The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs(metafluff.com)
metafluff.com
The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs
https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
562 comments
So even if you only had 100 tabs
This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?
This is fucking surreal. Why on Earth would anyone want 100 open tabs, besides testing? What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?
I wish tabs/windows worked more like persistent "workspaces".
For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while.
I feel like many "dozens of tabs" windows are little projects like this. For example, doing development I typically have a bunch of documentation tabs open. We keep these windows open because there's no way to stash them into a drawer while they're not actively being worked on.
What browsers lack is a good way to treat these tabs as "persistent workspaces". I'd like to be able to close a window and be able to return to it later. Rather like an IDE which remembers your open files. So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name, after which every action would automatically update the saved workspace. Close the window, workspace stays saved. Open the workspace, everything is restored.
There are some browser extensions that allow saving groups of tabs, but there aren't any that behave like I described above.
For example, say I'm booking a trip. I always open a bunch of sites (Kayak, Booking.com, lots of hotels, Google Maps, places to visit, etc.) in a single window. In pre-computer times it would be like covering a desk with a ton of papers, books and notes. Gradually I will figure out stuff, book the trip, etc. but the tabs can stay for quite a while.
I feel like many "dozens of tabs" windows are little projects like this. For example, doing development I typically have a bunch of documentation tabs open. We keep these windows open because there's no way to stash them into a drawer while they're not actively being worked on.
What browsers lack is a good way to treat these tabs as "persistent workspaces". I'd like to be able to close a window and be able to return to it later. Rather like an IDE which remembers your open files. So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name, after which every action would automatically update the saved workspace. Close the window, workspace stays saved. Open the workspace, everything is restored.
There are some browser extensions that allow saving groups of tabs, but there aren't any that behave like I described above.
Firefox used to have this feature, but it was removed. You need to install this extension now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...
Unfortunately, this extension, too will soon die when Firefox no longer supports legacy addons.
I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers
IIRC https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/?s... is a replacement
Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like incognito, but persistent and within the same window.
Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like incognito, but persistent and within the same window.
That looks really good! I'll have to try it out first, but it makes me more hopeful about Firefox's future.
Will it work after the legacy addons support is removed? If yes, how can you tell? I couldn't find any related keywords I know on the addon's page.
I didn't know of this one, is its tab management any good ? As in how do you move tabs around groups, open/duplicat/close tabs and groups ?
The 'simplified' in its name makes me doubtful it has any of the advanced features I need.
The 'simplified' in its name makes me doubtful it has any of the advanced features I need.
No idea, I haven't used tab groups in a year, so I've never tried the new version.
These "redone" addons that work post 57 start out pretty bare-minimum but they rapidly gain features.
These "redone" addons that work post 57 start out pretty bare-minimum but they rapidly gain features.
I've been looking for something just like this for Chrome but haven't quite found it yet.
[deleted]
[deleted]
According to its developer it is the only of his extensions that may have a shot at surviving webextensions, though requires a rewrite and dropping of some of the useful features.
Tab Groups has a shot. I took on this project after it was
decided to remove the built-in Tab Groups from Firefox, as
I thought it could be a good and fun learning experience;
it hasn't been, if anything it's been stressful and
time-consuming. I don't really use groups outside of my
development profile, with my browsing habits I only find
them useful to a point, they're helpful for my
development/coding workflow, but I've used them maybe twice
in my main profile during normal browsing.
Its core functionality and basic workflow probably can be
made into a WebExtension, but only after an almost complete
rewrite of the code (with some major work done on Firefox's
side as well!), and still stripped down of at least some of
its features. Many of the new groups features I've wanted
to add since the beginning are impossible though, for the
same reason as I mentioned above: they either don't fit the
scope of what can be allowed through WebExtensions or their
implementation would be far too complex to do on my own.Are the "groups" persistent and tied to the window? So if you change the tabs around, close the window, then "open" the group again, you will get exactly what you had?
They are persistent, but I don't think they are tied to a window (I mainly just use one). But your groups are kept as you left them after restarting.
I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups.
I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs.
I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother.
Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.
I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups.
I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs.
I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother.
Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.
Last time I tried the groups that were opened when quitting firefox would reopen at next launch but you could not "reopen" a closed group. Having more than one window was asking for trouble as in risking losing all your groups and tabs because there another firefox window opened in the background or the downthemall manager window when you closed the main firefox windows.
Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty.
Best bet is to manually save your session at times.
Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty.
Best bet is to manually save your session at times.
I LOVE tab groups. I'm hoping a WebExtension version comes out before FF57.
It's impossible to go back once you get used to that UX.
It's impossible to go back once you get used to that UX.
Nope, it didn't have that feature, though it had some basic foundations. It got removed as several others firefox features for no good reasons.
There's also tab groups and tab groups helper but those are about to disappear[1] and make firefox useless for this use case.
[1]: http://fasezero.com/
There's also tab groups and tab groups helper but those are about to disappear[1] and make firefox useless for this use case.
[1]: http://fasezero.com/
Yep. I found that feature very useful before. Really sad when it was removed.
Edge has this since Creators update. Unfortunately, Edge is pretty bad in ways that actually matter (UI responsiveness, reliability).
Edge is useless outside of recent windows version.
Vivaldi has tab groups, and lets you put the tab bar on the side (where it becomes kind of like a tree).
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/grouping-tabs/
https://help.vivaldi.com/article/grouping-tabs/
I'm pretty happy with OneTab https://www.one-tab.com/
Thanks ! did not know about this one.
It lacks the ability to sort tabs by activity and is messy when you have 150+ tabs over 20 activities, also lack the visual preview of tab content but it's still useful.
Wow, that's freaking awesome. Definitely using this from now on. Thanks!
yes, OneTab is the thing! No need to have a million tabs open. It also lets you export the links as text
same, has helped tremendously
You had all that in the old Opera browser, but people liked slower and more resource-consuming alternatives better.
Opera was a damn fine browser. Used it upto version 12 from version 6 onwards. IE sucked during those days. All those widgets that nobody knew about. Opera was too ahead of its times and now it has moved to chromium which is really bad.
I miss Opera 12 so much :'(
Otter[1] has made much progress in recreating the opera 12 experience.
[1]:https://otter-browser.org/
[1]:https://otter-browser.org/
I miss it dearly too, buddy, it was a real joy to use.
I use separate browser windows across actual Ubuntu/centos work spaces to separate ny contexts.
My project context has a chrome window with all my task related tabs, my terminal window and my IDE. My communication context has my tickets, slack and other communications in it. Then there is one more context with podcasts, spotify or non project docs and reading.
It wasn't something I set out to achieve either, it just happened naturally once I started using shortcut keys to switch between workspaces.
My project context has a chrome window with all my task related tabs, my terminal window and my IDE. My communication context has my tickets, slack and other communications in it. Then there is one more context with podcasts, spotify or non project docs and reading.
It wasn't something I set out to achieve either, it just happened naturally once I started using shortcut keys to switch between workspaces.
> So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name
Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming.
Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.
Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming.
Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.
I use the one called Session Buddy. It allows to save all tabs in one chrome window as one session, and allows you to open all those anytime, as well as to export as html. Also, autosave session just like Microsoft office autosave function. I will post link from pc in few hours.
Not related anyway except as happy user
Not related anyway except as happy user
It's time to deprecate bookmarks in browsers, and add workspaces.
Don't touch my bookmarks! I have all my tabs in my headspace at all times, I need bookmarks to mentally organize my stuff in the short-term/long-term category.
If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly.
Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!
If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly.
Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!
Merge, not replace. If there's a special bookmark group that dynamically contains current tabs, then you have the best of both.
Let a group of tabs be a bookmark folder that has the "show" attribute set, and so dynamically tracks what is shown.
Want to show all tabs in a group/folder? Toggle show.
Let a group of tabs be a bookmark folder that has the "show" attribute set, and so dynamically tracks what is shown.
Want to show all tabs in a group/folder? Toggle show.
Bookmarks sucks ! link rot makes them useless and it's time consuming and tedious if not impossible to manage when you have a lot of them.
I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.
I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.
[deleted]
Can you just open a new window as a "workspace" and have tabs within that window?
In Chrome you can "Bookmark all tabs" by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D or right clicking any tab and choosing that option. Then just close the window and when you want to bring them back later, in the bookmark tree you can right click a folder and say "open all tabs in a new window".
They all reload, which is not ideal.
Not the same thing. The behaviour isn't "persistent": If you add or remove tabs to the window, the bookmark folder isn't automatically updated. Re-bookmarking every time you make a change isn't an option. You also lose state (history, forms, scroll position).
Also, they allow duplicates I guess.
The built in spaces feature of Firefox was quite good for making multiple desktops for different projects. It was still in Firefox the last time I checked.
[deleted]
I've been trying to work like this but I just can't. So far I found no way of actually confining each activity into its own window. Mainly because opening a new page from an external applications opens it in a seemingly random opened window. I finally abandoned the idea and just use tab searching extension
Folders of bookmarks?
Requires automatic two-way syncing. Browsers have, for a long time, supported restoring a bookmark folder into a window as tabs. But if you then change the tabs, the bookmarks aren't automatically updated. This is one of the missing pieces.
Additionally opening a bookmark fold as tabs does not support lazy loading so it will bog down your computer when you open all the bookmarks.
I speculate that general-purpuse virtual machine management software would fit the bill quite well
How would this help with the scenario described by the OP? Are you suggesting starting a new virtual machine instead of a new browser window?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. VMs can be named, saved and loaded straightforwardly.
That's massive overhead for managing a set of tabs which is exactly what Firefox is trying to avoid.
This functionality exists with bookmarks.
FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.
It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"
This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger
FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.
It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"
This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger
But you lose the state the tabs were in, which means risk of losing hours of work and tedious work to restore each state.
Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.
Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.
[deleted]
Hey, great idea !
I'm just use Firefox in the same way. Here i couldn't say thé fox is finnish. On linux it's thé best.
I'm using zeerka.com for exactly that: research projects that are saved as groups of links. And it's browser agnostic.
Along the lines of your analogy, I wouldn't have papers strewn all over the desk, I'd have them in a pile or in a folder. Reversing the analogy I feel this is similar to using bookmarks or saving a list of links.
"Session Buddy" on Chrome has been really useful for me.
It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation)
https://sessionbuddy.com/
It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation)
https://sessionbuddy.com/
Session Manager does the same for Firefox (not sure if it's been ported to the new addon model)
I use onetab though it only saves the tabs and can only be exported as plain text but it fills all my needs.
I used to be a big OneTab user, but Session Buddy really is a lot better for reviewing, saving, loading, and editing your windows and sessions. If you've never used it, I'd recommend giving it a try.
[deleted]
Serious example: learning a new subfield. You start with the general article in wikipedia, trying to get a gist of the field. Cue 20 or more wiki pages for new terms and ideas. As you learn the terms, you get ideas and have to see if they have been done before. Cue up another 20~30 tabs of searches. Eventually start looking at articles. Each one has 10 figures which can be opened in new tabs for high-resolution viewing, and about half of them have supplementary information which is best viewed concurrently. Add transient personal tasks, email, any other searches (online shopping), and it is not uncommon to see 150 or more tabs. Then as the project winds down the tabs get whittled down, too. Then start looking at the detailed references. After just a week of reading, you can easily end up with 100 tabs of "things to read later.the course of a week long re 10 tabs of other references and things that I searched for, but won't s
Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.
Why abuse the browser in this way? Tabs are a fifo buffer for web pages. Opening something in a new tab allows one to read/act on it when the current tab is closed, without interrupting the mental state / flow relating to the current tab. Pages loaded in new tabs are also opened in the background, so there is no interruption while waiting for pages to load.
As usual, there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/609/
From 2009, so rather ahead of the curve.
From 2009, so rather ahead of the curve.
Not ahead of the curve at all, it describes a quite common use of the web for power users. I've had the habits 100+ tabs open in browsers a few years before maxthon released its international version in 2006.
Opera was that one browser that really enabled that workflow very well back in the day. Having several dozen tabs open was pretty common, even as far back as Opera 6 (2001 I think?).
I wish that were still true of Cracked.
I am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it.
Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I feel they are important to read but don't feel motivated to do so ever.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt. So I had to triage away the least important tabs and bookmark them or force myself to read them, just to keep my computer running. I just starting using firefox though, which is not helping this bad habit.
Looking at my current open tabs, most of them are dense "boring" reading material like scientific papers (or reddit/HN discussions of them.) I feel they are important to read but don't feel motivated to do so ever.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt. So I had to triage away the least important tabs and bookmark them or force myself to read them, just to keep my computer running. I just starting using firefox though, which is not helping this bad habit.
Hello, you mention it as a serious problem.
I agree and I think it's good to be aware of it.
I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.
Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.
You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.
I don't believe it should be up to the browser to deal with tabs. I don't actually believe tabs are a particularly good representation of browsing.
Using extremely light browsers such as surf (http://surf.suckless.org) in a good window manager such as i3 (https://i3wm.org) makes each page a first class window, without any browser clutter.
You soon learn to browse with as few pages open as possible. Opening new tabs is a promise to spend time in the future. Using simpler linear navigation helps keeping focus. I want to know why I'm browsing, not hoping that I go through every tab that I lazily felt I might need to see in some open-ended future. The web is broken but with some effort you can alienate most of the cruft from your usage.
"You're holding it wrong"?
Greetings fellow hoarder. Should you be using Chrome I highly recommend the great suspender. It will unload tabs from memory if they're not used after a set time. That way one can open and return at your leisure without as much of an impact.
That sounds interesting. What happened when you return to a suspended tab?
It's immediately reloaded. As far as I can remember you can set it to reload from cache or it will download it again.
In my experience (unlike my sibling comment), it displays a mostly blank page with a "click to reload" link.
I am in the same boat as you. I hoard on tabs, having over 200 Chrome tabs on my macbook pro, over 350 on the Ubuntu desktop, same over 350 on the Windows Desktop and 16 Safari tabs on my iPhone 6. Finally to help with this issue I made https://summarybrew.com
Same. I stopped using bookmarks around 1999 or so because I found them to be a terrible solution to anything, really (it was a graveyard where links went to die, and this was before bookmark syncing was a thing, so you always forgot to back them up as well).
I've tried all the third-party type attempt to solve it (everything from saving the links in a textfile I always keep open to ReadItLater, OneTab, Pocket etc. All those things are where tabs go to die, never to be read again. More like ReadItNever, amirite?). That's a "solution" I guess.
Now I try to be more selective in what I "keep" to read later, and as soon as I hit 40-50 tabs, I go through and kill a bunch of them. It hurts a bit, but not as bad as when I have hundreds of tabs.
I've tried all the third-party type attempt to solve it (everything from saving the links in a textfile I always keep open to ReadItLater, OneTab, Pocket etc. All those things are where tabs go to die, never to be read again. More like ReadItNever, amirite?). That's a "solution" I guess.
Now I try to be more selective in what I "keep" to read later, and as soon as I hit 40-50 tabs, I go through and kill a bunch of them. It hurts a bit, but not as bad as when I have hundreds of tabs.
I am tab hoarder. It's a serious problem. So many links that I want to read. But I don't feel like doing it right now. And I know for certain that if I put it into a bookmark, I will never ever look at it again. So they sit on my tab bar for months until I get around to it.
You are not alone.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt.
Yep, been there before too. My "light" laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so Chrome starts to dog out pretty quick if I go tab crazy on it. It can handle about 25 tabs and then it starts freezing the entire system for minutes at a time.
Fortunately my "big" machine has 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor so it can handle 4 or 5 Chrome windows each with oodles of tabs, 2 or 3 Eclipse instances, and various server processes all running at the same time. I just can't bear carrying that thing around because it weighs a frickin' ton. :-(
You are not alone.
I've never gotten to 100 tabs before. For entirely practical reasons, that Chrome can't handle it. It runs out of memory and grinds my computer to a halt.
Yep, been there before too. My "light" laptop only has 6GB of RAM, so Chrome starts to dog out pretty quick if I go tab crazy on it. It can handle about 25 tabs and then it starts freezing the entire system for minutes at a time.
Fortunately my "big" machine has 32GB of RAM and an i7 processor so it can handle 4 or 5 Chrome windows each with oodles of tabs, 2 or 3 Eclipse instances, and various server processes all running at the same time. I just can't bear carrying that thing around because it weighs a frickin' ton. :-(
Yep, another here. I have tabs that have been there in FF for several months ...
I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.
I also have to run a FF and a Chromium (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers). This is enough to fill 8GB. Good Lord the web is fat these days.
Chrome has profiles. I use multiple profiles for this. You can easily have two or more profiles loaded and running at the same time, and each has its own cookie jar/login set. When I need to do it on a borrowed computer, then I just use incognito mode for the second profile.
I also use chrome profiles to separate my workspaces, so I don't have to load everything all the time and search through my tabs to find the one I want. I even sync them to different accounts.
Mobile is the only place I use multiple browsers, due to mobile browsers not supporting multiple windows, even though chrome has already had the functionality for it in the past (remember the chrome 'desktop' when chrome ran in metro mode? Alternatively, just have multiple entries in overview). On my tablet I have six browsers, which is probably more than I really need; two incognito browsers and four mobile browsers. Various combinations of add-ons (firefox) and not (chrome), incognito (focus and inbrowser) browsers, and browsers (chrome) with JavaScript disabled.
I also use chrome profiles to separate my workspaces, so I don't have to load everything all the time and search through my tabs to find the one I want. I even sync them to different accounts.
Mobile is the only place I use multiple browsers, due to mobile browsers not supporting multiple windows, even though chrome has already had the functionality for it in the past (remember the chrome 'desktop' when chrome ran in metro mode? Alternatively, just have multiple entries in overview). On my tablet I have six browsers, which is probably more than I really need; two incognito browsers and four mobile browsers. Various combinations of add-ons (firefox) and not (chrome), incognito (focus and inbrowser) browsers, and browsers (chrome) with JavaScript disabled.
> (two separate Google accounts is basically unmanageable without separate browsers)
You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.
You can use Firefox's container tabs for this.
Exactly the same here. For Example at the moment it is Crypto Currency. Likely in the range of 50 Tabs.
Like you said about the boring material. I wouldn't think of them as boring. But detailed, and basically takes a long time to grasp. I will need to spend at least an hour or two on the topic. And i since it is not the most important things in life This two hours schedules gets put away for the time being.
Then there is the Apple News tabs hoard which happens in Apple Events.
Like you said about the boring material. I wouldn't think of them as boring. But detailed, and basically takes a long time to grasp. I will need to spend at least an hour or two on the topic. And i since it is not the most important things in life This two hours schedules gets put away for the time being.
Then there is the Apple News tabs hoard which happens in Apple Events.
I'm a hoarder in recovery, I try to consciously limit the number of tabs I open these days.
If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.
You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.
If I see a tab open that I haven't looked at in a while, I try to make the effort to either submit it to Pocket or Pinboard, and then close it.
You could argue that's just moving the problem elsewhere, but I like to think I'm making at least some organisation effort.
I have found Pocket to be very helpful in this regard. The key is to set it as your default page upon tab creation.
Using a bookmark manager like diigo might let you save those articles with your own keywords and search on those topics later.
The feature I like best about diigo is for what I do read, I can highlight the sentences I want to recall or locate later.
The feature I like best about diigo is for what I do read, I can highlight the sentences I want to recall or locate later.
That just puts it out of sight, out of mind. I have thousands of meticulously tagged tabs, including a tag called "toread". I think I can count the number of those I've read without taking my shoes off. And if I want something in the future I generally find myself googling it.
But I have on more than one occasion been unable to remember how I got to a page, or even how to search for it, and in those times I found my system invaluable.
But I have on more than one occasion been unable to remember how I got to a page, or even how to search for it, and in those times I found my system invaluable.
I find I don't bookmark a page as much as bookmark a sentence in my mind.
Less out of sight as well, the next time I do a google search, diigo plugin injects my existing stuff beside the search. I like the offline copy it keeps for me like you said.
It's not perfect but not a sinkhole of bookmarks.
Less out of sight as well, the next time I do a google search, diigo plugin injects my existing stuff beside the search. I like the offline copy it keeps for me like you said.
It's not perfect but not a sinkhole of bookmarks.
Just don't use chrome, it is not at all suited for this use case.
FWIW if you use a side-tabs addon like Tab Center (Tab Center Redux on newer Firefox) or Tree Style Tabs it's easier to manage.
Chrome also just tinifies tabs as you add them (eventually making them little slivers that are hard to click on/close and impossible to identify), whereas Firefox stops shrinking them at one size and then lets you scroll through them. This itself makes it easier to have more tabs. So if you're a Chrome user having 100 tabs may feel excessive, but given that the experience is pretty pleasant in Firefox a lot of folks have workflows around this. If something is hard to do you'll never discover workflows that need that functionality :)
On top of that, the addons I mentioned make the experience even better.
For me I have >100 tabs often because I'm working on many things, and each thing may have 3-5 tabs open (github issues, code, a million documentation tabs), and I'm also reading news articles and such, and often queue up things to read later as more tabs that I get to eventually. Pretty easy to get there.
Chrome also just tinifies tabs as you add them (eventually making them little slivers that are hard to click on/close and impossible to identify), whereas Firefox stops shrinking them at one size and then lets you scroll through them. This itself makes it easier to have more tabs. So if you're a Chrome user having 100 tabs may feel excessive, but given that the experience is pretty pleasant in Firefox a lot of folks have workflows around this. If something is hard to do you'll never discover workflows that need that functionality :)
On top of that, the addons I mentioned make the experience even better.
For me I have >100 tabs often because I'm working on many things, and each thing may have 3-5 tabs open (github issues, code, a million documentation tabs), and I'm also reading news articles and such, and often queue up things to read later as more tabs that I get to eventually. Pretty easy to get there.
Speaking strictly for me: tabs with articles I urgently need to read, tabs with articles that I really ought to have read, tabs with articles that I've long since forgotten to close. All the same, really, just with varying degrees of guilt. Also, um, Google searches for quick notes that I couldn't be bothered to open an actual note-taking application for.
I start doing that, but have made an effort to always start a week with a fresh browser, one tab open. If I haven't read the article before the week was up, clearly it wasn't important enough.
In principle I agree, but in practice... I can't let go of my hoarding ways. What if there's a nugget of information hiding in all those tabs that could ︎change my life?
Frequent occurrence, in my experience.
And I'm very happy about better support for this kludge, but I do wish that someone would get to the roots of the needs that cause this use of tabs, and design the correct interface for it instead.
And I'm very happy about better support for this kludge, but I do wish that someone would get to the roots of the needs that cause this use of tabs, and design the correct interface for it instead.
They kind of did with Firefox, it was tab groups, started as a plugin, they integrated it, and then they dropped the feature (I assume) because almost no one (except me) used it.
You could create visual groups and lay out sets of tabs and even name the sets, and switch between them at will. It was awesome.
You could create visual groups and lay out sets of tabs and even name the sets, and switch between them at will. It was awesome.
I vaguely think I had the extension version at some point but it was probably in an awkward stage then.. I never really noticed the integrated version.
From the way you describe it I think it sounds like a great start for at least some of the needs driving this. I suspect in many cases heavy multi-tab use comes from a need to lay out sets of documents for use together in some sort of spatial metaphor. The traditional desktop model often does a pretty good job of covering this for local files and native programs, but I find browsers to be far weaker at supporting it.
As a complement, for the potentially-life-changing(-but-not-right-now-for-goodness-sake) things and other valuable resources I will almost certainly never find my way back to otherwise, I think it might be a nice start if I had a 1-keypress way to drop them, with metadata, into an local, indexed archive. The followup challenge to that would be a really good interface to getting stuff out again. Tools like Zotero could in principle cover the first part of this niche automatically already, but I wouldn't want the backlog archive (sluggishly) dropped together with my references without any shadow of compartmentalization, so I don't really view that as a ready solution.
From the way you describe it I think it sounds like a great start for at least some of the needs driving this. I suspect in many cases heavy multi-tab use comes from a need to lay out sets of documents for use together in some sort of spatial metaphor. The traditional desktop model often does a pretty good job of covering this for local files and native programs, but I find browsers to be far weaker at supporting it.
As a complement, for the potentially-life-changing(-but-not-right-now-for-goodness-sake) things and other valuable resources I will almost certainly never find my way back to otherwise, I think it might be a nice start if I had a 1-keypress way to drop them, with metadata, into an local, indexed archive. The followup challenge to that would be a really good interface to getting stuff out again. Tools like Zotero could in principle cover the first part of this niche automatically already, but I wouldn't want the backlog archive (sluggishly) dropped together with my references without any shadow of compartmentalization, so I don't really view that as a ready solution.
Try Vivaldi.
It also has a very interesting fresh take on history.
It also has a very interesting fresh take on history.
Do you folks happen to have Kindles? I use instapaper to save articles as I come across them and then have it all wrapped up and sent to my Kindle once a week. My own customized magazine to read throughout the week as I see fit on an easy on the eyes e-ink format.
I call it "information hoarding". The struggle is real.
The best part is when you wait so long that the link breaks when you finally open the tab, and then you feel free because it wasn't really your fault that you didn't read it!
Here's the way I do it... I setup a Gmail account that I only use to "save" links. Anytime I encounter an article that looks interesting and want to save, I just tap the browser menu, tap "Share" and share it to that email account. Works great and no more hassles with bookmarks and open tabs.
I just checked and I currently have 450+ tabs open. I closed around 100 the other day. I work on a number of projects at the same time, so I'll often have a bunch of documentation open for one project and then switch to the next one without closing everything.
I also research a project and then wait a while before starting it. This helps me get a better perspective on the project. I'll often leave my research open in a tab group so that when I start the project I can very quickly review everything and get up to speed. Using bookmarks in this scenario doesn't really work because bookmarks don't save session state very well.
I also research a project and then wait a while before starting it. This helps me get a better perspective on the project. I'll often leave my research open in a tab group so that when I start the project I can very quickly review everything and get up to speed. Using bookmarks in this scenario doesn't really work because bookmarks don't save session state very well.
Same use case here (with aprox. the same amount of tabs). I'd like to add that leaving a project's tabs open also helps me easily remember where I was in implementing a specific project, especially when I need to work on another project as its dependency. It's much more convenient than keeping notes or following last changes.
The point made is that different people will use software in different and unexpected ways. Assuming that people use browsers the same way you do, or assuming that a certain scenarios are "impossible" because you personally are not likely to encounter it will harm your userbase.
The point made is that different people will use software in different and unexpected ways. Assuming that people use browsers the same way you do, or assuming that a certain scenarios are "impossible" because you personally are not likely to encounter it will harm your userbase.
Do you have any add-ons to manage that? I don't mean to tell you how to work but that doesn't seem optimal. There is probably a better way than having over 400 tabs open.
FF searches open tabs when you type in the url bar.
(Officially the "Awesomebar" and the name is kind of earned but it is to cool for me.)
Also many of us (I think) use some kind of vertical nested tabs.
Also many of us (I think) use some kind of vertical nested tabs.
I use a similar workflow to research or keep different projects open. I like tools like diigo that let me keyword bookmark and hifhlughy the text I want from these links into one place. Makes it much easier to come back later and find where I was or had left off even if those tabs are lost or closed.
I usually have around 400 tabs open across 10 windows. They build up because I have many things that I intend to read, use or reference but I don't want to stash them and forget to read them like with Pocket or normal bookmarks. So I keep them open in a window so that I can return to whatever I was researching or working on some time soon.
Just an example: I'm working on an ML model, I begin by researching prior work. I get down to 100 or 200 related papers in google scholar. I start going through the papers until I find the ones that are closest to what I'm looking for. I leave the tabs of the 10 or so papers that I have found open. Now I have 12 tabs open: 10 related papers, my specific google scholar search and my general google scholar search. As I go through the related papers I will happen upon different ideas, libraries/tools or referenced papers that I want to return to. These tend to build up and you can easily get to 6 or 7 per paper. By the time I finish 4 related papers I could have 40 tabs open. This whole process happened over the course of 30-40 minutes. I also tend to find new keywords to use in google while I'm reading these papers which I then produce more google scholar searches from and repeat this same process over again. Now imagine having done this many times over with various projects you're working on but not necessarily required to finish. That's how you end up with a few thousand tabs in onetab and 400 tabs open in chrome.
Just an example: I'm working on an ML model, I begin by researching prior work. I get down to 100 or 200 related papers in google scholar. I start going through the papers until I find the ones that are closest to what I'm looking for. I leave the tabs of the 10 or so papers that I have found open. Now I have 12 tabs open: 10 related papers, my specific google scholar search and my general google scholar search. As I go through the related papers I will happen upon different ideas, libraries/tools or referenced papers that I want to return to. These tend to build up and you can easily get to 6 or 7 per paper. By the time I finish 4 related papers I could have 40 tabs open. This whole process happened over the course of 30-40 minutes. I also tend to find new keywords to use in google while I'm reading these papers which I then produce more google scholar searches from and repeat this same process over again. Now imagine having done this many times over with various projects you're working on but not necessarily required to finish. That's how you end up with a few thousand tabs in onetab and 400 tabs open in chrome.
I have the same issue of not reading things I bookmark... Until recently, when I installed Random Bookmark add-on which allows me to open random bookmarks. So now when I'm bored I just click it a lot and finally read those bookmarks.
Also exists in pinboard I think.
I don't understand why some people think it's weird. Folks with tabs in the 100s just have a different workflow from you.
If I google something, I like having a few different sources or points of view, so I open a bunch of tabs to look through.
Sometimes, I want to switch to a different task, so I collapse that tab tree for looking at later.
Sometimes, inside that tree, there's another topic of interest I want to know about, so I create another tree (with 3-5 tabs for different sources) inside.
I have a tree for music, various trees for work, various trees for interesting topics, leisure, etc.
If I google something, I like having a few different sources or points of view, so I open a bunch of tabs to look through.
Sometimes, I want to switch to a different task, so I collapse that tab tree for looking at later.
Sometimes, inside that tree, there's another topic of interest I want to know about, so I create another tree (with 3-5 tabs for different sources) inside.
I have a tree for music, various trees for work, various trees for interesting topics, leisure, etc.
You absolutely right that it's just different workflows, for different people. The weirdness comes up when someone like me meet someone with 20+ tabs, because I wouldn't now how to work like that. If I end up with 10 or 15 tabs during a session where I'm researching something, I'll often pause to close down all the those tabs, because they're a mental burden.
So some of us think 100s of tabs are weird, because there's no way we could get any work done, before closing down those tabs.
So some of us think 100s of tabs are weird, because there's no way we could get any work done, before closing down those tabs.
For us, the tabs that aren't relevant to our current task just disappear. It's not in our sphere of perception for as long as we don't need it. Furthermore, we think it's a huge waste of time to go back to a previous task if we've closed the tabs. That means we need to waste a ton of energy and cognitive effort recreating state.
Some people effectively use tabs as bookmarks.
Or, if you want to look at it the other way, bookmarks are just tabs that don't load until you click on them.
Or, if you want to look at it the other way, bookmarks are just tabs that don't load until you click on them.
Bookmarks are tabs that you're sure you want to keep permanently.
Bookmarks are stateless hence useless for many use cases.
I'm a Firefox fan and a strong evangelist of it (in my circles). For a long time, I have been using Firefox with several open windows and a few hundred (not just 100) tabs. Why do I do that? Firstly, I research many topics (being in tech and also having some specific focused interests in other areas that require more reading and learning) and need a way to capture information that I have to look at - scan, skim, read completely, etc. Secondly, there is currently no good interface available, at least for me, that keeps things visible as well as quickly accessible (preserving history would be a bonus).
All the bookmarks I have ever saved in my life on any browser remain without being touched because it's just another bunch of stuff hidden away with no context or relationships. So I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago (for frequently accessed sites, the Awesome Bar fulfills the needs). I have the same attitude with all the bookmarking and "read later" services. For me, if something is out of sight, it soon gets out of mind. This is where tabs help me focus on different subjects/areas much better than bookmarks (or even a page that has all tabs listed). I can easily find what I had put in a group of tabs and decide when to get to them. It's not perfect. Sometimes I find that some tabs are no longer interesting or that I don't have time for them, and so close them after several days or weeks.
I've seen some experimental stuff from Mozilla on improving bookmarking and addressing the issues with "save for later". One such effort was Dropzilla [1] in 2012, which I was impressed with. But it seemed like that was abandoned soon or not carried forward (if anyone has updates on this that I may have missed, please let me know).
Firefox has also been, in my experience (not meaning to start a browser war here), much better at memory management. In comparison, I consider Chrome as a toy that's useful as long as you don't want too many tabs (otherwise it just brings the system to a crawl). Stability wise too, I find Firefox extensions to be of much better quality. To date, I can't get session restore working well or undoing tab close working well in Chrome. Same goes for switching proxies quickly and other things too.
So, what I need is a browser that can handle hundreds of tabs well. For me that has always been Firefox, ahead by far.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/
All the bookmarks I have ever saved in my life on any browser remain without being touched because it's just another bunch of stuff hidden away with no context or relationships. So I stopped using bookmarks a long time ago (for frequently accessed sites, the Awesome Bar fulfills the needs). I have the same attitude with all the bookmarking and "read later" services. For me, if something is out of sight, it soon gets out of mind. This is where tabs help me focus on different subjects/areas much better than bookmarks (or even a page that has all tabs listed). I can easily find what I had put in a group of tabs and decide when to get to them. It's not perfect. Sometimes I find that some tabs are no longer interesting or that I don't have time for them, and so close them after several days or weeks.
I've seen some experimental stuff from Mozilla on improving bookmarking and addressing the issues with "save for later". One such effort was Dropzilla [1] in 2012, which I was impressed with. But it seemed like that was abandoned soon or not carried forward (if anyone has updates on this that I may have missed, please let me know).
Firefox has also been, in my experience (not meaning to start a browser war here), much better at memory management. In comparison, I consider Chrome as a toy that's useful as long as you don't want too many tabs (otherwise it just brings the system to a crawl). Stability wise too, I find Firefox extensions to be of much better quality. To date, I can't get session restore working well or undoing tab close working well in Chrome. Same goes for switching proxies quickly and other things too.
So, what I need is a browser that can handle hundreds of tabs well. For me that has always been Firefox, ahead by far.
[1]: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/
I also have many tabs open. Usually, 200+ because I research. Here's how the workflow goes:
- client asks for a say an audio player integration into an app
1. Research bunch of open-source audio player libraries available on Github. This is easily 20+tabs
2. Additional, sometimes temporary tabs get opened when researching individual libraries (like their documentation page, etc)
3. I want to pick a library, save the state if this research and go to implementation. (I create a new window)
4. Open documentation for the library or its Readme and start implementing, use Google, or stackoverflow.com as needed. Save state of this (don't) meaning, don't close it;nowadays i use bookmarks if it's a task i wont get back to soon)
Now, I'd have a bunch if tasks like this. Personal, professional, hobby projects, etc. Tabs should be cheap and should be lazy loaded. You should even be able to hibernate tabs manually (Vivaldi (chrome clone) let's you do this)
- client asks for a say an audio player integration into an app
1. Research bunch of open-source audio player libraries available on Github. This is easily 20+tabs
2. Additional, sometimes temporary tabs get opened when researching individual libraries (like their documentation page, etc)
3. I want to pick a library, save the state if this research and go to implementation. (I create a new window)
4. Open documentation for the library or its Readme and start implementing, use Google, or stackoverflow.com as needed. Save state of this (don't) meaning, don't close it;nowadays i use bookmarks if it's a task i wont get back to soon)
Now, I'd have a bunch if tasks like this. Personal, professional, hobby projects, etc. Tabs should be cheap and should be lazy loaded. You should even be able to hibernate tabs manually (Vivaldi (chrome clone) let's you do this)
This is Me. The guy with a lot of tabs open. Sorry.
Whenever I find something interesting, i open it in a new tab, read it little bit and leave it there thinking - I will get back to it later which never happens. Later on when it is getting enough that I can't open a new tab then using tab-snap extension I copy list of all the tabs open and email it to myself. This email list is like my own mini knowledge dump which have helped me retrieving things later on when required.
Whenever I find something interesting, i open it in a new tab, read it little bit and leave it there thinking - I will get back to it later which never happens. Later on when it is getting enough that I can't open a new tab then using tab-snap extension I copy list of all the tabs open and email it to myself. This email list is like my own mini knowledge dump which have helped me retrieving things later on when required.
I have had about 100-200 tabs open in my browsers for years.
The reason being that session management is terrible or non existent and bookmarks is horribly broken.
With firefox I have a bunch of extension and groups my tabs by activities. I guess some power users do so because it's more convenient and practical than having to remember one or two dozen URLs and reopen them when coming back to an activity later on.
The reason being that session management is terrible or non existent and bookmarks is horribly broken.
With firefox I have a bunch of extension and groups my tabs by activities. I guess some power users do so because it's more convenient and practical than having to remember one or two dozen URLs and reopen them when coming back to an activity later on.
Right now I've got five browser windows up with about 30 tabs apiece... Most of the tabs i don't HAVE to have up, but my usual pattern is open app i'm working on, open some documentation, open up another app tab for a different scenario, remember some other docs I need, go to HN and open 8 tabs of stories I want to read over the next hour, open a debugger window on the first tab, open a doc window on emacs to figure out how to do some thing i used to know how to do in vim really easily, then i get a question from a client and switch over to another window with 22 tabs worth of their stuff in it to find the answer... then i go back to the first window and remember that documentation i was reading... after a full day of this stuff, yes, i've got a couple hundred tabs open. its a little obscene but its been working for me for a good 10 years now.
When you're reading an article on a subject you don't know much about and it cites many articles, and each of those cite many articles, it can grow quite quickly
While I generally have a few windows open with 10-25 tabs open. I know one person that sells/buys on eBay and 200+ is fairly standard
Pages I have always open, pages I open but have no time to read at the moment, pages I read at the moment. Right now (after just starting my day) I have 64 tabs, so with a bit of surfing today 100 is no problem. At times I have 200+ tabs.
edit: This was one of the reasons I loved the old Opera. It just didn't care. 50 tabs, 100 tabs, 200 tabs .. it just worked. I miss it.
edit: This was one of the reasons I loved the old Opera. It just didn't care. 50 tabs, 100 tabs, 200 tabs .. it just worked. I miss it.
Hardly surreal, that's just my workflow, which works well under Firefox, so I don't see the need to change it. Sometimes, when I reach a few hundred open tabs, I just clean them all up (at a few thousand it was usually becoming slow, so I started to clean up earlier; looks like with the new changes I might be able to reach thousands again)
I have more than 100 tabs on mobile. FYI, the indicator changes to a smiley.
It's easy to cross that threshold when you're doing research.
It's easy to cross that threshold when you're doing research.
30 for hacker news items
30 more for each comment page
20 for google news
10 for wikipedia (conservative)
at least 20 per tool's documentation section, since all docs are now broken down into a hundred 5-kilobyte files, it seems
20 to research cheap action cams on Amazon
10 to go through some configuration guides for a cloud product
10 for random facebook feed links
and 10 for youtube rabbit-holing
So, 160 tabs I have open. It's a slow evening.
30 more for each comment page
20 for google news
10 for wikipedia (conservative)
at least 20 per tool's documentation section, since all docs are now broken down into a hundred 5-kilobyte files, it seems
20 to research cheap action cams on Amazon
10 to go through some configuration guides for a cloud product
10 for random facebook feed links
and 10 for youtube rabbit-holing
So, 160 tabs I have open. It's a slow evening.
Just one data sample,
On desktop I have 4 pinned tabs, Gmail, workflowy, trello, google Calendar. Plus anywhere between 2-30+ tabs, depending upon the google term i am searching, or reading something. And none of these is Facebook Youtube Medium and such, as all these are blocked.
On my two Android phones,on main one, this one, this is tab number 98. Many of these are HN search pages, and links there on. Others include github, google, stackoverflow, jekyll, javascript related. Also, occassionally i go through, and prune tabs. Also the times I have nothing to read, I go back to these tabs, read, and then close.
The secondary work phone has 52 tabs.
Terrified of loosing all these, occassionally I use desktop google chrome option of open all tabs on other (mobile) device, and then export all those tabs to a html file.
On desktop I have 4 pinned tabs, Gmail, workflowy, trello, google Calendar. Plus anywhere between 2-30+ tabs, depending upon the google term i am searching, or reading something. And none of these is Facebook Youtube Medium and such, as all these are blocked.
On my two Android phones,on main one, this one, this is tab number 98. Many of these are HN search pages, and links there on. Others include github, google, stackoverflow, jekyll, javascript related. Also, occassionally i go through, and prune tabs. Also the times I have nothing to read, I go back to these tabs, read, and then close.
The secondary work phone has 52 tabs.
Terrified of loosing all these, occassionally I use desktop google chrome option of open all tabs on other (mobile) device, and then export all those tabs to a html file.
I'm not sure if I have 100 tabs, but I have a lot. I find it easier than using bookmarks. I have several chromes open, each one with a bunch of tabs. My queen one has but list, API list, work wiki, several tabs for different logs. A couple of forums for third party products we use, bit bucket, maybe a coyote of tabs for third party documentation...
For personal products I might have the skin tab open plus a couple of non admin tabs. I do this for several different sites. And so on... On my Google drive I have easily a dozen open for various documents... It adds up quickly.
I tell myself I'll read it when I have the chance so I leave it there.
It's not surreal if you think about it.
People put off cleaning there room and such... so there are bound to be people who put off reading tabs they see interesting.
If you're going to say book mark it then no. My bookmarks are a mess.
I've sent Mozilla a suggestion of doing machine learning and cluster my bookmarks for me. >___< Also if they can have topic labeling ml stuff on book mark that would be nice.
It's not surreal if you think about it.
People put off cleaning there room and such... so there are bound to be people who put off reading tabs they see interesting.
If you're going to say book mark it then no. My bookmarks are a mess.
I've sent Mozilla a suggestion of doing machine learning and cluster my bookmarks for me. >___< Also if they can have topic labeling ml stuff on book mark that would be nice.
You might be interested in wallabag.
https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.it/en
https://wallabag.org/en https://wallabag.it/en
I used to have a work flow where I opened around 100 tabs. I was "curating" pictures for my Tumblr blog by opening tabs from Feedly and then deciding to reblog it or not. At the end I had around 80-90 pages with a large picture opened. Firefox has no problem with this but Chrome was struggling after 35 tabs.
Now I don't do this anymore because I wrote a web extension to reblog directly from inside Feedly.
I don't know. I have 100+ tabs almost all the times. Recently, the tab groups add on really helped me manage them, but that's going to end too with Firefox 57. I thought Panorama was one of the most useful and differentiating feature of Firefox, unfortunately they never thought of fixing its shortcomings, and since people didn't use it much due to those, they decided to end it. :-(
None of the browsers are really that good at letting you get back to things you recently looked at, or had loaded. Meanwhile there are great plugins for searching within all open tabs. When you have a wiki page that you need about ~1 time per week, and can't remember the URL for- just keep the tab open. You're augmenting your limited human memory with the computer.
> Meanwhile there are great plugins for searching within all open tabs
which is your favorite?
which is your favorite?
Opera did back when it was not a google chrome skin.
> None of the mainstream browsers
Fixed it for you. Like another person wrote, old Opera did it just fine in a period where PCs were much slower.
Fixed it for you. Like another person wrote, old Opera did it just fine in a period where PCs were much slower.
This is what I wonder every time someone brings this topic up. I've seen friends that have so many tabs open that each tab is barely an edge in the screen without a title or icon to identify it. It's also weird how defensive people get when you point out that those tabs might as well be closed, because they don't even know what's in them.
This isn't true of Firefox though, and if you organize them well enough, you won't have any issue with recognizing what tab is what. I have 11 tab groups, some with around 4-5 tabs, others crossing 50 easily. I've also gone to nearly 1000 tabs, as long as they're in their group and organized well, you can access them.
You never get the "without a title or icon" thing in Firefox, because it enforces a minimum tab width.
because they don't even know what's in them.
Doesn't matter. They're there for a reason. And there's still something a touch "different" about a tab, compared to a bookmark. It's hard to explain, but there really is a purpose to doing things that way.
Doesn't matter. They're there for a reason. And there's still something a touch "different" about a tab, compared to a bookmark. It's hard to explain, but there really is a purpose to doing things that way.
Research man. You run into a problem coding and go into a spiral hunting through random blogs. You can mouse over tabs and use your scroll wheel to quickly flash through tabs. But yeah you do lose track. 8GB for me isn't enough I end up maxing out the ram even with i3. I do wish they turned the inactive pages into picture or something.
I do that myself too, so even for a small numbers of users, it still is a valid use case. Firefox has a bug report here about this with interesting info https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=855930
100 tabs is too much but I use anywhere around 10 to 20 tabs at any given time. And chrome on windows hangs half the time while on linux chromium is slightly better. This too with just 5 or 6 extensions. If firefox really has these ridiculous speeds then I will switch to firefox in a heartbeat.
I use tree style tabs to group tabs by "context" (scala stuff, Haskell stuff, news, stuff to read later) and I get to 100+ tabs quite fast.
Then I close the whole parent tab and sub-tabs when I'm done with a particular context, or go through my to-read-later tabs to catch up and close them.
Then I close the whole parent tab and sub-tabs when I'm done with a particular context, or go through my to-read-later tabs to catch up and close them.
My general 'serious' search workflow is: try googling three different keyword combinations. Open all acceptable results in new tabs. I wont lose time for loading, I already wait enough. This generally creates peaks of 50+ tabs.
However i force myself to clear everything on startup.
However i force myself to clear everything on startup.
You wouldn't literally have 100 tabs, but the principle of the matter is that Chrome will dominate your memory.
By the way, there are extensions that will kill tabs that are inactive, but even on my 16GB MacBook Pro it doesn't take much for Chrome to start weighing things down.
By the way, there are extensions that will kill tabs that are inactive, but even on my 16GB MacBook Pro it doesn't take much for Chrome to start weighing things down.
Until somebody comes up with a better way to keep interesting and relevant tabs an immediate click away, I'm going to regularly habe 100-200 tabs open at any time. Bookmarks are too unwieldy and require too much of a context switch.
I read ~30 posts daily and I use tabs to postpone intreasting reads I've found through "open in new tab" on mobile. And anytime I'm doing any research I have 50+ tabs open usually.
I agree. If I have more than 10 tabs open it's pretty extraordinary.
I keep them open because I use them (docs and stuff) and then sometimes I forget I have some open so I re-open them. Sometimes I'll have 5 of the same tabs open. :-)
Sort of like a temporary bookmark. I have stuff to do, and things to finish reading, but I don't want to bookmark them. So they sit in tabs waiting.
I used "Snooze Tab," which kind of could address that: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/snooze-tabs
I like having my history for a lot of things, so I can hit the back button and forward button a lot.
I had 37 tabs open in Firefox on my phone yesterday. A stack of pages to read. No slowdowns.
44 now as I read this.
I'm on beta. Had a few hangs last week but this week it is buttery smooth as usual.
I'm on beta. Had a few hangs last week but this week it is buttery smooth as usual.
Boredom or laziness. On my mobile firefox, i sometimes don't close tabs for months
> What's the real life scenario we're looking at here?
Have you ever used CloudFormation?
Have you ever used CloudFormation?
100 is low end for me. My sessions typically have 600 to 900.
Wikipedia
Tvtrops
scp-wiki.net
API research
I can easily have over 100 tabs of just Reddit open.
API research
I can easily have over 100 tabs of just Reddit open.
Research.
so, you're doing some research on 3 or 4 different simultaneous projects. one is in particle physics (a part-time interest) where you need to find related articles on nature, arxiv, vixra and the general internet. google search, click darn that was useless and took too long to load anyway, hmmm, how about i right-button open-in-new-tab on half a dozen of these pages, let them load in the background whilst i go to page 2 of those search results? ah ha! yes! that works well!
okaay, so there's now 10 potential useful articles to read, they're already loaded (yippee, saves time...) hmmm let's go through them hmm... that one's useless (close) that one's useless (close) that one looks interesting but i don't have time to read it immediately....
---->>> LET'S KEEP IT OPEN FOR NOW * <<<< ----
.... and move on whoops the phone's ringing i have to deal with a client's urgent issue, he also needs something to be fixed okay so it's an obscure issue i don't know anything about let's do some google searches damn we're under time-pressure again let's do the same trick, right-mouse-button on a stackexchange liiink, right-mouse-button open-in-new-tab on a forum paaaage, right-mouse-button on some git repository browser because i might need to compile that up or investigaaaate...
okay now the tabs are open and loaded don't have to wait for them to load let's review them... close, close, read, read, close, read.... hmm that looks like it's got the info i need, but...
---->>>> LET'S KEEP THE TAB OPEN IN CASE I NEED IT AGAIN TO FIX THE CLIENT'S PROBLEM IN THE FUTURE <<<<<----
okaay so i have time to go back to that particle physics research now and i can carry on where i was interrupted ...
--->>>> * BECAUSE I LEFT THE TABS OPEN.... * <<<<-----
repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. the technique saves vast amounts of time (through proper use of parallelism), uses the browser itself as a proper research tool, as well as an information storage mechanism "with history". the actual "browse history" itself i have found to be pretty damn useless, i can never find anything as it doesn't have a proper useable UI.
from your enquiry i should imagine that you're one of these people who sits there waiting for a page to load, sequentially, then closes it... sequentially. depth-first in other words. by which time it's been so long that you've forgotten what you were searching for. for those people who use internet search engines to do breadth-first searches, tabs are absolutely invaluable.
okaay, so there's now 10 potential useful articles to read, they're already loaded (yippee, saves time...) hmmm let's go through them hmm... that one's useless (close) that one's useless (close) that one looks interesting but i don't have time to read it immediately....
---->>> LET'S KEEP IT OPEN FOR NOW * <<<< ----
.... and move on whoops the phone's ringing i have to deal with a client's urgent issue, he also needs something to be fixed okay so it's an obscure issue i don't know anything about let's do some google searches damn we're under time-pressure again let's do the same trick, right-mouse-button on a stackexchange liiink, right-mouse-button open-in-new-tab on a forum paaaage, right-mouse-button on some git repository browser because i might need to compile that up or investigaaaate...
okay now the tabs are open and loaded don't have to wait for them to load let's review them... close, close, read, read, close, read.... hmm that looks like it's got the info i need, but...
---->>>> LET'S KEEP THE TAB OPEN IN CASE I NEED IT AGAIN TO FIX THE CLIENT'S PROBLEM IN THE FUTURE <<<<<----
okaay so i have time to go back to that particle physics research now and i can carry on where i was interrupted ...
--->>>> * BECAUSE I LEFT THE TABS OPEN.... * <<<<-----
repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat. the technique saves vast amounts of time (through proper use of parallelism), uses the browser itself as a proper research tool, as well as an information storage mechanism "with history". the actual "browse history" itself i have found to be pretty damn useless, i can never find anything as it doesn't have a proper useable UI.
from your enquiry i should imagine that you're one of these people who sits there waiting for a page to load, sequentially, then closes it... sequentially. depth-first in other words. by which time it's been so long that you've forgotten what you were searching for. for those people who use internet search engines to do breadth-first searches, tabs are absolutely invaluable.
Well, until they git rid of XUL add-ons in November/FF57, I live and die by the Tab Groups extension.
I have a group of tabs for various things in AWS, a group for various things in my build system, a group for the various Jira and Confluence things, a group for mail and google docs, a group for my company's HR requirements (timesheeting), a group for programming docs, and any one of these groups can have additional tabs for idle browsing while I'm waiting for something, and I can add additional groups if I'm on a secondary project.
The way I tend to browse is to hit a page, then load several promising links in new tabs. Load them over the network in parallel, because doing everything on one tab with back/forward is painful in the extreme.
Overall, it's ridiculously easy to hit 100 tabs.
Edit: fantastic, thanks for the suggestions. Will definitely check them out.
I have a group of tabs for various things in AWS, a group for various things in my build system, a group for the various Jira and Confluence things, a group for mail and google docs, a group for my company's HR requirements (timesheeting), a group for programming docs, and any one of these groups can have additional tabs for idle browsing while I'm waiting for something, and I can add additional groups if I'm on a secondary project.
The way I tend to browse is to hit a page, then load several promising links in new tabs. Load them over the network in parallel, because doing everything on one tab with back/forward is painful in the extreme.
Overall, it's ridiculously easy to hit 100 tabs.
Edit: fantastic, thanks for the suggestions. Will definitely check them out.
There's a new Tree Tabs that works on 57 FWIW
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
not as nice as the old one (but it's improving!), I just use Tab Center Redux.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/
not as nice as the old one (but it's improving!), I just use Tab Center Redux.
There's also talk of implementing Tree Style Tabs as a WebExtension. It appears the required APIs have been approved, they're just waiting on someone to implement them:
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224
https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/issues/1224
"Simplified Tab Groups" [1] is a similar Firefox extension and the developer says [2] he intends to make it compatible with the new WebExtension API.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
[2] https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups/issues/60
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
[2] https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups/issues/60
Can it backup into a file/load tab groups from backup file? This is an essential feature of the current Tab Groups extension for me.
"Why would anyone do that?!"... there's always one
For Chrome, the Great Suspender plugin had fixed the resource usage for me, it's kind of like lazy loading + freezing of heavy background tabs, and it enables quick startup even with 100 tabs.
But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.
But it should be a core feature of the browser itself IMHO.
I used the Great Suspender for a few months and thought it was great. Unfortunately, at some point tabs I came back to were 404ed =/ It's also why I switched away from bookmarks to Evernote (and later Bear) so I could capture the page in addition to the address for reference.
I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...
I guess I should use it in tandem with that plugin that replaces 404 pages with archive.org links...
A bigger problem with Chrome is that it doesn't support multiple rows of tabs. The usual reasoning is "close some tabs!" For someone who uses a monitor in portrait mode, this is painfully ridiculous.
Conform to widescreen!
I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.
I'm sympathetic, I use my two secondary 1080ps in portrait. I think I used to use a vim plugin on Chrome that had a sublime-ctrl+p-like feature to just search through my open tabs for the one I wanted.
I'd kill for something that could search across Firefox and Chrome tabs - sometimes I know I have something open, but not sure which browser app. I did have an addin like this for FF, but with the performance issues FF already has, it wasn't realistic to run it.
Vimium! I use it too, very useful. The command is shift+t to search through open tabs.
na the usual reasoning is "use vertical tab bar and tab groups and dont put your monitor n portrait mode"
This is not just for power users. My mother is about the most opposite of power user that there is. But she constantly has hundreds of tabs open when I go to visit her and do my obligatory tech support duties. She uses tabs like bookmarks, even though she bookmarks everything.
I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her.
You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager.
First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans.
Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad.
But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.
I've tried to coach her on working with the bookmarks better, but she has her system, and she's sticking to it. And to be fair, I don't know how I would manage bookmarks in any web browser trying to deal with them at her level. She has > 30k things bookmarked that are "important" to her.
You know that feeling you get when you're watching a user do something and he or she right clicks and selects copy and then goes through the dock to find the next application and then right clicks to paste, but the target area isn't focused, so it doesn't work. So then it's back to the dock to find the prior app and then reselect the text and right-click, copy, etc. etc. etc.? You know that feeling. It hits you in the pit of your stomach like the first time you saw the alien burst out of John Hurt's chest in Alien, or the red wedding from Game of Thrones, or every time you're in a meeting with a product manager.
First, there's the shock of it. The horror. Oh. My. God. WTF is happening here? Then there's the reality setting in. Holy shit. This is real. This is actually a thing that's happening, and there is literally nothing I can do about it. Then there is the sadness. I used to think of this thing in front of me as a person. Now all I see is a dead, empty, hopeless, useless, lifeless husk of a human. An end user. With a product manager alien screeching as it runs away from the lifeless corpse of the user it just murdered. Not by intent. Simply because that's what it is: a fully alien form of life that can only exist by killing humans.
Sorry about the vivid imagery, and I'm hoping this comes across as a joke about the friction between PMs and developers. I don't actually think they are that bad.
But every time I watch my mom try to scroll through 30k bookmarks to find a link, I get that feeling magnified by about 50.
OK, I'll put my hand up here. I bookmark sites reflexively, probably a hangover from the days before Google when things were harder to find and we had dial up that you paid for by the minute.
Bookmarks | Show All Bookmarks then keywords in the 'Search Bookmarks' is useful.
I have actually set the bookmark.html file as my start page. I can then use 'find in page' if I can remember any keywords about the page I am looking for, or just scroll down.
Ms Martin Senior needs to have her bookmarks backed up as well or there will be gnashing of teeth at some point in the future.
Imagery fine!
Bookmarks | Show All Bookmarks then keywords in the 'Search Bookmarks' is useful.
I have actually set the bookmark.html file as my start page. I can then use 'find in page' if I can remember any keywords about the page I am looking for, or just scroll down.
Ms Martin Senior needs to have her bookmarks backed up as well or there will be gnashing of teeth at some point in the future.
Imagery fine!
It isn't always them and us. Empathise more,
Long time user of Tree Style Tabs. Works great for me.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Too bad it won't work on Firefox 57
Old Opera simply used to load cache. So if you opened a tab, it was there.. for days, weeks, months, through restarts and all. I loved that. Now everything I open to "check out later" is getting lost.
This really was one of the things that Opera got better. I don't understand what the reasoning is to do this any other way.
There is no reasoning, it's only cargo-cult mentality and fashion choices. Old Opera got almost everything better, but it lost to inferior alternatives because users aren't rational when it comes to their choices. Chrome and Firefox are the OOP of browsers.
YouTube is a bit smarter these days: they defer playback until the tab first gets focus. So you have to pause at most as many videos as there are separate windows, not tabs.
I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.
I believe Chrome is not nearly as smart as it could be about deferring loading of tabs, though.
It's not youtube doing that, but chrome. The html5 video element doesn't start playback until the tab first gets focus.
Firefox has the same thing, but you have to enable it in about:config
Do you have to enable it? I use Firefox Nightly, and have been observing this behavior for a long, long time. It's one of those things that's so minor and yet so important that I wonder how I went without it for so long.
I believe it is enabled by default now, and the value in about:config is `media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground`
Thanks for the pref name. The feature is currently enabled by default only in the Firefox Nightly channel but you can use the pref to enable it in the Beta or Release channels.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1352014
It's disabled by default on regular firefox.
I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.
I prefer to disable media.autoplay.enabled which is enabled by default.
YES, I'm not the only one who uses this! As a compulsive tab-opener (I really gotta work on this...) and also a cellular hotspot user, both Safari and Chrome eat up, like, a gigabyte of traffic as soon as I open them. Firefox behaves much more reasonably, but until recently it's been very slow with 50+ tabs. I'm glad to hear this use case is (apparently) getting some close attention!
> I'm not sure if it's still this way, but Chrome used to load every tab on startup.
I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create:
https://github.com/hrj/sloth/
It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.
I used to avoid Chrome for the same reasons, but then I found an extension and, uh, extended it, to create:
https://github.com/hrj/sloth/
It forces all tabs into inactive state on startup. Also creates a new tab page (or switches to an existing one) to avoid loading the focussed historical tab.
Firefox lazy loads tabs on startup, but not otherwise. So if you open a YouTube in a new tab it will start playing. Chrome, on the other hand, will not start playing the video, which is nice.
I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.
I'm a Firefox user though so that's where my chrome knowledge starts and ends.
The current Nightly doesn't autoplay until I focus the tab now. I'm not sure if this is a Youtube-the-website feature or Firefox-lazy-load feature.
It's Firefox https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824509
Is that a Chrome feature or Chrome-only Youtube feature?
It's Chrome's lazy-loading of tabs. YouTube could presumably implement this on all browsers by detecting if the user is focused or not, but I don't know that it's always desirable.
I'm pretty sure it's a Chrome-specific lazy autoplaying of html5 video. I really like to alt-click Youtube links (so the page is loaded and queued), put my headphones on and switch over when I'm ready.
Firefox does this too. It's on by default for Firefox Nightly and an opt-in preference in the other update channels.
So what you say is that firefox does not do this. (unless you go deep in about:config which is highly discouraged by mozilla).
Firefox Nightly does, and it's not done by default in non-nightly (but you can enable it with "media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground"). I imagine it will become the default eventually.
"Firefox doesn't do this" is not a valid one-sentence summary of what I just said.
"Firefox doesn't do this" is not a valid one-sentence summary of what I just said.
The fun part is that opera did this and did it better years ago, but sadly it came to stop the day they decided quarterly profits were the new priority and switched to become a google chrome skin.
> I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.
I got 8 extensions installed at the moment, 6 of those are marked as legacy and will stop working before the end of the year. I also hope Mozilla focuses more on power users, but I think a lot of them will leave when their favorite extensions stops working and Google keeps favoring Chrome on their sites.
I got 8 extensions installed at the moment, 6 of those are marked as legacy and will stop working before the end of the year. I also hope Mozilla focuses more on power users, but I think a lot of them will leave when their favorite extensions stops working and Google keeps favoring Chrome on their sites.
It irks me that they're not just dumping the XUL extensions, but the Jetpack extensions as well. I've already converted my extensions once, from Greasemonkey to Jetpack, and now I have to convert to WebExtensions.
And no, Firefox WebExtensions are not compatible with Google Chrome WebExtensions. They're close, but not compatible.
And no, Firefox WebExtensions are not compatible with Google Chrome WebExtensions. They're close, but not compatible.
Hope is not enough, it's clear that mozilla has a strong stance against power users.
Chrome has supported lazy loading for a while now. I unfortunately can't find this reference, but I remember it being announced as part of release notes many months ago.
I have the problem of moving a tab to a new window, and then 15 minutes later I have 15 tabs open. So I often have a few Chrome windows open at any point.
If I restart Chrome, only the focused tabs on each window are loaded.
I have the problem of moving a tab to a new window, and then 15 minutes later I have 15 tabs open. So I often have a few Chrome windows open at any point.
If I restart Chrome, only the focused tabs on each window are loaded.
Yes but I have found that if you "open in new tab" then it loads the page even though it is in the background. It should do as it does as startup but doesn't.
This, exactly. I'd love to open half a dozen tabs pointing at videos, without having to wait for each one to load and then quickly pause it.
(Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
(Related: I'd also really like to middle-click video annotations to open them in a tab. No, I don't want to replace the current video with them.)
Some sites, such as YouTube, don't start playing a video until you switch to the tab.
That hasn't been my experience with YouTube; middle-clicking to open a half-dozen videos in tabs starts all the videos playing at once.
Not sure if you're using Chrome or Firefox. I just tested FF 54 by alt-clicking a link. It loads and autoplays the non-active tab. Chrome v59, loads the page but doesn't autoplay until you switch to it. Chrome is my daily driver and I really prefer this behavior.
But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.
But recent performance improvements, especially the handling of many, many tabs has me looking at FF again.
By default they do start playing immediately in Firefox.
Configurable with the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.
Sorry but you got the wrong setting here. To disable autoplay it's media.autoplay.enabled
media.autoplay.enabled toggles whether videos in the current (foreground) tab starts auto playing or not
The question was about videos in a background tab, which is controlled by the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.
The question was about videos in a background tab, which is controlled by the media.block-autoplay-until-in-foreground setting.
Sadly mozilla provides no documentation for those settings, but I can assure you that this setting does not care if the tab is in the foreground or background, autoplay is simply disabled which it seems to me was what was asked here IIANM.
Unfortunately, neither of those settings does quite what I'd like. Once a tab has been in the foreground, I'd like it to continue being able to play things in the background, including new things. (For instance, some sites play a chime for notifications.) I just don't want anything played from a tab that has never been in the foreground.
Some sites maybe, but definitely not youtube.
Yeah, my workaround in a situation like that is to open all. Then close, restart and click restore session. It only loads the active page, not all.
With firefox go to about:config and disable media.autoplay.enabled now you have to click play for the video to start.
That's probably the right behavior for those people who are never going to open the tab; but for people like me who have few tabs, open in new tab is a great way to load something I'm actually going to read soon; eg open the article in a new tab, scan the HN comments while the article loads (especially if it's from one of those sites that takes 3 minutes to load)
I think this behavior should be linked with the "Make new tabs have the current focus when opened" option. So if that is not set, and the new tab does not appear, then Firefox should not load. In the devs defense, the inconsistent behaviour between startup and "restore all", and "open in new tab without focus" is easy to miss.
EDIT: I would agree with you in your assessment of the default behavior however, if it were the case, that most people only have a few tabs open normally.
EDIT: I would agree with you in your assessment of the default behavior however, if it were the case, that most people only have a few tabs open normally.
[deleted]
There are a lot of people who use tabs as bookmarks. Seems like a good way to keep the RAM industry going strong. Someone once told me (seriously) "I need at least 128 GB of RAM otherwise I can't keep my tabs open." But does everything you were interested in over the last X weeks or months really need to be loaded up? No, and if you use it like that then it can't preload stuff.
I think the main lesson is that bookmarks don't work too well or people just don't use them. If nothing else, make the bookmark display show newer bookmarks rather than the same old ones from four years ago. And maybe start preloading if they are opened regularly. Merge two features together, maybe add optional other organizational features for example similar to new tab screen.
The tricky thing is that there are a lot of things that are potentially supposed to happen while a tab is open. The browser is now it's own OS, and it may be very difficult for developers to use important features if tabs (processes) only _look_ like they are running.
I think the main lesson is that bookmarks don't work too well or people just don't use them. If nothing else, make the bookmark display show newer bookmarks rather than the same old ones from four years ago. And maybe start preloading if they are opened regularly. Merge two features together, maybe add optional other organizational features for example similar to new tab screen.
The tricky thing is that there are a lot of things that are potentially supposed to happen while a tab is open. The browser is now it's own OS, and it may be very difficult for developers to use important features if tabs (processes) only _look_ like they are running.
That's because the bookmarkers sucks. They do not adapt to what you are doing, you need to do a lot of setup and organize a lot to be able to use it well. It should be more organic, grow with the use you make. I still believe that anyone who makes a better bookmark will dominate more than just the browser war.
Bookmarking always struck me as a 90s solution to just having fulltext search and analytics over your browser history, there have been a few attempts at browsers that addressed this head-on, but they've all died off over time
IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue
IMO just one good new tab UI over a user's history/local cache could make a sizeable dent in Google's ad revenue
Opera with its unique cache offered the option to have full text search in history and it was great. Then quarterly profit became a priority for the board and they dropped their browser to become a google chrome advanced skin.
It's not like you have to reinvent the wheel even, just use Xapian like notmuch to do the grunt work of full-text indexing.
How do you organise tabs then? I've god knows how many bookmarks and I've been blindly Ctrl-D-ing since time immemorial, only tagging very distinct stuff and modifying titles if too stupid. When I need to get at sth. bookmarked, typing stuff into the url field in firefox just works.
Tree Tab Style.
Try it, then read the original post and the comments again. :)
I think this is the missing piece on all this discussion.
Try it, then read the original post and the comments again. :)
I think this is the missing piece on all this discussion.
I do know those extensions, but still prefer bookmarks. I just tag stuff unread and go on.
Have you tried pocket? I used to keep a load of bookmarks but the problem was that after a while many of the source urls would die off. So something like pocket is very handy as it takes a copy of the page you're interested in.
Why pocket when we have opensource wallabag that you can either host yourself[1] or use as a service[2] ?
IIRC pocket has had some serious vulnerabilites exposed.
[1]: https://wallabag.org/en [2]: https://wallabag.it/en
IIRC pocket has had some serious vulnerabilites exposed.
[1]: https://wallabag.org/en [2]: https://wallabag.it/en
Pocket might get better integration since it was recently acquired by Mozilla. Fingers crossed...
Pocket had a great integration with Firefox when it was an extension. Then they decided to integrate it into the browser and ironically it end up being a piece of shit that was not more functional than a bookmarklet. Not only that but they also removed the original extension from add-ons site so you have had to use the half assed built-in implementation.
I'd try a thing for tabs that works like cmd-tab / alt-tab works for apps.
Edge's reading list shows newer entries at the top. The problem is you don't have to do anything extra to use tabs. You just... leave them open, and then there's no reason to use bookmarks or reading list or history
Yea, but that reduces the value of tabs overall. You can't just glance at the top of the browser to remember where you just were.
If i don't look at a tab for a few hours, it's not worth keeping around as it just adds to the noise without providing value. If i need to read something, i either read it immediately or bookmark it to read later. The result: i can confidently resume work without distractions at any time.
If i don't look at a tab for a few hours, it's not worth keeping around as it just adds to the noise without providing value. If i need to read something, i either read it immediately or bookmark it to read later. The result: i can confidently resume work without distractions at any time.
> You can't just glance at the top of the
> browser to remember where you just were.
With tree-style tabs, each root represents a train of thought. I just collapse them until I decide what to do with them. Sometimes I bookmark and banish them. Sometimes I come back to that thought next weekend.
Chrome's default tabs at the top, to me, are the distraction where each tab has equal weight. But I'm not going to say that anyone is doing it wrong if that's what they prefer.
[deleted]
There's a good reason not to use edge: it's not available outside windows.
How is that relevant to a UI discussion?
It could be the best UI ever, if it is not available it is useless.
In this particular example microsoft uses edge to push people to use the latest version of their adware/spyware OS.
In this particular example microsoft uses edge to push people to use the latest version of their adware/spyware OS.
That says nothing about whether a particular UI feature is good – and browsers in particular have a long history of good ideas becoming widely implemented by most vendors.
It's not just tabs as bookmarks. I can build up a stack of 100 tabs in a day easily.
How??? I've never understood how people can have that many tabs open and it be useful at all. At that point the information overload is too much. I have at most 10 open, and close them as I'm done with them. Helps reduce cognitive load.
I open almost every link in new tabs. It's faster to close a tab and return to the prior tab than it is to go Back, and the back button often doesn't work with dynamic pages. Plus, when replying in various forums, it's much easier to flip between tabs to refer to stuff that was said upthread, especially when you have to go back a page or two.
Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.
Neither the back button nor bookmarks retain state sufficiently or have sufficient responsiveness to replace open tabs.
Also looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history. In fact going through your browsing history may be faster because you can actually use key words to search for what you want.
I have 2-3 tabs open most of the time. If I am looking something up, I go to 10-12. When I am done, it goes back down to 2-3. I can't even fathom under what situation people are using hundreds of tabs.
I have 2-3 tabs open most of the time. If I am looking something up, I go to 10-12. When I am done, it goes back down to 2-3. I can't even fathom under what situation people are using hundreds of tabs.
> looking up what you want when you have dozens / hundreds of tabs open is no better than going through your history browsing history
I have heaps of tabs open, but there are orders of magnitude more pages in my browser history. The latter usually contains so much that is too much to look through to find anything but quite recent entries. The tabs still open are pages still with some relevance to me, while the history is filled with lots of incidental stuff that is no longer of use.
[Edit: also, with open tabs the page content is already there so it's more quickly accessible. This can be useful if you need to look at it to help find the page you're looking for, and to get the content from the page]
I have heaps of tabs open, but there are orders of magnitude more pages in my browser history. The latter usually contains so much that is too much to look through to find anything but quite recent entries. The tabs still open are pages still with some relevance to me, while the history is filled with lots of incidental stuff that is no longer of use.
[Edit: also, with open tabs the page content is already there so it's more quickly accessible. This can be useful if you need to look at it to help find the page you're looking for, and to get the content from the page]
I usually max out at around 50. Today I got to 40, by reading several articles in the morning, and then starting a programming project in the afternoon. And the project included several unfamiliar topics, and I opened multiple tabs for some Google searches because not every website has the same take on the matter.
I open a tab as an (internal) signifier that "this might be interesting". I will browse it, and cull the ones that dont fit my interest/mood/timescope.
For me, it reduces cognitive load. I don't keep in mind all tabs that I have open -- that's why I keep them open! To forget about them.
Bookmarks are mentally for things I want to save and reuse. But I'll probably open 40 HN sourced articles (from the main page and comments) per day, and continually cycle/review them for interest/effort throughout the day.
For me, it reduces cognitive load. I don't keep in mind all tabs that I have open -- that's why I keep them open! To forget about them.
Bookmarks are mentally for things I want to save and reuse. But I'll probably open 40 HN sourced articles (from the main page and comments) per day, and continually cycle/review them for interest/effort throughout the day.
On the contrary, opening tabs reduce the cognitive load for me. Instead of having to use some of my limited mental space to keep in mind that there's some interesting link I'd like to go when I have finished reading the current page, I just open it now and will go back to later. Same as writing something down in a todo list.
I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.
I also close tabs as soon as I'm done with them which is why I only have 150-200 tabs open. Each categorized by activity, so when I switch one activity to the other I save time and cognitive load by having them right as I left them instead of having to find what URLs to reopen and actually open them. This way I only have 5-30 tabs open in front of me while the other are offscreen in other groups.
I think a lot of people use it like instapaper? A queue of things to read.
If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think
If browsers had a sort of tab queue where longer lived stuff then things could be a bit better on this front I think
Couldn't agree more. Bookmarks are so poorly implemented, people use tabs instead. Which is dumb
Doesn't a lazy-loaded tab solve this problem?
To me, the problem is that bookmarks are "while browsing, go to a different component that loads the browser tab with what I want".
Tabs, OTOH, are a placeholder for things that I want to keep just 1 step closer.
Saying it that way, I don't think it makes rational sense. But 1 cognitive step to a page instead of two is huge for me.
To me, the problem is that bookmarks are "while browsing, go to a different component that loads the browser tab with what I want".
Tabs, OTOH, are a placeholder for things that I want to keep just 1 step closer.
Saying it that way, I don't think it makes rational sense. But 1 cognitive step to a page instead of two is huge for me.
Well, which is it for? To make your page come in quicker when you click it, or to be a more accessible UI for choosing among options of sites you've visited and want to return to? To me they are different things, and shouldn't be lumped together the way they are.
Why is it dumb?
I use holmes google chrome extension and it's awesome. Once a website is bookmarked, it can be easily searched with by simply *[tab] and it searches for it. Highly recommended.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmo...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/holmes/gokficnebmo...
I had the same feeling. Seems like they are using tabs as a history.
A better history may solve their problem.
A better history may solve their problem.
Sure a better history along with bookmarks and a pile of things could indeed fix my problem. But using tabs also fixes my problem perfectly well.
Bookmarks have been broken in browsers for more than a decade. Using bookmarks requires so much work and time that it makes no sense to use them.
How come?
First you have to create some categories, but that doesn't take long and then you simply throw bookmarks in these categories. the end.
First you have to create some categories, but that doesn't take long and then you simply throw bookmarks in these categories. the end.
It doesn't help that the bookmarks toolbar is not shown by default. I prefer to keep my tabs down to a reasonable number, and put folders on the bookmarks toolbar instead. If I want to bookmark something, I can just drag that link to the appropriate folder.
I think the main lesson is web browsers are bloated as hell now.
Wow. I've been getting more and more frustrated with how poorly Chrome handles even a moderately large number of tabs (~150), and it sounds like my savior is going to be ... Firefox. Huh.
Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it.
I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?
Wouldn't have guessed it, but I'll totally take it.
I have a nice extension for Chrome called Quick Tabs that gives me a searchable list of my open tabs and makes it easy to find things I have open... anyone know which of the several things that seem to do that with Firefox would be the best to use?
"% foo" will search your open tabs for foo. See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/awesome-bar-search-fire... for other characters that will filter the search results for other data such as bookmarks, history, tags, etc.
And even if you don't use %, the awesomebar will include open tabs in results if it thinks them relevant!
Cool trick... But I wish it did a full text search as it appears to only search URLs and tab titles. (maybe there is a different symbol that does full text?)
Add a '#' to further restrict the search to page titles.
You can also configure the character used to search only tabs (I use ",") with "browser.urlbar.restrict.openpage" in about:config.
Wait, Chrome doesn't have tab search built in?
Jeez. TIL. Couldn't live without it.
Jeez. TIL. Couldn't live without it.
It's unfortunate because back in ~2010 I used to open over 1,000 tabs in Chrome at a time. It's very useful when doing research: each window represents a topic, and each topic can spawn 30+ tabs.
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).
Nowadays Chrome keels over at around 150, like you say. It also leaks memory like a sieve, so if your hard drive is anywhere close to full you'll end up with a lovely OS X popup saying all your running programs have been frozen and that your system is out of memory (since it can't page to disk because it's full).
I frequently play a little game with Chrome:
1. Open up Window->Task Manager
2. Sort by CPU
3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list
4. Try not to kill extensions
5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage
6. Kill everything over 99mb
7. Continue enjoying Chrome
Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.
Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
1. Open up Window->Task Manager
2. Sort by CPU
3. Tap back and forth between tab clusters with single digit+ CPU usage and the "End Process" button as they bubble to the top of the list
4. Try not to kill extensions
5. When I'm not seeing too many >1% processes, sort by memory usage
6. Kill everything over 99mb
7. Continue enjoying Chrome
Every time I do this little dance, I think: this would be much more fun as a little Space Invaders style video game. Wave 1 of enemies would be processes that bubble above 1%. Extensions would be friendlies. Wave 2 is high memory processes. It'd be fun to get a little score every time.
Of course, Chrome should just have a "use less resources" button that did all of that for you.
I have a bash script called `kill-chrome-helpers` that kills all Chrome processes without terminating any Chrome windows. It kills extensions too, but whenever that happens Chrome pops up a bubble saying "click here to restore the extension", so usually I just run the script and then click a few times. The script is dead simple:
killall "Google Chrome Helper"
A couple things. First, it's best to avoid using `killall`. On Linux it searches the process list, but on Solaris and possibly other nixes, it kills all processes system-wide. Using `pkill` is a better habit, but read the manpage first because it matches a little differently.
Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
Secondly, check out this extension for Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende... . It auto-suspends tabs that haven't been opened for a given time period (I think the default is 60 minutes). Can also whitelist domains, etc. I've been using it with great success for a long time now.
No, that is rather a Solaris quirk. That's ancient (literally) sysv behavior and killall in neither OpenBSD, nor FreeBSD work like that today.
So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.
So in practice, what you're saying isn't relevant to majority of *nix users today.
I also use many 100s of browser tabs almost all the time. The Opera browser in 2009-2011 used to handle 500 tabs easily for me. These days I am often sitting at >200 tabs in both Chrome and Firefox on same machine.
I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)
One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.
Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
I'd like to see a command line interface to manage my open tabs, so that I can see which tabs are going to be "expired" soon (unloaded into a stale tab, or converted into bookmarks as long-term cold storage) so that I can manage which groups of tabs I would prefer to continue to be running, and do bulk maintenance on what's "very cached" and "mostly cached" and such. I would imagine something like buku/jotmuch that has HTTPS API access to some extension in my browser. (I mean, the right way to do this is DCOM/RPC but see lkcl's eternally ignored pleas...)
One alternative I tried for a while was xmonad + a plugin to label individual windows. Instead of using browser tabs, each page would be loaded in a new window, and each window would be given a list of tags by me when leaving the window first time. With a keyboard shortcut, I was pulling up a list of possible browser windows that matched a search query about tags. I don't really care about tabs/window distinction as long as the interface gets out of my way.
Have you considered doing a quick extension to monitor your tab usage stats? At minimum you could track details like: Open/close rate, tab revisit/reload rate (longer than a second), tab lifetime, groups of tabs (such as tab creation relationships) and their lifetimes. Once you have this information, you could probably tweak your browser's build configuration to more closely match your habits.
vimperator aka pentadactyl. works really well and if you press the alt key you get the "standard" menu back. it increases screen real-estate, and i love it. it's by no means perfect but i won't go back to standard key bindings in firefox... ever. yes i also have 200-300 tabs open in firefox, and maintain them there for months at a time. firefox continues to eat memory (i got a laptop with 16 GB of RAM just to cope with how insane firefox gets) so a restart is necessary on a regular basis... that's done inside pentadactyl with ":restart".
ok clarified with you later that i meant xpcom bindings not keyboard bindings :)
There has got to be a better solution to this problem than having 1,000 tabs open in a web browser. That sounds like an absolute nightmare.
I don't understand this perspective. It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."
It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.
Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
It's not like you're actively monitoring every tab at once, you just have the knowledge ready to go and at a finger's whim. You use extensions like Tab Hunter to jump directly to the tab you care about.
Yeah, you could do the same with using a bunch of profiles and bookmarks... but then you need to copy your login cookies and such and it just becomes a mess. I've tried many, many other solutions over the years and simply having a huge number of tabs is the one that continues to Just Work.
> It's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 files on your file system. That sounds like a nightmare."
No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"
Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
No, it's similar to saying "Surely there's a better solution than having 1000 radio/tv channels tuned on at once, waiting for you to decide which one is relevant"
Like why not open what you need when you need it rather than squirreling all those "maybes"?
Different people are different. When researching a question without a direct answer, it's more effective for me to open up tabs as I read a page and then search the most likely candidate. Whenever I reach a dead-end I can just switch tabs as opposed to pressing the back button N times. zzalpha's comment sums it up nicely: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14824086
I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
I know I'm a power user, but I miss how effective old Chrome was at this.
The same approach works well for forum discussions. One tab representing the forum, and child-tabs to track the comments section.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
For instance with HN, tabs provide quick navigatable references back to discussions that are relevant to my interest, and that might contain lead-off liks/references after they have fallen off the front-page.
I'm a chronic tab abuser as well, often with over 100 tabs at once. 1000 tabs still sounds insane to me.
Well, I'm running 600+ in Firefox for no particular reason. I guess that makes me only 60% insane.
I'd compare it more to bringing a stack of books to your table at the library. Just because you could notate the name and position of each and fetch them as needed doesn't mean it's not helpful to have them all handy. I've never personally used that many tabs for research, but vetting sources often requires taking a look at a lot of different links for any given subtopic.
Or that you don't know which tabs will be useful until you open them, and your qualification process is multi-pass.
It's not the same as having 1000 TV channels turned on at once.
No, it's like having 1000 radio/tv channels available at once, which you can tune to any one of in a mere moment.
[deleted]
Ok let's say you remember seeing something on a tab but couldn't remember which one it was on. How do you even begin to find that tab? With 1000 files on my file system I have any number of ways of searching not only the filenames, but also the contents of the files, visualizations based on size of the files, etc etc. I don't think it's a good comparison.
So what do you suggest is a better way to find the information, that would end up being less total work for the user?
I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
I don't think the person you're replying to was referring so much to implementation details, but rather more to function for the user. What if the browser had better support for finding items that are open in tabs?
Given the limits of human memory, I wonder how many of those 1,000 tabs are duplicates?
I'm not sure that there is. Bookmarks don't work as well because you can't preserve a session as easily. For example, I can just create a new tab group for a project that I want to work on, and then it will stay in the background until I have the resources to work on it.
I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
I don't know about other people, but I find it really useful to research a project and then leave it alone for a month or two before working on it. When I do this I often have a better perspective on the project than if I were to just jump in. With my setup, when I return to it my session is just as I left it; making it very easy to get up to speed.
You can bookmark tab groups (at least in Firefox) that's what I do to save a session.
With a lhs vertical tree-style tab-manager, I'm at around 100-200 tabs. It works the same as an expandable chapter/section navigation metaphor, except I control the content and nesting.
I'm curious, do you not have tons of tabs open? Do you just use a few at a time? A typical day at work will require at least 50+ tabs for each customer that comes in, plus Google/StackOverflow/Slack for whatever I'm researching, not to mention a few SoundCloud/YouTube tabs for music, while browsing Reddit or HackerNews, and then whatever I have racked up to read later. I'm open to another solution though, but can't think of one.
I typically have 5 - 30 tabs open at work depending on what I'm doing
A breadth-first search of the web is likely to do that kind of thing. Nothing wrong with it.
Maybe the Web is as much to blame as Chrome.
Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
Average webpage size has ballooned in the past 10 or so years.
Damn, I should have waited to comment. I even phrased it the same way.
/me smh
/me smh
Ha! Echo chamber indeed.
I have never opened 1000tabs in chrome but I can manage 100-200. I've noticed that a lot of this responsivness comes down to extensions. If you have only one bad extension it kill the performance of chrome. Another thing are ads ofc or sites with lots of (poorly written) javascript, but with ublock origin Chrome works fine for me.
Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
Also by 200 the GUI of chrome starts to annoy me so much that it forces me to close some stuff. I've tried a few extensions to deal with this but I've chosen to keep it clean and below this threshold instead.
I hesitate to say that Chrome leaks memory because of what you're seeing. Webpages have exploded in size over the years (both with high dpi images, css, and javascript). I'm not sure I have quite as many tabs as you, but I generally work the same way (window per topic, tens of tabs per window).
Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
Would a plugin like The Great Suspender fix your problem? I really liked that you could collapse a page of tabs into a collection of bookmarks and open a new page of those tabs just as easily.
Out of curiosity, and because the article doesn't delve into it, why do you have 150 tabs open?
In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open
In the course of my regular browsing, I usually have 3-4, and never more than 10-15. It's not something I've ever considered to have that many tabs open
As far as I can tell it's all about depth-first vs breadth-first.
I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.
Why?
Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).
I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.
I find the same people that like to open lots of tabs also prefer tabs that open in the background.
Why?
Because the browse breadth first. They'll be reading something and in the midst of it, see something they want to dig into, and open a new tab while continuing on the page they're currently on. This repeats a few times, and then once done with that content they go the next level down. Then lather-rinse-repeat. This causes a queue of pages to form (and BTW, for you programming newbies out there, this is a great way to visualize how recursion-less breadth-first tree traversal works).
I tend to be much more depth-first. When I open a tab, it's because I want to start exploring what's in that page. So I always have my browser focus new tabs (and screw you, Chrome, for only making that possible through an extension...). Then I'll pop back out and continue. In that model, you can just throw tabs away as you're done with them.
This is broadly my process, too.
I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.
Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.
This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.
YM, as always, MV.
I'll do a search, and background-open all of the results that seem responsive as I skim them, to read in depth once I think I've found "enough". Most of them of course get closed quickly upon ... uh, tabbing to them, because they weren't as material as I'd thought from the summary.
Then, sometimes (read: often), I'll recurse.
This way, in my experience, I tend to find more (as in quantity) relevant info, from which I can sieve quality of info, than if I were to serialize my search, going depth-first.
YM, as always, MV.
I strongly suspect this depends on a) the person and how they process information, and b) the kind of research being performed.
Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.
If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.
Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem. In that case, a large quantity of information isn't useful. I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers. So once I find it, I can abort the search. Researching breadth-first may cause me to build up a queue of tabs unnecessarily.
If, on the other hand, I was researching to synthesize large quantities of data from multiple sources, absolutely your workflow makes a lot of sense.
> Usually when I'm researching, it's typically because I'm searching for the solution to a problem.
I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.
I find that when I'm searching for a/any solution to a (specific) problem - "depth first" will be ok. But I'm usually searching for the best solution to a problem - and then I find that I normally have to "skim wide" - partly to figure out if I'm looking at the wrong problem (it's just a symptom of something else), and partly because something like 80% of stuff that I find online is outdated, wrong, not-well researched or all of the above.
> I just need an answer, not a survey of all possible answers
For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!
On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.
For me, sometimes when I need a direct answer, none of the answers found are that direct. Sometimes I look at an answer, gauge the effort it would take to investigate if that would work (code changes, whatever) then move on to see if there's an easier answer to verify. When I run out of those options, then I want to come back to this answer and try it. Doing this it's pretty easy to get my number of tabs up pretty high!
On the other hand, for research, yes, lots of tabs are the norm.
I wonder if Google has enough data to look at the search history of (150+) tab users and make a correlation with mental health searches.
I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.
I've often felt that the number of tabs I have open was both a symptom of ADD and something that made it worse.
Yes, this breadth-first description is a good way to characterize my reason for having lots of tabs (though I don't have nearly as many as some people here say they have).
One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).
One additional factor is that I think I was trained to do that by slowly-loading websites. If I open a site in a new background tab, it can go about loading as slowly as it wants, and it'll be ready by the time I get around to reading it (I guess this would be ruined by lazy loading tabs...).
Try using Pilgrim[0] if it's breadth you're concerned with. It's a simple reader bookmarklet that also creates a linked map of all links in a page[1], letting you visualize the breadth of linked info in a tree and glide back and forth between them in a simple way.
I just found it today and already I love it.
-
0. http://pilgrim.are.na/ 1. http://i.imgur.com/z78eybj.png
I just found it today and already I love it.
-
0. http://pilgrim.are.na/ 1. http://i.imgur.com/z78eybj.png
Kudos for the great explanation!
In a lot of ways, my open tabs are my to-do list. Some of them are things that I need to do, some are "I want to read this article when I have time", some are long term research.
I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.
So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.
I've tried doing things like bookmarking things to read later, or saving them to Evernote or Instapaper or whatever, but I never went back and actually read them. Ever.
So, this workflow actually works for me, even if some people would consider it unwieldy. It actually works pretty well, until Chrome starts getting annoyed. I probably average more around 120, but I've got a couple of projects happening simultaneously right now, so I'm up around 150 at the moment.
I too use tabs as ad-hoc to-do list. In fact I have tab open right now that is open since at least 2011 as the relevant project is on kind of on back burner right now and the tab got in some way repurposed as a separator between stuff linked from HN/Twitter/FB/wherever and stuff that I explicitly searched for.
Also, 150 isn't really that many, resource-wise. A modern computer should be able to handle that trivially. So even if my use case was unreasonable (I obviously don't think it is, obviously), there's no good reason a browser shouldn't still be able to support it well.
Modern webpages aren't just electric paper though. Often they are very dynamic and interactive applications. (Regardless of whether or not the content warrants it)
Personally, I keep generally 1 window per topic and multiple tabs in that window. They're kind of like medium-term bookmarks. For example, I'm shopping for a carseat, looking for a replacement for my front gate, working on a React project, a RaspberryPi project, and playing with Vagrant and Ansible for something else. I start something, but have to set it aside because of something is blocking me (I need to solder stuff together for rPi, verify my kid's hight/weight for the baby seat, talk to the wife about the gate, or I just get in the mood for switching projects).
After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.
Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.
At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.
After I finish a project (or abandon it) I can lose all of the tabs.
Unfortunately, this can end in 100s of tabs open at a time.
At work it's very similar. Especially, because a lot of things are interrupt driven and I'm jumping between short, medium, and long term projects.
I use them instead of bookmarks: with Tree Style Tabs, I can pause a task, collapse it's subtree(s) and come back later with the complete state intact.
I wonder if the 100+ tab people are also the ones who can handle dozens of cups of coffee a day. I guess I'm boring. Whether tabs or coffee, I do 1-2 at a time/per day.
It's not like people are suddenly opening up 150 or 1000 tabs due to hyperactivity! :p. I know in my case I just keep my browser open and things tend to just keep going and eventually I have hundreds of tabs open over the course of ... a week? A month? I'm not exactly sure. Occasionally I just shut the browser down and start over.
FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.
FWIW, I use safari as my primary browser and it seems to handle many tabs fine, though I'm sure I don't get up to the thousands of tabs that people are reporting. I can't say I've thought about how many tabs it can actually handle, though, as I do eventually clean things up, bookmarking tabs that are actually worth something and discarding the rest.
I often have close to 1000 tabs open (How do I get the count?) I'm also very sensitive to coffee and cannot do more than 2 a day.
I use tabs like I used to use bookmarks. I use tab groups, so I will maybe have a group of rust tabs, C++ tabs, and HN tabs open. This can add up over time.
Honestly, I find that the built-in behavior is good enough: go to the location bar (ctrl-L), type
Great feature, completely undiscoverable.
"% <substring>"
Great feature, completely undiscoverable.
Not to at all dispute your use case/requirements or anything, but as a depth-first browser user, I can't even fathom a world in which 150 tabs qualifies as "moderately" large, and not "how many tabs???" large. And 1000+ (as cited by a sibling poster)? Wow!
I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
> I wonder if this "I want to read this but I'll set it aside for now" model of browsing might be better served with a different UI metaphor...
Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed.
Sure, you're welcome to design it, I'll even give other methods a try occasionally, but for me every other metaphor has proved worse in some way and I'm perfectly happy working this way, there could be something better, but it isn't bad in a way that I feel needs to get fixed.
We'll, I can think of one obvious problem right off the bat: when you accumulate enough tabs they're no longer discoverable.
Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.
Maybe.
I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.
Many folks here have offered extensions or workarounds for making finding/searching tabs easier, but to me this is an issue introduced by the UI metaphor, and maybe better solved some other way.
Maybe.
I just observe that tabs seem to be a cumbersome tool for a very legitimate use case, and I gotta think there must be room to innovate.
Discoverability is a bit of a weird metric, if you have very few tabs you don't really need discoverability since you just put the tabs there. So this isn't really strictly worse when you have many tabs.
I'm under the impression that no one (or at least very few people) who have 150+ tabs open at once actually use the tab metaphor, at least by itself. I've seen several people in this thread who discuss a tool for searching tabs. Such a person would seldom click on, or even look at the tabs themselves. They would only interact with tabs through the search system. They have already found a new metaphor. Another common system for dealing with large numbers of tabs is building heirarchies. For example, some people have several browser windows open, each wih several tabs in it. One could limit each window to 15 tabs, and only have 10 browser windows open. Roughly equivalent methods include firefox's tab groups and tab tree. Tab tree in particular stands out as a separate metaphor from tabs. While it maintains the ordered list of favicons & titles used by tabs, it adds a new piece of information to each tab, allowing you to more easily determine the correct tab to switch to.
The better UI metaphor IMO is tree-style tabs. It lets one organize tabs in a similar manner to a folder tree in a file explorer. It's great for research, where you'll need to repeatedly reference many different sources, and maintain a chain of how you found each source.
I use Tab Center (now Tab Center Redux), which shows you the tabs on the sidebar (great for >20 tabs). The sidebar also has a search bar to search open tabs!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...
Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re...
Besides that, by default (no addons or settings necessary) Firefox's awesomebar (the URL bar) will search open tabs if you type stuff. This is great because often I'll want to open a site and it will show me that I already have a tab open for that and let me choose to just switch there anyway. I am surprised Chrome doesn't have this yet, really.
Firefox already does this - that's why it's the awesome bar. You can see it in action here https://youtu.be/pKE0Oc3yIBs?t=53
Awesome bar is nice, it's like using a crippled opera from 10 years ago.
Sadly, I have found that almost any new feature of browsers these days is like using a crippled opera from 10 years ago.
Firefox's “Awesome Bar” will suggest open tabs and let you switch to them like any other site.
Yep! No need for extensions, you can see it working here: https://youtu.be/pKE0Oc3yIBs?t=53
Do you have saved sessions with lots of tabs from chrome that you were able to import into firefox? Hoping there's an established method :)
Tabhunter; hugo search; All tabs helper;
there's tab groups and tab groups helper but this will be dropped by firefox in november so ...
I've been considering switching to Firefox due to these performance improvements, but the one feature that's always missing is for the location bar to autocomplete terms from other sources such as Wikipedia. Is there some add-on I can install that can fix this?
Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from one source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for. Notice how it offers to search Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature (I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a special box in its search results.
Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time. I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular site. I can't make FF do anything like that.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png
[3] http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png
Safari is brilliant here. If you enter something in Safari's location bar, it will suggest Wikipedia and other search suggestions right away [1]. I use this feature all the time. But FF, out of the box, will only show suggestions from one source. Here [2] is what FF suggests; all the hits are from Google, and it doesn't try to be clever about showing what I might mean to search for. Notice how it offers to search Wikipedia, with this tiny, obscure icon at the bottom of the suggestions, which I find to be a completely useless feature (I have keywords for that). The top hit tends to be what Google puts in a special box in its search results.
Here is another nice thing Safari does [3] which I make use of all the time. I've not visited walmart.com, so that "Top Hit" is just because it's a popular site. I can't make FF do anything like that.
[1] http://i.imgur.com/83FfnPn.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/T4p1NZv.png
[3] http://i.imgur.com/MkRP2Le.png
Like this?
https://s13.postimg.org/l8vjukezr/Screen_Shot_2017-07-21_at_...
It's just the search box next to the location/url bar. Now has search options to start out at wiki/amazon/twitter etc.
It's just the search box next to the location/url bar. Now has search options to start out at wiki/amazon/twitter etc.
No, not at all like that. I want the top search suggestion to be Wikipedia (or whatever else which is appropriate). I don't want to then click on an Wikipedia icon or whatever to search.
Go to Preferences > Search and set keywords for each search engine.
E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news" likewise on Wikipedia.
E.g. I use "g" for Google and "w" for Wikipedia. "g hacker news" in the AwesomeBar would then search for "hacker news" on Google and "w hacker news" likewise on Wikipedia.
That requires typing the full name of the thing.
I do use keyword search. Not the same thing.
Just another keyword search suggestion like the sibling comment, but if you use DuckDuckGo as your default search engine, they have bangs so you don't need to step up keywords yourself (!g for Google, !w for Wikipedia, etc). That's all I've ever felt the need for, when I want to search another site.
Regarding [3], are you suggesting Mozilla should sell advertising on the AwesomeBar or are you suggesting they should spy on their users to provide this feature?
What makes a URL "Top Hit"? If it is simple popularity, how do you propose Mozilla to gauge this? This problem is better punted to search engines, IMHO.
What makes a URL "Top Hit"? If it is simple popularity, how do you propose Mozilla to gauge this? This problem is better punted to search engines, IMHO.
[deleted]
I don't know, and I don't care, I just see it as a big usability gap compared to Safari. It could use Alexa or something.
But at least it could autocomplete sites I've already visited. For example, say I've visited microsoft.com. The next time I type "micros", it could offer microsoft.com as the first autocompletion, which is what Safari does [1]. Instead you get this [2].
[1] http://i.imgur.com/JLDaquM.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/XrjaQyf.png
But at least it could autocomplete sites I've already visited. For example, say I've visited microsoft.com. The next time I type "micros", it could offer microsoft.com as the first autocompletion, which is what Safari does [1]. Instead you get this [2].
[1] http://i.imgur.com/JLDaquM.png
[2] http://i.imgur.com/XrjaQyf.png
See this recent (sub) thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14808645
I don't see the relevance? I am on the 55b1 and the behaviour I described is with that release. (I only use the location bar, anyway; I've hidden the search box.)
DuckDuckGo does a good job of this. So it's not exactly suggestions in your search bar, but it's damn close. Also you can configure FF to have selectable search tools including Wikipedia and Stackoverflow.
But I am specifically asking about suggestions in the search bar.
I <3 you Firefox. I'm so sad that nobody uses you.
I switched back to Firefox from Chrome. I'm interested in hanging on the ride with Rust and Servo integrations (Project Quantum), and I also like how it's community based rather than with standards support and features sometimes suspiciously following some company's agenda that don't always have user needs or interests as top priorities.
I do, almost exclusively. It's nowhere near as bad as some people around here make out. I like it.
Me too. How could I ditch Firefox?! It's been with me since 2004, through the dark days of IE, and still perfectly usable when compared with johnny-come-latelys like Chrome. I've never liked Chrome, and I don't trust Google. Long live Firefox!
It's been my main browser since 2004. So much more flexibility than Chrome.
I wish this ticket would see some movement though! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101611
I wish this ticket would see some movement though! https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101611
That issue has been open for 16 years? Kind of shocking when you think about it.
I've been using Firefox since the time it was still called Firebird, and I will continue to do so as long as it is in active development.
Plus, having read that article, I feel much more comfortable leaving many tabs open (although I don't think I've ever had more than 100 open simultaneously).
Plus, having read that article, I feel much more comfortable leaving many tabs open (although I don't think I've ever had more than 100 open simultaneously).
I'm eternally irritated that it doesn't support date inputs. This has been a thorn in my side for years.
This is being actively worked on and coming soon to Firefox.
Should be in 56: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2017/06/12/datetime-inputs-...
I hope it is locale-sensitive. US is the only country that uses mainly the mm/dd/yyyy. Most of the others use dd/mm/yyyy with some important exceptions (China, Japan, Korea) with yyyy/mm/dd (which happens to be the standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country
Firefox ships ~100 localizations. (See https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/nightly/all/ for the list.) I'm pretty sure this will be handled appropriately :)
actually, it’s almost never dd/mm/yyy, but dd.mm.yyy, and yyyy-mm-dd. Japan is one of the few offenders, almost everywhere else the separator can be used to identify the format.
Australia also uses DD/MM/YYYY. You see ISO dates here and there but it's not as common.
I didn't mean about the separator at all, just the ordering. But good point.
Works on Firefox for Android
that's just not true... i've used firefox consistently since v. 0.3 (phoenix) so that's at least one. plus a couple others in this thread make a few. i bet there are a few more out there too, so that makes a bunch. =)
anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement.
the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's of tabs open and that should land sometime soon as well (even so, i'm a diehard firefox fan so it will be hard to make me switch).
anyways, i have ~350 tabs open on firefox 54, and so i can't wait until 55 lands to see this great improvement.
the chrome lead for mac told me that they too are working on better performance with 100's of tabs open and that should land sometime soon as well (even so, i'm a diehard firefox fan so it will be hard to make me switch).
Why not switch to Firefox Beta to get those improvements immediately? With the removal of the aurora channel, Mozilla is trying to get more people on the beta train, that now is the only stabilization phase between Nightly and Release.
As a die-hard Nightly user I usually install the Beta (x64) version for other users and, depending on the add-on compatibility, enable e10s or some other features (e.g. TCP Fast Open) that may already be in A/B testing. Right now it makes an amazing difference in user satisfaction.
yes, i have developer edition installed for testing, but still use the release version as my main browser. it's just a couple weeks left to wait so i think i can hang on until then. =)
It is my main browser on Desktop. But after version 57, when Tab Groups extension (formerly Panorama) stops working, I am not sure whether I will continue using it.
"Simplified Tab Groups" [1] is a similar Firefox extension and the developer says [2] he intends to make it compatible with the new WebExtension API.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
[2] https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups/issues/60
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
[2] https://github.com/denschub/firefox-tabgroups/issues/60
A few months ago I switched to Chrome from Firefox for a couple of reasons. However, about a month later I switched back... I just feel dirty using Chromium =/
Although I think the dev tools in Chrome are superior, I love the way I can step through the code and have all the information I need displayed neatly against each step without having to manually watch everything.
Is there anyway to get Firefox to do something similar?
Although I think the dev tools in Chrome are superior, I love the way I can step through the code and have all the information I need displayed neatly against each step without having to manually watch everything.
Is there anyway to get Firefox to do something similar?
The only thing keeping in Chrome at the moment is that Firefox' debug tools don't let me profile JS line-by-line like Chrome does. Line-by-line testing to see what needs optimisation is seriously useful for the type of stuff I'm doing.
EDIT: obviously, I spend most of my day developing. Firefox definitely has my preference when I'm ust browsing on my own.
EDIT: obviously, I spend most of my day developing. Firefox definitely has my preference when I'm ust browsing on my own.
Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical tabs for these scenarios.
> Hard to love when the broken extension ecosystem prevents the use of vertical tabs for these scenarios.
Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions API.
Here's an in-development vertical tabs extension using their new extensions API.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-redux/
I've started making another one that try to respect the system's theme:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-tabs/
That is broken because it supports more tabs. The multiprocess model is precisely why the old extension model had to be abandoned.
Sadly, the new extension model isn’t nearly ready for prime time yet.
Sadly, the new extension model isn’t nearly ready for prime time yet.
I've got vertical tabs from Test Pilot for months now and I'll never turn back. Not sure what you're talking about.
> Not sure what you're talking about.
They changed their add-on API and are in the process of deprecating the older one which allowed for radical UI changes. That's probably what he was talking about.
They changed their add-on API and are in the process of deprecating the older one which allowed for radical UI changes. That's probably what he was talking about.
Will their own test pilot addon stop working then?
Yes it will. In fact, the test pilot for Tab Center has already ended. And it will be removed entirely starting after Firefox 56.
https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/
https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center/
Nope, it just that older extensions will and IIRC the developer of the tree-style-tabs extension was really vocal about the fact that he disliked the new API. He had claimed it would be impossible to port his extension to the new system. I'm not clear on the history of it all, so I don't know if it was possible at the time or not.
Tree style tabs work
Mozilla doesn't care about its community anymore, the lost focus, the mismanage Firefox and its quality gets worse.
The multi process will never work with the current XUL based gecko code base - they could have told us the truth several years ago, instead they put some resources to it, and it gets no we're - it will never work like Chrome 1+ or IE 8+.
Instead they should have focused on maintaining Firefox as it is and put more resources to Servo - which takes way too long already (a new Rust Lang doesn't help).
The multi process will never work with the current XUL based gecko code base - they could have told us the truth several years ago, instead they put some resources to it, and it gets no we're - it will never work like Chrome 1+ or IE 8+.
Instead they should have focused on maintaining Firefox as it is and put more resources to Servo - which takes way too long already (a new Rust Lang doesn't help).
Where do you get the impression of e10s not working with the current code base? It works pretty great for me with 10+ processes and ~20 add-ons and is already enabled for ~50% of the Firefox population (though with more conservative defaults with the other half mainly blocked on add-on compatibility). There's no maintaining Firefox as it is and integrating Servo (which btw already works quite good on Nightly and webrender is also making great strides).
The Rust language actually does help immensely because it makes developing Servo and other rust components way easier. Implementing servo in C++ would have likely taken longer and would definitely have been a maintenance nightmare.
I find way more productive to use bookmarks
- Archive folder: bookmark dump to keep the links just in case I ever need it again (so they pop on the search bar even after I clean my history, you can also add keywords manually if you want)
- Buffer folder: to-dos, reminders and things I <need> to read soon™. I keep it at a maximum of 10 items at all times
- Follow up folders (plural): pages I want to check ocasionally for updates. Often used for pages without RSS. I don't like to use extensions to check for page modification because I want to do it on my own pace. This helps reducing my mental load because I know it's there if I ever need it. I often delete the entire folder if I don't feel it's useful anymore.
- The rest are folders divided by a main folder and subject. This way I can easily delete them after I'm done with that task (after a minute or after a year). Example: Programming > Project X, Programming > CSS fix for that thing.
Middle click on the folder to open everything at once. Done.
The position of the folders are crucial and also helps with muscle memory. I keep it like this: the more to the right (of the browser), the more disposable they are.
- Archive folder: bookmark dump to keep the links just in case I ever need it again (so they pop on the search bar even after I clean my history, you can also add keywords manually if you want)
- Buffer folder: to-dos, reminders and things I <need> to read soon™. I keep it at a maximum of 10 items at all times
- Follow up folders (plural): pages I want to check ocasionally for updates. Often used for pages without RSS. I don't like to use extensions to check for page modification because I want to do it on my own pace. This helps reducing my mental load because I know it's there if I ever need it. I often delete the entire folder if I don't feel it's useful anymore.
- The rest are folders divided by a main folder and subject. This way I can easily delete them after I'm done with that task (after a minute or after a year). Example: Programming > Project X, Programming > CSS fix for that thing.
Middle click on the folder to open everything at once. Done.
The position of the folders are crucial and also helps with muscle memory. I keep it like this: the more to the right (of the browser), the more disposable they are.
Firefox is a case study in how performance really does matter. A lot.
It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this?
Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regressions and given an engineer (or multiple engineers) who loves optimizing things carte blanche.
Really, I want to know what happened over there. Does anyone know?
It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow, while Chrome became fast. Who was in charge over at Mozilla during all this?
Any engineering director worth their salt would have noticed what was happening and installed metrics that didn't let engineers commit code that caused performance regressions and given an engineer (or multiple engineers) who loves optimizing things carte blanche.
Really, I want to know what happened over there. Does anyone know?
> It used to be the best browser, and then something happened and it gradually became slow, really slow
In many cases, it wasn't that Firefox became slow but that people installed extensions which made it slow. For years, you could solve 90% of those complaints by uninstalling AdBlock Plus.
In many cases, it wasn't that Firefox became slow but that people installed extensions which made it slow. For years, you could solve 90% of those complaints by uninstalling AdBlock Plus.
Except that Adblock Plus wasn't the problem when Firefox was slow with web apps or sites that used JavaScript to load content. Firefox's JavaScript engine lagged significantly behind Chrome (and Safari) for a few years. It still does in a few areas.
That's partially true but remember that you're generalizing from micro-benchmarks – which did not universally tilt Chrome – to the complex behavior of real sites, where networking, memory usage, and general de-optimization tended to cancel out many of those small wins.
That's not saying that the browser teams haven't made big strides, only that it's not such a simple story. Chrome running a certain JavaScript function 15% faster isn't a game changer if a side is limited by layout or poorly structured DOM interactions.
That's not saying that the browser teams haven't made big strides, only that it's not such a simple story. Chrome running a certain JavaScript function 15% faster isn't a game changer if a side is limited by layout or poorly structured DOM interactions.
Aren't micro-benchmarks kind of pointless if they don't reflect real-world behavior?
The fact is that javascript execution (not networking behavior but javascript performance) on many web apps differs by orders of magnitude between Firefox and Chrome. There are a handful of sites that I find literally unusable in Firefox on a new Macbook Pro because even after loading, sitting in the background doing nothing, they make the entire computer unresponsive due to high CPU usage. These same sites work just fine in Chrome and Safari.
The fact is that javascript execution (not networking behavior but javascript performance) on many web apps differs by orders of magnitude between Firefox and Chrome. There are a handful of sites that I find literally unusable in Firefox on a new Macbook Pro because even after loading, sitting in the background doing nothing, they make the entire computer unresponsive due to high CPU usage. These same sites work just fine in Chrome and Safari.
Well, for years, uninstalling AdBlock Plus was unacceptable (at the time, now we have uBlock Origin). For many people, a browser without an ad blocker is an unusable browser.
There were other options which had much better performance, but that's not really the point: much of what people blamed on the browser was actually a less visible program they'd installed, similar to the way Windows often got blamed for performance or stability problems created by anti-virus software.
I think multiprocess/multi-tab was a big separator for a long time, as well as plugin memory leakage being way worse on Firefox (initially because Chrome had nearly none to speak of).
I very reluctantly switched to Chrome. I loved Firefox. I even know today that Firefox likely suits my needs better... but at this point I'm too old and too stuck to change. Chrome doesn't yet make me so angry that I have to switch. Horowitz is right (along with every other entrepreneur) when they say for someone to switch, the next product has to be an order of magnitude better than the currently adopted product. Anything less isn't enough.
I very reluctantly switched to Chrome. I loved Firefox. I even know today that Firefox likely suits my needs better... but at this point I'm too old and too stuck to change. Chrome doesn't yet make me so angry that I have to switch. Horowitz is right (along with every other entrepreneur) when they say for someone to switch, the next product has to be an order of magnitude better than the currently adopted product. Anything less isn't enough.
I will check up on Firefox every couple of months to see if it's still slow. The moment at which I feel the performance matches my chrome experience, I'm going back.
You should check today then. The performance more than matches Chrome. In some area, it's straight up faster than Chrome (like closing tabs, for instance).
I don't remember firefox being the best browser anytime in history, I don't remember firefox becoming slow over time either.
I do remember opera being years ahead of all major browsers and being copied right and left and I also remember most major browser (not IE) having similar performance.
Maybe it's the web pages that have become more and more bloated with useless tracking, ads and scripting a.k.a. web 2.0
I do remember opera being years ahead of all major browsers and being copied right and left and I also remember most major browser (not IE) having similar performance.
Maybe it's the web pages that have become more and more bloated with useless tracking, ads and scripting a.k.a. web 2.0
Which timeframe are we talking about? Personally I have never had any problem with FF and considered this recurring slowness complaint ~fud. I dug up some old benchmarks just to see what was I missing out on not defaulting to Chrome [1][2]. Surprisingly both have FF in front. However I don't think benchmarks tell much about the browsing experience. Indeed sporting an adblocker makes a much bigger difference than a bit lower memory consumption for example.
Imo both FF and Chrome are very capable browsers and Mozilla lost significant market share simply because Chrome had better promotion.
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...
[2] http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/benchmark-battle...
Imo both FF and Chrome are very capable browsers and Mozilla lost significant market share simply because Chrome had better promotion.
[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/chrome-27-firefox-21-ope...
[2] http://download.cnet.com/blog/download-blog/benchmark-battle...
Mozilla turned to a big corp (even if non profit) and got too many new staff. The original staff that was part since early Mosaic and Netscape days left. When Firefox got this new rounded tabs and left the slower release cycle around Firefox 3 it was the tipping point. It changed from a community project back to a corp project, that again doesn't care.
[deleted]
A quick tangent to plug my method for paring down open tabs when it gets out of control: I create a document!
Personally I use Google Docs, but you could use a wiki or MS Word or many other things. The point isn't the technology, it's that when you have a whole slew of tabs open, and you feel the urge to keep them open, it's a strong sign that your mind is trying to gather info about a topic.
Putting it into a document often feels great. It gives you an opportunity to type out a few quick notes on the topic (like what you thought was significant about various links) or other thoughts you had. And you might find you want to share the document with people you're working with. And I find I feel more organized, not just because I cleaned up something messy but because I took a moment to focus my energies on something my mind was begging me to pay attention to. Sometimes you even realize you need two different documents on different subjects, and it's a little enlightening to realize the two separate themes.
Personally I use Google Docs, but you could use a wiki or MS Word or many other things. The point isn't the technology, it's that when you have a whole slew of tabs open, and you feel the urge to keep them open, it's a strong sign that your mind is trying to gather info about a topic.
Putting it into a document often feels great. It gives you an opportunity to type out a few quick notes on the topic (like what you thought was significant about various links) or other thoughts you had. And you might find you want to share the document with people you're working with. And I find I feel more organized, not just because I cleaned up something messy but because I took a moment to focus my energies on something my mind was begging me to pay attention to. Sometimes you even realize you need two different documents on different subjects, and it's a little enlightening to realize the two separate themes.
I once wrote AnnoTabe (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/annotabe/fdhebnled...) for this in Chrome. Bare minimum extension that lets you annotate tabs, and find them again after closing them.
Pocket is good for this too.
Pocket is good for this too.
I just pocket them and then close them. Once pocketed, I can easily go back and find them with full text search.
I'm also very impressed with FF's performance on Linux in recent versions. I bumped up the RAM allocated for multiprocess but I never really have more than 20 tabs open. Startup and rendering seems much quicker, and the add-ons seem more open.
I'm curious, if you go to about:support are HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING enabled?
Someone (likely here) mentioned that setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true in about:config makes a dramatic difference in performance, and based on my limited experience, it does. So much so, that I'm thinking about switching to Firefox after many years of only using it sparingly due to lousy performance on Linux compared to Chrome (e10s has helped too).
edit: I should note that HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING are not enabled by default on the 2 Arch Linux systems I have (Ivy Bridge and Haswell iGPUs, up to date Firefox, Mesa and Kernel). Not sure if there is a white/blacklist, or if its just always disabled in Linux.
Someone (likely here) mentioned that setting layers.acceleration.force-enabled to true in about:config makes a dramatic difference in performance, and based on my limited experience, it does. So much so, that I'm thinking about switching to Firefox after many years of only using it sparingly due to lousy performance on Linux compared to Chrome (e10s has helped too).
edit: I should note that HW_COMPOSITING and OPENGL_COMPOSITING are not enabled by default on the 2 Arch Linux systems I have (Ivy Bridge and Haswell iGPUs, up to date Firefox, Mesa and Kernel). Not sure if there is a white/blacklist, or if its just always disabled in Linux.
Is there a particular reason that layers.acceleration.force-enabled is off by default?
Linux users have a lower priority and there are some hard to debug issues with graphics drivers and sometimes it causes horrible performance and freezes.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=ogl-linux-beta
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=ogl-linux-beta
Why do you have a profile w/ 1600 tabs in it. If whatever it is is so important, aren't you afraid to lose it? I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.
> I'd be terrified that one time Firefox just wouldn't shut down clean.
This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update.
The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.
This is why Firefox stores a sessionstore file. _And_ a backup of that sessionstore file. And a previous version of that sessionstore file. And a backup of the file as of the last several times you did a browser update.
The idea is to never lose the session in an irrecoverable way.
From my experience (max tab count of maybe 30, usual close to 4 or 5), when I tried to restore, I would always get the 'we tried hard, but couldn't do it' type of message, so I don't even bother trying anymore. My guess is that all the people relying on session storage are losing a bunch of data, but they just don't know it because how do you know when you lost one of 1000 tabs.
At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.
At one of my jobs, they instituted weekly scheduled reboots of desktops; after several times of getting my sessions killed by that, I started making an effort to close everything at the end of the day; I don't always close all my tabs, but often, and I never leave more than two or three. Whatever was interesting, but I couldn't read, I don't worry about -- if it's important, it'll probably come up again; I just leave a couple things open if there's work I need to do on them when I get back.
This isn't his main profile ( well I hope not any way ), it's a profile used to test extreme startup performance issues.
You'd be surprised. And if not that many, I know many many people with 100+ tabs. I never really understood the workflow myself. Every time I have more than 20 tabs, I generally can get to the page I'm looking for faster by googling it than having to find it in my tabs. But I guess to each their own.
For me its a linear view of how I got somewhere when I'm doing exploratory research. Usually a tree of tabs (I use side tabs) will start with a google search, then go to a site, then another site, then another. When I find something interesting and think "how did I get here again?" and I can just glance at my open tabs.
This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
This context is useful if I get sidetracked/distracted by a coworker, so I can retrace why I was looking at a certain page.
Is there an extension that can display tab history as an actual tree?
Typing some part of the tab title or url in the URL bar and then selecting the "switch to tab" option in the dropdown is faster than googling. Prefix with "% " if you want to search _only_ the tabs and not your history or bookmarks.
Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.
Of course not all browsers have that feature, but Firefox does. So finding the tab you want is pretty easy.
Sometimes after searching for some time I'll come to something quite arcane that I want to hold on to. (I know this is what bookmarks are for but the UI is so poor here)
Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.
Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.
After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
Other times I'll find something and think; I'll read that later.
Or. Less often, I'll be recurring into different things looking for solutions to a problem I have. Eventually I'll find something relevant and close the tab that was last opened, I forget the others and they become orphaned in my like of tabs I'll likely never get back to, until my browser crashes hard and I lose everything.
After the mild panic a wave of relief washes over me, and I go about my business hoarding tabs once again.
The first example, it seems like we need a better UI for bookmarks. Something that allows you to organize and quickly search them (url, title and even maybe page content).
For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list.
As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
For the second, we all do that, but again, the optimal thing there would be to have some extension or tool that keeps track of your "to read" list.
As for tabs stacking when you're looking for a solution, that's generally what my comment referred to. I know somewhere in those 20 tabs, there's one for the documentations to the function I'm trying to use, but it's honestly faster to search for it again than look at those 20 tabs for it.
That's why you save the tabs periodically.
Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though).
Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.
Session Buddy works well for Chrome (and it's really needed there). Firefox is much more reliable IME, and I haven't needed a backup in many years, but I still use SendTabURLs, as it makes finding and bulk closing tabs easier. There may be better options for Firefox, but I haven't needed one so haven't gone looking (used TabMixPlus years ago though).
Tabs are just much more convenient bookmarks.
I feel like preserving open tabs across a crash is not that hard from a technical point of view. The thing I'd be afraid of is more that something would decide (for me) that I don't want to preserve tabs.
Right. I guess as an engineer, I would be afraid to use something for data storage that is intended more as ephemeral state. But I suppose if you back it up you can always go back.
The Firefox session is not intended as ephemeral state, fwiw. Certainly the session-restore code doesn't treat it that way.
You can backup all of your tabs by copying the .mozilla folder. If you were really concerned you could just setup a cron job to do this once a day.
Surprised to see no mention of Tab Center (https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/tab-center) in the comments. I've gotten so used to it that now I find it hard to use a browser with tabs on top. Being able to see more of the page title when tabs are displayed horizontally is extremely useful. There's a search field too. This combined with the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" set to true in about:config (enables MRU tab switching with ctrl-tab) makes managing tabs awesome for me.
Note that Tab Center will stop working by the end of this year, but I have found https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-center-re... to be an adequate replacement!
How is this different from Tree Tabs?
There's no tree, it's flat. I find it works better than Tree Tabs at the moment unless you need the tree.
Shameless plug: the current lack of a WebExtension for vertical tabs bothered me, so I wrote one:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertigo-tabs/
Can anyone offer an explanation of why should not tabs be managed by the window manager? (My understanding is that this question is independent from how the particular application would choose to control the contents of a tab - whether directly, or through a separate thread, or by spawning a child process.)
We had that already. Opera was the first browser with tabs, it had MDI support and tabs. MDI stands for Multiple Document Interface, and was common with Win 3x and Win9x (WinAPI) applications: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface .
Macromedia Dreamweaver had tabs even before Opera browser, as well as Frontpage. Word, Excel and PowerPoint used to be MDI applications up to Office 2010 (up to 2003 with a good UI, kind of hidden but still that way until 2010). Photoshop on Win, older Acrobat, mIRC, etc use MDI and have tabs as well. Win3x had all the auto arrange and different MDI modes, Win95 unfortunately broke the "icon" MDI mode, though the mode still exists but doesn't work in Win95 or later.
So it would be great if Chrome and other browsers would support MDI with tabs like the old Opera 4-6. Use could auto-arrange two tab-windows within the browser main window side by side or arrange them in any way you wanted by hand. Very unfortunately Microsoft lost all their proper devs from last century and with it all the previous inbuilt WinAPI knowledge - otherwise Win8 and Win10 trainwrecks would never have happened.
Macromedia Dreamweaver had tabs even before Opera browser, as well as Frontpage. Word, Excel and PowerPoint used to be MDI applications up to Office 2010 (up to 2003 with a good UI, kind of hidden but still that way until 2010). Photoshop on Win, older Acrobat, mIRC, etc use MDI and have tabs as well. Win3x had all the auto arrange and different MDI modes, Win95 unfortunately broke the "icon" MDI mode, though the mode still exists but doesn't work in Win95 or later.
So it would be great if Chrome and other browsers would support MDI with tabs like the old Opera 4-6. Use could auto-arrange two tab-windows within the browser main window side by side or arrange them in any way you wanted by hand. Very unfortunately Microsoft lost all their proper devs from last century and with it all the previous inbuilt WinAPI knowledge - otherwise Win8 and Win10 trainwrecks would never have happened.
Non-mobile link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface
> So it would be great if Chrome and other browsers would support MDI with tabs
It's extremely unlikely that will ever happen (if they were to do it, they would've done it by now).
It's extremely unlikely that will ever happen (if they were to do it, they would've done it by now).
Tabs handled by the OS / window manager seems to be the direction things are headed. MacOS already has a tabs api [0] and Windows is experimenting with a feature called "Tabbed Shell" that would provide a tabs API for the devs that want to use it and would wrap existing application in a tabbed shell for apps that don't. [1]
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To...
[1]: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-tabbed-shell
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/To...
[1]: https://www.windowscentral.com/windows-10-tabbed-shell
Window managers failed us and that's why we created tabbed browsing.
I think at some point the browser will collapse back into the desktop shell as a multipurpose document viewer. Window managers will need to catch up first, though.
For that you need a good window manager that supports tabbing, tiling, floating, grouped resizes etc. I.e. something like i3.
The OneTab extension has been really good for helping me handle my tab hoarding tendency.
https://www.one-tab.com/
It lets you hit a button and send all open tabs to a single page that persists between browser sessions. You can remove a link by opening up that list and clicking on it.
Has a bunch of other handy features too ... like publishing the list of links to a share-able URL.
https://www.one-tab.com/
It lets you hit a button and send all open tabs to a single page that persists between browser sessions. You can remove a link by opening up that list and clicking on it.
Has a bunch of other handy features too ... like publishing the list of links to a share-able URL.
I'm pretty happy with this extension too. The other one I use is 'The Great Suspender' which basically suspends unused tabs to free up resources.
I would love get rid of chrome and to switch back to firefox as my everyday browser, but simply can't get over how messy/ugly the tabs(even in compact theme) and window title look compared to what chrome does with tabs and title bar, and lack of window title bar.
If you enter customize mode, you can:
1) Choose one of the compact themes, which have square tabs instead of curved
and
2) Re-enable the title bar
1) Choose one of the compact themes, which have square tabs instead of curved
and
2) Re-enable the title bar
I was already using 55.x Beta. My BIGGEST issue, is that EVERY browser seems to chew up memory over time, just by leaving it open with tabs going. Firefox, Chrome, Safari. All do the same thing. Alleviated by using the Great Suspender in Chrome, but why can't they all have this just built in? Startup/speed, and initially memory use really haven't been that big of an issue. It's the memory, and finally grinding to a halt that is the BIGGEST issue for me. I can't escape it.
Happens on MacOS, and Windows for me.
Happens on MacOS, and Windows for me.
There is a fairly big, incrementally growing memory leak in firefox that has been fixed in recent nightlies and uplifted to beta 5 days ago. So it'll probably be in the next beta build.
https://bugzil.la/1377738
https://bugzil.la/1377738
"Ridiculous" is right, especially from a UI perspective --- it still puzzles me why they would design it so that by default all the tabs are crammed into the place which used to be the titlebar, making it difficult to both read the title and find the tab you're looking for.
I've seen others start opening multiple windows when the tabs get too small. I usually do that to keep tabs grouped into "pages I am unlikely to view simultaneously".
I've seen others start opening multiple windows when the tabs get too small. I usually do that to keep tabs grouped into "pages I am unlikely to view simultaneously".
Chrome's UI is worse. Firefox shrinks tabs until they're maybe 10 characters in width, and then lets you scroll through them. Chrome just shrinks forever.
I've found that a vertical tabs addon (Tree Tabs, Tab Center Redux) is great for fixing this problem, since vertical tabs never get squeezed.
I've found that a vertical tabs addon (Tree Tabs, Tab Center Redux) is great for fixing this problem, since vertical tabs never get squeezed.
I do as you do, but I use the tab groups addon and use groups instead of windows.
I have 2 tabs open right now. If the number of open tabs gets over 10 I start to actively look for tabs to close.
I'm the same way. I use bookmarks for places I regularly visit that I will want to have ready access to (things like work related services and what have you).
For just articles or something I'll want to read later, I've started using the Google Inbox extension to save the link as a reminder. From there I can snooze it until I have the time or motivation to actually read it.
For just articles or something I'll want to read later, I've started using the Google Inbox extension to save the link as a reminder. From there I can snooze it until I have the time or motivation to actually read it.
I use Firefox as much as I can, for many reasons. Two things keep me from using it all the time:
– Yubikey – My Chromebook (I would use and equivalent FirefoxOS if given the choice)
There are performance issues in some cases but nothing major. It is still somewhat slow compared to Chrome, even though this may be due to optimizations done specifically for Chrome.
– Yubikey – My Chromebook (I would use and equivalent FirefoxOS if given the choice)
There are performance issues in some cases but nothing major. It is still somewhat slow compared to Chrome, even though this may be due to optimizations done specifically for Chrome.
There's a plugin for U2F support[1]. I use a Yubikey at work daily without issues.
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...
1. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/u2f-support-a...
Many sites, including Google, specifically check the UA instead of checking for U2F support, so won’t work with this.
(shameless plug) For those of you keeping many many tabs open because you worry you might forget it again, or working on related topics, I am building https://www.pagedash.com to save your page exactly as you saw it, and everything from the original page (HTML and assets) are saved to PageDash so that you can load it again without worrying that the original page went bonkers/down.
v1 will be quite basic, just a list of saved pages. Expect more organization tools (folders, tags, etc.) in the further releases.
Please do sign up to be informed of impending release! :) (estimated end August)
Also, do leave a reply if you are keen on using ML (link classification) to help organize your pages for you. Unfortunately, because computers can't read our minds, this can't be perfect so folders are probably still relevant for your mini-projects.
v1 will be quite basic, just a list of saved pages. Expect more organization tools (folders, tags, etc.) in the further releases.
Please do sign up to be informed of impending release! :) (estimated end August)
Also, do leave a reply if you are keen on using ML (link classification) to help organize your pages for you. Unfortunately, because computers can't read our minds, this can't be perfect so folders are probably still relevant for your mini-projects.
Sorry if this is somewhat off-topic but how do you make Firefox' tab bar look like the one in the article (i.e. no rounded edges for the tabs) on MacOS?
Firefox has two alternative built-in themes, compact light and compact dark.
I've never noticed this, thank you!
Whenever people ask me about the excessive number tabs in my browser, I simply show them Einstein's desk: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eyOIn_EOW2Q/Vmcl6O-55OI/AAAAAAAADs...
I am not Einstein but it is probably not a bad idea to have a whole lot of interesting things around you all the time. Sort of like a cache or the way proteins are synthesized, like swimming in a nutritious soup. "Oh, look here is a piece that fits!".
One basically decreases the chance of forgetting interesting and useful information. "Out of sight, out of mind."
I am not Einstein but it is probably not a bad idea to have a whole lot of interesting things around you all the time. Sort of like a cache or the way proteins are synthesized, like swimming in a nutritious soup. "Oh, look here is a piece that fits!".
One basically decreases the chance of forgetting interesting and useful information. "Out of sight, out of mind."
I love Firefox and never had issues, except at work. For some odd reason it will break, all tabs will look white and all I see is a loading icon on the middle no matter what tab I click on ruining my workflow. No idea what that's about since at home Firefox works fine, Chrome seems to work fine at work on the other hand. I guess I'll be using Chrome at work and Firefox at home till I figure out how whats causing the Firefox issue. I only usually have no more than 20 tabs open at any given time. Very unusual for me to keep 10 tabs open really.
I had a very similar issue (running e18s) with uBlock Origin after restoring my computer from backups.
I narrowed down the problem to that add on by selectively disabling them.
Uninstalling and reinstalling uBlock fixed it.
YMMV, but figured I ought to speak up :)
I narrowed down the problem to that add on by selectively disabling them.
Uninstalling and reinstalling uBlock fixed it.
YMMV, but figured I ought to speak up :)
I'm torn between thinking it's time to switch back to Firefox, and thinking I need to avoid Firefox at all costs, because the slowdown when Chrome gets over 100+ tabs is the only thing keeping my browser windows remotely navigable.
You know what I really want? A way to attach titles to browser windows. This window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work" task, this one is "Research" on the new doohickey I'm thinking of buying...
You know what I really want? A way to attach titles to browser windows. This window is "Games", this one is for "Books", this one is for my current "Work" task, this one is "Research" on the new doohickey I'm thinking of buying...
Check out the Firefox extension "Simplified Tab Groups" to create named groups of tabs:
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/
Holy shit. Don't have time to try it right now, but if it does what I want I probably will go back to Firefox. Thanks!
It was a built-in feature for manu Firefox releases (called Panorama), but then it was removed, and ended up in extensions.
I would like a way to have opera tab stacks style groups but also with functionality to somehow automatically group tabs based on title, url, etc.
I've been running a ~7 year old laptop for occasional browsing. Chrome is unable to seek properly in video playback (gives page unresponsive after a while) and lags randomly when loading large pages, I suspect due to RAM allocations.
Old Firefox played videos fine, but lagged on many page loads. I was about to conclude it was just too old to browse the web decently, but this... this seems incredibly usable.
Thanks Mozila, I'm definitely installing this thing on my main, much more modern machine tomorrow.
Old Firefox played videos fine, but lagged on many page loads. I was about to conclude it was just too old to browse the web decently, but this... this seems incredibly usable.
Thanks Mozila, I'm definitely installing this thing on my main, much more modern machine tomorrow.
I measured by eyeball, using "time cat" on the command line. This might seem weird, but c'mon - I'm measuring minutes. Microsecond precision is not required.
https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-startup/
I use chrome with the extension The Great suspender and that works well for me:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
Would love to switch to Firefox, but I still find Chrome faster to use. Anyone tried vivaldi?
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
Would love to switch to Firefox, but I still find Chrome faster to use. Anyone tried vivaldi?
This is nice to hear. I use Firefox as my default browser with the tree-style tabs add-on, and just yesterday I replaced ABP with uBlock and Ghostery with Disconnect out of frustration with how slow things were going (~30-50 tabs open). The slow startup time hasn't been helping (come on, its not even loading the tabs until I click them, what's taking so long?)
Hint: uBlock Origin already includes filters for Disconnect if you go to the settings
My biggest frustration with Firefox is that you can't 'Tab to Search' as you can in chrome. Every time I attempt to switch to FF the lack of this feature just kills my productivity and I end up switching back.
So wish this was possible.
Ref: https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search
So wish this was possible.
Ref: https://www.chromium.org/tab-to-search
A similar (but not as magical) feature in Firefox is Smart keywords: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...
There's a bug on file to consider adding this, but it has no momentum behind it right now since it's a bit niche: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740
There's a bug on file to consider adding this, but it has no momentum behind it right now since it's a bit niche: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1373740
I used to have dozens of Firefox Smart Keywords (for Wikipedia, Amazon, etc), but now I just use DuckDuckGo's !bang searches in my address bar:
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
https://duckduckgo.com/bang
I currently have over 1380 tabs open in firefox 52 ESR (over 4 windows). Oh god, it's terrible. Very slow and unresponsive, CPU usage is typically 60+% when idle. I restart firefox every couple days (which takes many minutes) to keep CPU and memory usage down, by causing all tabs to be unloaded. (As an example, right now at 5.2GB resident, with only a small percentage of tabs loaded).
I've been trying to kick the habit.
I also have several other profiles and other computers. Probably adds to 5000 tabs all in all.
I use All Tabs Helper to help jump between tabs. Finding tabs is hopeless without it. ATH also has features like mass closing tabs or unloading them. I wish it had a way to bookmark tabs, which I would use to close most of my tabs.
So, I'm very glad to hear this. Time to switch off ESR.
I use All Tabs Helper to help jump between tabs. Finding tabs is hopeless without it. ATH also has features like mass closing tabs or unloading them. I wish it had a way to bookmark tabs, which I would use to close most of my tabs.
So, I'm very glad to hear this. Time to switch off ESR.
Is there anything similar for chrome/chromium? Would be interesting to compare them.
With Chrome, I use "The Great Suspender" extension.
This. Changed the way I use a browser. New window per topic. Only stop making tabs when the titles/icons can't be seen any more...
In Firefox, the "titles/icons can't be seen any more" state is never reached, because Firefox enforces a minimum width on tabs so that information is always visible. Combined with searching tab titles via "% stuff" in the URL bar, it's a much nicer experience than Chrome, imo. [Disclosure: I'm biased, obviously, since I'm using Firefox and hence more used to it.]
I am happy to hear this because I stopped using firefox and migrated to google chrome around firefox 51, and boy it was SLOW.
Now it might be worth it to give it another try.
In the meantime, I am seriously concerned about Thunderbird. Thunderbird is my MUA of choice and quite frankly, there are very few options to replace it, and none of them seems 100% okay (except, maybe, Evolution). Clawsmail is okay-ish, but so ugly to see and feature-poor.
Now it might be worth it to give it another try.
In the meantime, I am seriously concerned about Thunderbird. Thunderbird is my MUA of choice and quite frankly, there are very few options to replace it, and none of them seems 100% okay (except, maybe, Evolution). Clawsmail is okay-ish, but so ugly to see and feature-poor.
How does this translate to real use, as in actually loading the pages and having a couple dozens extensions ?
The ability to open 5-10 times more tabs than I use is quite and edge case that mozilla usually doesn't care about, but the real question is what is the point of this when it comes with making firefox totally useless for said use case by dropping support for extension that make it practical or useful.
The ability to open 5-10 times more tabs than I use is quite and edge case that mozilla usually doesn't care about, but the real question is what is the point of this when it comes with making firefox totally useless for said use case by dropping support for extension that make it practical or useful.
I follow the zero inbox mindset with tabs and try to reduce them to a few ever running apps like Gmail and Mixcloud. The rest is just noise and mental load that I can get rid of.
I put articles to Pocket if I don't read them for a week or so. I'll probably read them on a vacation, but I don't need a constant reminder how poor my time limits are.
I put articles to Pocket if I don't read them for a week or so. I'll probably read them on a vacation, but I don't need a constant reminder how poor my time limits are.
Note for the blog author:
"It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51."
I believe you meant to write "until Firefox 52." I think the usage of "until" would typically point out the exception to the rule, in this case Firefox 52 is the first version that is no longer slower than the previous.
"It's interesting that Firefox startup time got consistently worse over time until Firefox 51."
I believe you meant to write "until Firefox 52." I think the usage of "until" would typically point out the exception to the rule, in this case Firefox 52 is the first version that is no longer slower than the previous.
[deleted]
So one challenge I face is that many of my tabs are for web content that isn't always there. Do any of these extensions like Great Suspender, Session Buddy, etc actually let me save the webpage as it is and then let me choose to refetch it as necessary?
not exactly what you're looking for but pinboard.in archival account does this: https://pinboard.in/upgrade/
I have the bad habit to open many tabs on my old MacBook (mid 2010). Boot time, together with CPU usage, is one of the main reasons I had to use Opera as my primary browser. I'm really happy to see this might change in the near future.
And then there's Firefox Focus which has no tabs and no other new instance capability. One single window. "Focus" indeed. It still makes me twitchy, but is so far completely usable.
Could do with a "fetch as desktop" mode, though.
Could do with a "fetch as desktop" mode, though.
How does this work in practice. I frequently have workflows where for example I have the AWS or GCloud console open and in parallel some kind of tutorial, documentation or help page I'm looking at. Would you go back and forth?
Yeah the one major issue is comparison shopping: you can't open multiple tabs/windows and flick between them.
Then again, "focus" might mean reading one review at a time. Or instead waiting until you're at a desktop and remembering to do it. If you forget, are you worse off or better off?
It's just a different situation. Depends on your criteria. Certainly, I've not missed it on my mobile.
Then again, "focus" might mean reading one review at a time. Or instead waiting until you're at a desktop and remembering to do it. If you forget, are you worse off or better off?
It's just a different situation. Depends on your criteria. Certainly, I've not missed it on my mobile.
If such numbers happen in android also you sir just have another firefox fan. I want to know right now. (Chrome sucks at this on all devices now.) The only reason I am using it is that it is better than firefox for accessing google.
This would have been useful 4 years ago before we all gave up on Firefox.
[deleted]
This is the first time in a decade that something (the article) convinced me to try Firefox as a possible day-to-day browser once again.
Great that you can open over a thousand tabs now. Next blog post will be when it's over a million I guess?
Personally, I usually have something like 3 or 4 tabs open. But what I would really need is this:
https://xkcd.com/619/
Yup, hardware accelerated video on Linux. Chromium has it. Firefox doesn't.
It's 2017 and for me Firefox is still missing the basic feature of seeing smooth Youtube videos.
Anybody working on that? Can't you just take it from Chromium? I mean it's open source, isn't it?
Personally, I usually have something like 3 or 4 tabs open. But what I would really need is this:
https://xkcd.com/619/
Yup, hardware accelerated video on Linux. Chromium has it. Firefox doesn't.
It's 2017 and for me Firefox is still missing the basic feature of seeing smooth Youtube videos.
Anybody working on that? Can't you just take it from Chromium? I mean it's open source, isn't it?
I use ridiculous numbers of tabs, and Firefox has been less stable for me the past months than ever before.
What made it so much worse over time?
Things that need to be initialized per tab. Lazy-loaded tabs were till backed by about:blank content window which get replaced with the actual content once you open the tab. And with that about:blank comes overhead, which is fairly small for a single tab but it adds up in large numbers.
The change is that now the tab item does not have an associated content window at all until you visit it.
The change is that now the tab item does not have an associated content window at all until you visit it.
Impressive, now I'm looking forward to the official stable version of 55
I wonder what these numbers would be compared to chrome.
I tested with 1690 tabs and got similar results :D
lol this is why I love firefox. I hoard tabs. But not as excessively as OP though... 1000+ is crazy.
John Siracusa would be proud :)
My usual day looks something like this:
open FF (it it's not already running) and wait for a hand full app-tabs to load:
I hardly ever left-click a link, I only wheelclick. but my ^w is at least as fast as my wheel click - since the awesomebar searches through history, pagetitles and already openend tabs it's really easy to navigate even between tab groups just by ^t, type 3 letters, press return to 'switch to tab' (really convenient icon there so you know you're going to close the new tab and switch to an existing tab at this moment)
if I want to restore a tab i killed prematurely I fire up the history - where I only use the 'by last visited view' - does anyone srsly use the 'by date and site' view?
tabs are something very different than bookmarks to me, a bookmark is something I return to on a regular basis - a tab is an open 'todo'. I don't use the usual bookmarks thou, only the bookmark-toolbar below the url - and my bookmarks there have no text - they get renamed to "" so I only see their favicon. entries there are e.g.
I have no idea what I'm going to do after the death of the tab groups extension.
one thing that really bugs me is that every time a show tab groups to 'normal users' (tm) they insta love them. I really wonder if no one used to use them bcs hardly anyone ever knew about them.
open FF (it it's not already running) and wait for a hand full app-tabs to load:
* slack (there's no dark theme in the native app)
* skype (there's no dark theme in the native app)
* toggl (timetracking)
* email (office365, I stopped worrying about outlook/thunderbird)
* jira (gotta know what to work on next)
* social (fb&twitter - could probably also do w/o - I rarely open those)
* work
* private
* to read
I hardly ever left-click a link, I only wheelclick. but my ^w is at least as fast as my wheel click - since the awesomebar searches through history, pagetitles and already openend tabs it's really easy to navigate even between tab groups just by ^t, type 3 letters, press return to 'switch to tab' (really convenient icon there so you know you're going to close the new tab and switch to an existing tab at this moment)
if I want to restore a tab i killed prematurely I fire up the history - where I only use the 'by last visited view' - does anyone srsly use the 'by date and site' view?
tabs are something very different than bookmarks to me, a bookmark is something I return to on a regular basis - a tab is an open 'todo'. I don't use the usual bookmarks thou, only the bookmark-toolbar below the url - and my bookmarks there have no text - they get renamed to "" so I only see their favicon. entries there are e.g.
* HN
* blog.fefe
* oglaf
* xkcd
...
I have no idea what I'm going to do after the death of the tab groups extension.
one thing that really bugs me is that every time a show tab groups to 'normal users' (tm) they insta love them. I really wonder if no one used to use them bcs hardly anyone ever knew about them.
You might want to try http://meetfranz.com/ .
thanks for info
It's about time. Slowness is why I quit all of Mozilla. Also dumping Thunderbird is irresponsible. We need one client that doesn't give annoying pop-ups when using IMAP and that use to be it. Guess we have to go back to using CLI to avoid pop-ups.
I suppose I'm alone in getting all nervous if I have more than 10 tabs open.
I also use a small amount of tabs, usually under ten. When I want to go to something, I want to immediately be able to click it without having to spend time searching for it. Sometimes I watch over coworkers' shoulders as they are navigating their browsers, and they definitely spend a significant amount of time looking through tabs trying to find what they need. There is a terrible, visible lag time between asking them to navigate to a certain page and them actually being able to find and go to the correct tab. Maybe my coworkers are just inefficient at managing large amounts of tabs, but I have yet to see someone who is.
Having fewer tabs might also keep one more focused because there is only so much in front of you at a time. You don't have to process through a bunch of data that is unrelated to the current task at hand.
Having fewer tabs might also keep one more focused because there is only so much in front of you at a time. You don't have to process through a bunch of data that is unrelated to the current task at hand.
I feel the same way - it bothers me to have tabs open that I'm not actively working on (or, I feel like I need to actively remember the context of all my tabs). When I get to 12 or so I close any tab that I don't feel like I'll want to return to in the next hour.
Getting nervous because your computer starts slowing down or swapping because of the number of tabs open, or because you can't read the tab titles or see the favicons anymore? Firefox doesn't have those problems. ;)
[deleted]
I also get tab-induced anxiety. I have to close them and organize them when it gets ~10 or I can't keep browsing.
On the other hand, my desktop is an unorganized mess of random files...
On the other hand, my desktop is an unorganized mess of random files...
Same here, if I start needing to scroll through open tabs it means I should immediately start closing some.
Opera has supported this abnormal behavior for like two decades now. I remember being shocked by how many tabs the Opera core browsing/rendering engine developers used to have open on their desktops when I joined Opera back in 2004. I guess it was an odd pride thing? :)
To clarify: I am talking about a one-row tab scenario. With about 3-4 pixels per tab. And they were perfectly happy with that. Even seemed to feel it was a good user experience.
To clarify: I am talking about a one-row tab scenario. With about 3-4 pixels per tab. And they were perfectly happy with that. Even seemed to feel it was a good user experience.
When I see bug reports with these sorts of ridiculous over the top use cases, I think, yeah buddy, why don't you join the project and fix it since it's only applicable to you.
And in this case that happened. This guy is an actual Firefox developer.
This is as it should be and congrats.
Now I am wondering how I can possibly get into this mysterious world of having thousands of tabs open.
And in this case that happened. This guy is an actual Firefox developer.
This is as it should be and congrats.
Now I am wondering how I can possibly get into this mysterious world of having thousands of tabs open.
LOL I've been running Firefox with 5k+ tabs since 2009.
Dear god, why?
Whut? It didn't get any faster, it's just more aggressively lazy loaded now. This is breaking the very use case of people who have 100+ tabs; they want stuff to be there when they click on it.
Things have been lazy loaded on startup since Firefox 13: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711193
but the feature itself is much older.
The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.
but the feature itself is much older.
The problem was that the xul/xbl code creating the tabbar was still doing a lot of work for the not-yet-loaded tabs.
Yes, it's "it's just more aggressively lazy loaded". Unless you are trying to say it's now not doing less work because it's 1) lazy loading but because 2) they don't know how to implement a tabbar and should have used some native component like Chrome.
I wouldn't call it "more aggressively". The lazy loading is the same, but they fixed the UI code around it.
As a many tabs user, I don't agree. The use case is more like a more visible bookmark, with history. Any tabs commonly used will already be loaded, and it is fine to lazy load tabs that are rarely used but kept open as reminders. It's definitely a much better experience than waiting 5 minutes after startup for the CPU activity to die down.
Not true. On most days I visit <30 open tabs (out of hundreds). I'm happy to wait for a page to load when I visit an old one, and I'd really like my browser to unload pages I'm not actively using (but give me an override).
Tabs for me are like much more convenient bookmarks.
Tabs for me are like much more convenient bookmarks.
I often have ~100 tabs open, and I have a habit of hitting ctrl-tab and letting it cycle as a fidget.
The first cycle is not smooth because there's noticeable aggregate loading, but it's able to cope just fine after with a lot of tabs completely loaded. This has improved a lot rather recently.
And when I click a lazy loaded tab after startup there's no noticeable load for the individual tab, it's right there when I click it.
It's only when you force-load all the tabs that load times become visible, but that's to be expected.
The first cycle is not smooth because there's noticeable aggregate loading, but it's able to cope just fine after with a lot of tabs completely loaded. This has improved a lot rather recently.
And when I click a lazy loaded tab after startup there's no noticeable load for the individual tab, it's right there when I click it.
It's only when you force-load all the tabs that load times become visible, but that's to be expected.
It also loads a cached version of the page almost exactly as it were when the browser shut down. Unless you were AFK farming Cookie Clicker, it works just fine.
This is completely right. None of those tabs are doing anything, they're literally just holding a URL and waiting to load it when the user switches over to that tab. It's not a tab, it's a bookmark.
I've got a gazillion tabs open on Chrome right now and guess what, they're all actually open.
I've got a gazillion tabs open on Chrome right now and guess what, they're all actually open.
> None of those tabs are doing anything, they're literally just holding a URL and waiting to load it when the user switches over to that tab. It's not a tab, it's a bookmark.
The tabs store state too, so they aren't just bookmarks - I just closed the browser with just your quoted text in the reply form, and upon restart, the text was restored.
Chrome does seem to work this way as well, but loads all tabs by default instead of lazy loading when a user navigates to the tab.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/session_restore#Restoring_s...
The tabs store state too, so they aren't just bookmarks - I just closed the browser with just your quoted text in the reply form, and upon restart, the text was restored.
Chrome does seem to work this way as well, but loads all tabs by default instead of lazy loading when a user navigates to the tab.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/session_restore#Restoring_s...
I've just updated to Firefox 55 to test this, and the improvement is ridiculous. I hope that Firefox focuses more on power users in the future.
I'm curious what the author uses to manage all of these tabs. I use Tab Groups, but I think they won't work in a few Firefox versions so I'm looking for alternatives.