I can do an incremental, fuzzy search on by immediately starting to type. The default selected tab is the one next to the current one, in the order of opening.
3) Another keyboard shortcut brings a keyboard-driven tab management interface, that looks like this (with apologies to mobile users):
MRL Name Age Domain Category Full URL
--- ---- --- ------ -------- ----------
Coming to Chrome: a new... 30m news.ycombinator.com HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23175207
↳ Emacs: introduction to... 15m youtube.com Video https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k
Messenger 2d messenger.com IM https://messenger.com/t/zuck
static mesh editor bounds 1d google.com Search https://google.com/search?<lots of line noise>
↳ [HELP] Could someone... 1d reddit.com Reddit https://reddit.com/r/unrealengine/comments/<stuff>
↳ QJX2FGt.png 1d i.imgur.com Image https://i.imgur.com/QJX2FGt.png
< lots of other entries>
In that interface, I want to be able to sort and filter by any of the visible column, mark them directly or by a pattern-match on any of the columns, and then issue commands like: unload marked tabs, delete marked tabs, reparent tabs under a different one, show all marked in a new browser window (or transfer to an existing one), bookmark selected tabs, add/remove tabs from "permanent session", download marked tab(s), etc.
Or, in Emacs terms, 2) is the equivalent of "switching buffers" with any of the (many) incremental search completion plugins, and 3) is the equivalent of ibuffer (see https://youtube.com/watch?v=6KN_oSLFf-k).
I'm tempted to start working on an extension like this.
I'm also a Tree style devotee. Besides the organizational super-powers I find it helpful on wide laptop screens where vertical space is at more off a premium than horizontal.
As a fully paid up member of the tab collectors club, I mourn the demise of Tab Mix Plus. Not found anything which beats it, although some of the tree-style tab solutions are not bad.
I used to use tree style tabs too but it is too slow and laggy. I've trying alternatives and settled on Sideberry as of now. It's way faster albeit a little buggy. Some major bugs have been fixed and I'm very satisfied. I would recommend trying it.
The idea is not bad, but I agree that it does not scale well. I try to keep all the tabs related to a specific task/project in a Firefox window and have multiple windows, one per taks/project.
However, it quickly becomes tedious to open the set of windows (with relative tabs) and software need for a certain task/project (shameless plug #1, see this previous thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21995823).
To at least avoid closing windows, but not to have my desktop cluttered, I minimize them (on a Mac), but then I find it difficult to reopen the exact window I might need. To mitigate this issue I (shameless plug #2) did a small app that shows a big cover so that it is easy to find the window when minimized. It still is under development, so lots of bugs and few features. If you want to give comments, its https://cver.vernizzis.it/ :-)
In old Firefox it was possible to have multiple rows and variable width tabs. So there was no horizontal overflow and tabs could have been wide enough so that title fit into each. I wonder if it's possible to get this back.
Design-wise, it's still a more sane layout than the single row scrolling on overflow. It's also the solution most other programs and GUI toolkits use, with browsers being the exception I can't explain.
There are lots of tree style tab fans in here, I am one of them. Hey, guys!
I am curious how you organize other things. Do you think in trees in other places (like using Dynalist or Workflowy for notes)? I think many more concepts are fundamentally hierarchical and should be exposed to the user as such (trees everywhere!). What do you think?
Yep, my todo lists are all trees. Even when I'm writing a document, I first put the table of contents as a tree and then fill in the different sections :)
I have one exception, though. Mind-mapping.
I will use mind mapping tools for todos and notes. But for real mind mapping I use full blown graphs.
Years ago, Chrome included an experimental vertical side tabs feature. It was great. Worked perfectly. But, it disappeared one day. People created a bug on the tracker to get it restored. It got thousands of stars. It kept getting closed and re-opened and kept accumulating more and more stars. Eventually, someone at Google stepped in and said "we don't like how it looks. We have no other solution. But, we don't like how vertical side tabs look, so we will never permit them in Chrome." and ever since, if you want to open more than half a dozen tabs in Chrome you either need a monitor that's 9 feet wide or you use Firefox with the magnificent TabTree extension which is the correct solution to the problem.
Vivaldi browser supports it out of the box, and vertical is even the default iirc. It's thank to it I got used to vertical tabs and I cannot go back.
While it has the drawback of making tabs hoarding easier, just having some tabs open for documentation, GitHub, test pages, quickly brings me to a point where horizontal tabs' title are irrelevant and I have to guess tabs by their favicon.
On top of that, most screens are 16:9 and we're reading almost exclusively vertical websites and horizontal tabs take up vertical screen space.
Last time I tried Vivaldi, the vertical tabs were not 'tree style'. By that, I mean they were all listed directly underneath each other rather than indented to show from where they were open.
Do they indent like this? This is a really important aspect of tree style tabs because it adds another dimension of information. It also means that I can just minimise that tree of HN tabs down when I'm looking at something else.
It's my one complaint about Vivaldi's implementation, yep: you can "stack" tabs, but this creates an absurdly tiny target space to click between tabs, and there's no way to create tab trees instead. It would be lovely to be able to create them, because I often create trees of tabs when browsing sites like HN: I pop tabs open behind HN as I see interesting links, and then click down the tree to go through the sites themselves.
> none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open.
Indeed. I have 16 tabs open right now and I'm not doing anything much.
I did originally think this was Google's equivalent of Firefox's container tabs (which are separate entities for cookies/logins), but that's apparently not the case from this discription.
Also I note that Google's web page breaks using the down-arrow key to scroll, so that's just another piece of reflexive shittiness Google are forcing on web users.
I noticed the broken down-arrow scrolling too, in both Chrome and Firefox. Shame on Google for this anti-accessibility. Up-arrow, page-up/down still work, which is strangely asymmetric.
My personal Tree Style Tab record is over 600 simultaneous tabs. It ran without a hitch and it was still easy to navigate. I would never use a browser without vertical tabs in trees.
I dislike tree style tabs because a typical website is built for consumption by users sitting in the middle in front of it. This is especially annoying when using a laptop and suddenly every website is off center to the way you sit/use keyboard and trackpad because of the tab sidebar.
Hiding the sidebar is no option either because
a) with most extensions the site would flicker because the tree is not an overlay but takes away real space from the viewport
b) and if it is an overlay, learning the spatial tab structure is much harder if its not visible at all times
It's interesting that the default Firefox behavior is to use tab overflow if too many are shown in the top tab bar. You need to scroll to get spatial understanding and this is the main reason I am not using Firefox.
Chrome OTOH will allow many more tabs to fit (with smaller icons/tab handles) and eventually cuts off the icons if it doesn't fit anymore. At the very least it gives you a better spatial overview of where you put which tab
full disclosure:
I have currently 37 open chrome windows with 550 tabs on a MacBook with 16gb RAM. This works extremely well because of the The Great Suspender extension.
I have not yet found any other way that helps with organizing tabs and is better than OS X spaces + separate windows + a fixed horizontal tab bar.
I have great spatial awareness over projects (OS X spaces), time (order of tabs) as well as content separation (chrome windows)
Apparently I am what the article calls a tab collector :)
Well you need to enable the option. If that fits you, it's pretty convenient. On Mobile tabs just get to accumulate and I don't have time/interest to close them all.
Firefox also has a drop-down at the end of the tab bar that lists all the tabs in the window. I used to use TST, but have fallen away as the native functionality (between the drop-down and the awesome bar) suffices.
That’s a great addon. To be honest this would work great in a piece of software my company creates. Our clients can add there own custom tabs, this would help greatly...
I switched to the FF extension “tree tab”. it’s more our less the same, but it has groups (like these chrome groups) you can select on the left side of the tree tab
I wasn’t aware of Sidebery, but it looks way better than TST. How is the performance? With TST I notice it doesn’t “hibernate” older tabs (only if you restart FF).
EDIT: Damn! I'm blown away by Sidebery. The amount of customization and native looks is awesome. There is only a slight problem when compared to TST: It does not preserve tab grouping when parent tab is closed.
There is another extension called Auto Tab Discard that integrates with TST. I'm going to check out Sidebery too though...TST is a little rough at times.
I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
i use it for frontend development (most users use chrome) and also chrome's deep intigration with my android phone (send tab, password manager, sync etc). i know it's a tradeoff for privacy but the whole google ecosystem works together so that's the call I'm willing to take
I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature.
[0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...