This is very neat from a technological point of view, but: who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open, and how can we get them the help they need?
Almost. It is more like a temporary bookmark with an instant on feature.
It is so easy to use and useful (and doesn't use much ram 8n Firefox) that I frequently hit 1000 tabs open. In Chrome it was impossible.
While thousands is ridiculous, a hundred isn't that unreasonable. I often keep open many as I'm researching new things, or putting sites in my to follow up, or read later queue.
From what I have seen, it is like RAM vs HD usage. You bookmark things that are going to be useful in the future, long term, while you keep tabs open while they are in current use such as when researching a topic. For example, when someting here breaks or I want to learn more about a given topic, it is not uncommon for me to use hundreds of tabs open while I triage what is useful and what is not. Some of those will be added to the bookmarks (or pocket, or pinboard, depending on how I like them).
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
I research many things (being a student and as part of my job). But I usually close useless tabs after reading them. I keep the main research tabs open, the trunk you could say, that trunk can always lead me back to the leafs.
Mental thing. By having the tabs open (pinned), it's a reminder that I need to get this shit done. Eventually the ones that didn't get done are sent to the graveyard.
No bookmarks are for things I want to save; tabs are temporary. If I'm reading hacker news, I'll open all the articles I want to read in new tabs (maybe with their comments in yet another tab) and then go through them one at time.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Tree tabs are godly for this because it lets you retrace your steps.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
Bookmarks are mostly useless for read-later tabs because out of sight, out of mind, and there's always new stuff to read. Open tabs force you to make a decision - read me or close me. And, as usual, Opera 12 was the best browser of its time, and even today is orders of magnitude better than the current offerings, at least in some respects.
Tree-style tab and middle clicking means that you can have a hierarchical record of your browsing when researching. Middle click three to five tabs from a search, middle click from each tab when reading through on the first article for any interesting subarticles, then when you get to the bottom you have a visual record of your path to that point.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
Most people that have tens of tabs open google something then open every result in a new tab and basically use the tabs as a very short term todo queue. When you close the current tab you get moved to the next item in the queue. Managing bookmarks for something you're only reading for maybe two minutes isn't worth the effort.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.
Well, a hundred is actually manageable. A thousand just takes up so much space, in any form, that you can't possible sort through them in any reasonable time.
I think you misunderstood. A tab per site, some kind of drop down-type interface per tab for each page on that site. So if you had 50 tabs, you'd have an average of 20 pages under each per tab.
This is tediously rehashed in every. single. thread. about tabs (someone's always gotta have a problem with someone else), but the fact is that some people have lots of tabs open while others don't. For me it's because bookmark management is such a forgotten child in all browsers, so I leave tabs in order to read them later.
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
"I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail."
I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
Well, for example when I go into Wikipedia frenzy, I can easily open 10-20 tabs, terminology, graphs, tables, nested articles etc. It's much faster to switch between tabs than close and open them constantly. Why should I limit myself to 5? And yes, after an hour or two I usually get them off the stack one by one, collapsing back to first one, knowing much more about the history of Parliament in Canada.
tabs combine bookmarks with back and forward buttons. if i open a new tab and want to go "back" I switch tabs. now i have both states saved, which is good for speed and keeping my location on a page. tabs dont do a good job of showing me "how" i got somewhere", especially once I convert them to bookmarks.
to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.
tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.
i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
Tabs seem like a poor visualization of your browsing history. A history tree of your last N sites seems like it would be a lot more useful and informative (not to mention compact). Tabs don't show the tree relationship.
You really need a graph with a timeline / histogram or similar. See my previous comment which has more ideas. I hope someone builds this, but I know that the way to see it happen is to go do it.
This single extension is most of the reason I use FF as my daily driver. Can't live without it anymore. Being able to build out a tree, rearrange the subtrees, close out whole subtrees at once and have history maintained on each tab has ended up being central to my whole browsing flow.
I was trying to get the Chrome team to understand this and implement a bookmark manager which took this into consideration. We have the compute power, the memory, and the understanding to build such a thing. Just a bookmark isn't useful. I want a snapshot of my mental map of how I got there, what it's about (auto summarization), other tabs I had open and their same histories, plus an easy way to pick that back up and dive in from that exact spot. I don't just want a saved session, but a place on a map of knowledge that I can jump back to. Then give me fuzzy search that can match the idea / meaning of something across these saves, so I can find it without remembering the URL or page title. Give me a topical timeline with a graph so I can see when I was thinking about something. The idea of a "bookmark" for a "page" on the web is cute and had a place in history, but we can do a lot better in 2017.
Yes, you are into something. However I think you can forget about getting the 2017 version of google to implement it.
You might have better luck with trying to implement it as an extension to Firefox although the extension API is (at least for now) going to be a shadow of its former self AFAIK.
My tab tree is the closest thing I've come to an effort-less mind-map that works for me. (Effortless as in ctrl-click to open a new sub-tree so I can always see what is related to what and how I found something really hard-to-find-but useful.)
Even though my current setup works well I'm quite sure I or someone else will be able to create something event better in the future.
I know you're joking, but the "You're holding it wrong" mentality is one reason I'll probably never go back to proprietary software: The style of software which attempts to prescribe certain workflows and proscribe others inevitably reaches a point where it pisses me off.
I personally know many people with approx. 50 tabs open. The reason was that they opened the tabs, want to read but haven't got around to reading it yet. They wouldn't want to invest time in maintaining it into a Reading List software.
I tried reading lists, didn't work. I treat tabs as pieces of information fighting for my attention. Some win, some don't and get closed after several weeks or months... :)
The use of what most HN users would consider an absurd number of tabs is shockingly (to me anyway) common among the non-tech-worker crowd. I'd say about half of my family members that don't work in tech have at least dozens and probably hundreds of tabs open at any given time.
I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative).
It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
I can understand opening 20-30 tabs but with 100 or so it would take me longer to find the tab then just searching it for in Google or history.
I went from Netscape/internet explorer to Firefox then because of the frequent crashes and how slow it was to Chrome. I am to entrenched in the Google eco system to change now so just can hope this will make Chrome cut down on the bloat.
I think this is a pretty common practice. I know I have hundreds of tabs open as a temporary bookmark system over many windows(48 windows, 354 tabs right now) ... to the point that I made a simple extension to find what I am looking for visually and have links on the page that focus that window and tab. I find it pretty useful in practice.
I worked on a prototype new browser that understood this exact need -- visualizing browsing sessions -- so that you can quickly go to where you need. We used additional information, such as how long you spent on a page, to avoid cluttering it with less important information. Ultimately we were convinced by a former Mozilla C-type that getting people to switch their browsers was a herculean task (especially on the iPad where you can't change default browsers) and we moved on.
- make a habit of Ctrl+T before googling something
- open all outgoing links in new background tabs
so you can continue reading the current page
- leave several pages of reference material open
(e.g. docs, issue trackers, random blog posts relevant to whatever you're doing)
- open links that someone sends you to work on them later
And once the inevitable distraction hits you you might forget closing some.
I have >450 tabs open right now, so I guess this is me. I said this the other day, but I use the Tab Groups plugin, and I have a different group for each project I work on. For example, I have a keyboard group with pages related to DIY keyboards. I don't have the resources to make my own keyboard right now, but I don't want to lose the research I've done. My keyboard group lets me keep my research available in the state I left it, allowing me to quickly get up to speed when I have time to work on it.
It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
I don't usually get to hundreds, but it does happen sometimes, and for me it's just a matter of forgetfulness or laziness. It's easy to open new tabs, and easy to forget to close old ones, so they tend to accumulate. Eventually I'll try to find something I already had open, realize I have way too many tabs open, and go through and close all the ones I no longer need, and then the cycle repeats.
1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before.
2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it.
3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.
4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...
5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.
6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.
I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.
I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
Why do you think they need help? If their memory works differently and they have everything organized, what's there to fix? Just enjoy that Firefox is faster and less memory hungry for everybody.
It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?
Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.
The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.
How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.
> Do you just not have any interests?
Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.
I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.
An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
There is absolutely no technical reason why bookmarks and tabs are separate concepts: if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs, and the idea that a tab has to be some kind of constantly-open running program burning RAM and CPU is essentially a mistake made only by Google (and we can probably guess why they like that), as the only permanent state of a tab is the history of URLs it represented (which can be easily verified by rebooting: if the browser doesn't save it to disk it isn't part of the semantic state).
> if there is a way to search and organize bookmarks more easily that should be applied to tabs
That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.
Exactly true. I use chrome as my secondary browser. I have max 5 tabs open. But my primary workhorse(firefox) has close to 30-40 tabs.
I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.
It's a completely different view of what the tab bar is.
To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.
When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.
> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?
The problem is that some people don't have just one thing they are doing at a time: they have long-term projects that overlap in scope. I am a teacher at a University, where I am teaching multiple classes and helping multiple students. I am also an elected government official, where I am sitting on multiple committees and making decisions on multiple topics. I am also a software developer working on multiple projects and doing research into multiple algorithms. I am also a human being having fun in multiple ways and talking to multiple other people. Do you really insist that I finish, shut down, and serialize the state of every single task I am working on in order to work on some other task? That is probably the least efficient process I think you could come up with; every single sub-task I have has its own working area, and each of those involves maybe 12 tabs... so the result is many hundreds of tabs. If you only own one table, which you have to share between work as diverse as soldering and cooking, I highly recommend trying out a life with two tables for a while, as you might be shocked at how much more efficient life becomes when you don't have to pack up everything you are doing every time you get hungry. What makes a computer interesting is when you then realize you have an effectively infinite number of tables.
Hence, multiple windows (and because windows UX is broken, multiple browsers)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
> And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task?
No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.
> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.
> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.
Hence, multiple windows (and because windows UX is broken, multiple browsers)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
> who are these people who have hundreds and thousands of tabs open,
I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer.
> and how can we get them the help they need?
Thanks for asking! Here is my idea:
Make an even better solution! What I need:
An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes
- multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.)
- possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.)
My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.:
- I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
- I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it).
- A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P
Feel free to suggest more great ideas here.
[0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
Tab trees would be pretty cool, especially if you list tabs in column view like I do. Opening a link in a new tab would list as a child tab, and the list of child tabs could be collapsed/hidden. Drag child tabs out of the tree to become parents themselves.
This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on.
From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that.
(Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
> - I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
Here's the help I need: make a button I can push to save the urls of all open tabs to a separate history, and close the tabs. There's too much noise in the regular history. Bonus points if the saved urls are grouped by the window they were in.
I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
You can create a "to read later" folder in your bookmarks, then right click the tab bar in each window and select "Bookmark All Tabs". That's fairly close to what you're describing, and also works with Firefox Sync (though in my experience it's best to keep the number of bookmarks below 5000 for Sync to work well).
This is all fine if you are running Windows. On a mac it will spin the fan faster than anything else... with two tabs open. Firefox has become a Windows browser, if anything
I'm using FF as my main browser on both Linux and macOS and never had any issues like that. Most of the people I work with use macOS, a lot of them use FF and never heard anyone complain about that.
Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?
Just an anecdote, but back in my Windows XP days, I tried out firefox and found it pretty slow, seemed even worse than IE (in 2004ish?), whereas chrome was lightning quick. Fast forward several years and using gnome 2 on linux, and I found firefox felt snappier overall than chrome. I still do find firefox quicker for most thing (not google maps), though they have various add-ons which doesnt make it a fair comparison.
I'm curious if this has something to do with video. Do you experience much more power when consuming video on the browser and is there a difference between how firefox, chrome, and safari use the gpu while decoding video?
It might not be video. For a while my firefox was forcing the system to use the dGPU which caused the fan to spin and battery performance to drop. The cause was the google talk plugin that got loaded when I opened gmail.
One of the useful things about Chrome in this sort of situation is its task manager, which often makes it much simpler to work out what's causing this sort of problem.
Have you profiled it? At any time over the last few years when I've done that Chrome has been behind Firefox, which is behind Safari, but getting closer. That said, if you're reporting anything about browser performance the first step is usually to test without any extensions installed to confirm you're not chasing the wrong codebase.
People are downvoting you just like devs dismiss your bug reports about the issue, but I can tell it is exactly the same for me: Firefox on MacOS is extremely slow and uses too much CPU.
People can blame mine (and many others) particular system as much as they want but the fact remains: FF on some MacOS systems is a big CPU hog while Safari, Chrome and Opera just work fine.
In Linux (with the same plugins) it works rather well though (except when using some stuff like Google docs).
This is possibly a function of which two pages you have open, and/or the Extensions you use.
I'm currently running >300 tabs on Firefox 54.0.1 spread across four Windows, on a 16 GB, 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro, 2.9GHz Intel Core i7, under macOS Sierra.
The primary extensions I use to keep performance in check are Auto Unload Tab and Tree Style Tab. Post the two pages you are loading, and I'll check them out on my setup.
HTML5 games can ramp up the fan very quickly. For example, until Auto Unload Tab kicks in, Game of Bombs will pretty reliably chew up Firefox [1]. Most of my content that I keep open are text-heavy, and not crazy on Javascript ("crazy" to me is re-implementing the browser UI and taking over the entire screen experience with that; I don't mind the UI change, but heavy DOM manipulation with Javascript isn't kind to batteries or memory at this time).
It's not necessarily the RAM usage, is that as it consumes, the browser grinds to a halt. Happens every time, no matter what I have open. Particularly in MacOS.
>Now if they can only fix the memory leak, that chews up gigs of RAM in only an hour.
I recently quit Firefox on Linux (they no longer support ALSA and require PulseAudio for sound). I used to think FF was a memory hog. Moved to Vivalidi (Chrome based). Consumes more memory and I'm sure it has a memory leak. On FF I would have ~ 30-60 tabs open. On Vivaldi it's 10-20. I have to close Vivaldi every few days to reclaim the memory.
Just curious, because I was thinking of using PulseAudio just for Firefox (which is kind of annoying). What's wrong with PulseAudio? Why did they stop supporting ALSA?
I tried PulseAudio some years ago and could not get everything to work. I'm sure if I really tinkered with settings/config files, I could - but everything was working with ALSA out of the box, so I didn't bother.
Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.
The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.
They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.
They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark
Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it...
Useless is what it is IMO
This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do
They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car
The new system is more secure. There'll be some initial pain as new APIs are stabilized and new extensions are created, but I'm willing to give Mozilla the chance, they're the only major browser that's not making a browser with a secondary, ulterior motive.
How about the power to customize every goddamn aspect of the UI? The power to make my browser behave the way I want it to behave?
This is what made Firefox worth the while for thirteen, fourteen years or however long it's been. I really have no idea where to go from here.
Vimperator is not possible in the new Web Extensions, it requires customizing the UI in a way that Web Extensions doesn't allow. I am supremely salty about this still.
WebExtension Experiments (https://webextensions-experiments.readthedocs.io/en/latest/) allow you to create your own APIs that are equivalently powerful. You're just restricted to Nightly and Developer Edition builds, since we can't simultaneously support that degree of customization and guarantee the safety, performance, and API stability that we need for the mainstream Firefox browser.
I am well aware of the excuse used to sell the Chrome Clone version of Firefox.
I have used Firefox since Version 1, I was beta testing Firefox back when mozilla suite was still the focus
I never adopted chrome, and I do not like the User Experience or the limitation of Chrome.
From EME/DRM, to Web Extensions, to who knows what else, Mozilla is killing the identiy of FF all in the name of chasing market share it will never get back.
FF should be focusing on privacy, stability, and the ability to customize the browser for you. Instead they are focusing on Mainstream placation, performance, DRM, etc
Mozilla has made it clear they no longer want people like me as users, that is fine after over a decade of support I will see myself out...
So I could replace the history search backend, add tab thumbnails and colorized tabs, and add finally working HiDPI support for Firefox on Linux/X11 by parsing QT_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTORS with that?
As long as I can still do that, it should be acceptable. Ideally this would be in the main version, though.
Not to mention the only browser outside of Microsoft's that's not a fork of chromium. None of the other browsers out there can ever hope to be faster than chrome when they are just chrome with different paint job
That's not to talk down the chromium forks out there. Opera and Vivaldi are great projects. I just think they can't change the core engine much
The new system is less capable and everyone will be force-upgraded to that less capable version before the capabilities are restored. If that's even possible. Firefox will not turn into pumpkin.exe some time in November if they let it bake for a bit longer.
If they're going to make me throw away all my addons, I have no reason not to use Chrome. Literally every non-enterprise Firefox user will have this dilemma in the near future.
I originally read about this in the post you linked. There were some great charts in that article showing how performance has changed throughout the version of Firefox. I only clicked this article because I was hoping to see a direct comparison to Chrome laid out in similar fashion. Unfortunately, the title is purely click bait and the only mention of Chrome is that anecdotally, "Chrome has something of a reputation for being a resource hog".
The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and informative.
It's real. We've landed enormous performance improvements this year, including migrating most Firefox users to a full multi-process architecture, as well as integrating parts of the Servo parallel browser engine project into Firefox. There are still many improvements yet-to-land, but in most cases we're on track for Firefox 57 in November.
I hope not. We've been working our butts off optimizing stuff across the board. The big projects (Stylo, WebRender) are ongoing and awesome, but there's also a legion of people working on eliminating boring papercut performance issues (a few milliseconds here, a few milliseconds there).
Still have more stuff to land, so expect things to keep getting better.
Gecko is apparently pretty painful to embed, with most other Gecko based browsers (that weren't firefox forks a la Pale Moon) having long since stopped development or switched to Webkit/Chromium.
Meh, Opera was easily handling huge numbers of tabs a decade ago, while providing the option for vertical tabs, tab stacking and a tab scroller so that you could comfortably switch between them. By comparison, Chrome and Firefox have always appeared as dilettantes.
vertical tabs: It seems you are taking of an extension? (I got excited for a second but I couldn't find the option under settings). If you are talking about an extension then Firefox also has a similar extension that works very well.
I think it means this [1], which is a screenshot from Opera 12 in 2011, but looks pretty much the same as I remember the tab sidebar working in 2004-ish.
I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still exists.
Opera 12 (pre-Chromium) used to have the features I mentioned built-in, which meant they were faster, fit in with the browser seamlessly and you didn't have to worry about security. Best of all, you didn't need to use them if you didn't have to. Unfortunately the new Opera is missing most of old Opera's features, but you can give Vivaldi a try.
As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear. Now all they have to do is kill the walled garden and Firefox might be worth trying again.
>As someone that switched to Pale Moon (FF fork) because of the loss of large tab session performance in post-v30 builds this is great to hear.
I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious problem.
IMHO there is something wrong when people leave tens+ tabs open. There are bookmarks for keeping references to pages. FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later. So, this is a benchmark that should not be relevant in real life if the GUI offers the right solution for the problem of keeping references to pages.
I often open 80+ tabs during the normal course of a day. Often times 5 of those are spreadsheets in one window with a few pdf spec documents, reference sites, handfuls a internet searches, a few for different version/pages of the application under test, and boom.
Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I need them, which is now.
Well but ... In the course of a day, I often realize that I have the same URL opened in 2+ tabs. There of course are use cases where I want to have more views on the same page but usually, that's not the default behaviour I want.
> open when I need them
Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong here.
Most people aren't programmers and they (thinking of family etc.) sometimes use tabs as bookmarks. I don't argue against using tabs if you need them. What I'm saying is that people often use tabs when they actually want something else.
I hardly bookmark anything anymore -- everything is temporary. If I need to find a site again, I typically just google for it and find it. Lots of tabs help mitigate that.
Stewbrew might love this one. I often bookmark groups of tabs. For example, there are 6 spec documents (on my local disk) that I used every day for the last month or so. I middle click on that folder, and boom! 6 new tabs right there ready for me to read.
There's no use trying to change people's behavior. And this particular one really shouldn't need to be defended. Some people have simpler workflows than mine. Ahem...
>There are bookmarks for keeping references to pages.
Bookmarks are a pain to manage. Tabs are meant to be temporary - even if I have one open for weeks on end. They are like a TODO list. Bookmarking the tab blurs the line between temporary and permanent stores.
Blindly bookmarking to solve the problem will leave you with thousands of bookmarks.
>FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later.
And you'll end up with thousands of entries in your Pocket.
For people that have hundreds of tabs open...how do you find anything? I generally have about 5 frequently used tabs pinned in Chrome (so they take up minimal space) and up to 10 or so other ones open. Once I have more than that many tabs open I can't see the tab titles anymore which frustrates me so I'll close some.
I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.
If you type in the URL bar firefox will show results from open tabs. You can also force this by typing `%` before the search term.
Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs?
Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
Why does a tab need to be open for this though? For me, the point of open tabs is that I know what they contain and can switch between them quickly with a quick click. Having to search for them defeats their purpose.
In my case I don't have to search for them, they're pretty well organized by related topic. I can switch pretty quickly, and sometimes need to do a tab search when context switching to another task.
The "tab search" is exactly the same effort as opening a new page, in fact, what often happens is I decide to switch to doing something else, and type in the URL bar for history search, and it tells me I already have tabs open for it (which means I also have existing state in those tabs), which is great. I usually know that there's a tab open, but my workflow is the same whether they are or aren't.
you might like a small webextension I made for firefox and chrome that displays all the tabs in a new tab grouped by window. click on one of the links and it will open up the window and focus on that tab.
It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve.
There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back)
This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last.
The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's one that's probably easy to add.
The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.
Chrome does that as well until you get to a particular number of tabs, at which point it does annoyingly hide the favicon. But it's so much better than the scrolling tab bar or hidden tabs that Safari promotes to keep each tab a minimum width.
I feel like with a bit more improvements to Firefox Snooze Tab [1] and Container Tab [2] extensions the need to have tons of tabs open could be solved.
What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"?
Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container, so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow.
What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container.
it is possible today using tab groups and tab groups helper extensions. tab groups provides tab groups and the helper provides suspend/resume of individual groups.
sadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.
for those commenting about how unhygenic having many tabs open is, why bother trying to cajole others into having just a few tabs open? it's such a weird social norming behavior (to me). i can understand asking why others do it because it is not your norm, but why the addition of trying to force others to conform to your behavior? (i'm genuinely asking, as this kind of stuff is fascinating to me.)
why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right?
and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?
Personally tab bloat reeks of stemming from internet addiction and/or attention span issues. Would hazard a guess that this is the source of anti-tab sentiment.
Tabs left open don't feed internet addiction/ADHD. The act of opening a new tab does. ("Ooh I wonder if there's anything new on FB/HN/etc.?")
I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.)
But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.
Yeah "the act of opening a new tab does" I agree with. My original statement is based from my own behavior which I was projecting on to others (which I suspect others who are judging people in this thread may be doing), I don't leave my machine on overnight so the over 100 tab numbers being talked about freak me out.
They certainly feed my ADHD. If I have an HN tab open between the the AWS console I have up currently, and that API documentation I need, HN may get some attention before I hit CMD+[ again.
Ok, let's think about it in the other direction for a second, and trying on purpose apply just as much meanness so as to appreciate the duality: personally, attempts to limit the number of open tabs reeks of stemming from undiagnosed OCD and/or a lack of important tasks.
I would be lying if I said I wasn't internet addicted, am diagnosed with ADD, and open a lot of tabs. Original statement came from my personal experience, did not mean to offend anyone.
Anecdotally, both my parents (almost 70) have an insane amount of tabs open because they simply don't understand how tabs work. Every time they want to go somewhere else they open a new tab instead of using the current one, and they almost never close em. So this could be great for the less tech-savvy.
i disagree of course, because that's a pretty judgemental slippery slope argument (i.e., that a single behavior implies a whole host of other negative behaviors & attributes).
As an admitted internet addict with an ADD diagnoses I am fairly annoyed that my comment was considered so rude. It didn't seem like something out of bounds to call someone out on to me. Sorry for any offense.
no worries, i personally didn't take any offense (for what it's worth, i upvoted you because your response seemed genuine and without ill will, even if i disagreed with you. but it's internet points, so worth about as much as the paper it's printed on =)
> attempts to limit the number of open tabs reeks of stemming from undiagnosed OCD and/or a lack of important tasks.
Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.
On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.
For the same reason you might cajole others to perform regular backups. People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism. Very few people actually have two hundred tabs open for a single train of thought.
When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.
I completely agree. It should be way easier to "braindump" a window full of tabs into a folder of bookmarks. There are browser extensions for this.
Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.
The bookmarking interface in chrome could use a facelift. The fact that I have to come up with a name for the folder and think about where to put it makes this less than ideal.
Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.
Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with.
It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
This still doesn't do what I want. If I have 5 windows open with 5-20 tabs each, and force a crash, I can recover them via this menu. It's tedious because I have to do them one by one, but it works.
But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank.
I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.
> It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox
When my Chrome tabs crash unrecoverably it's a huge relief! Tens or Hundreds of things I wanted to read later, but weren't truly important. Too bad, but now I can use Chrome comfortably again.
>People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism
We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism".
As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it.
Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched.
I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.
> shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?
Completely agree. I am actually currently developing a tree-style-tab browser that has Chrome embedded for this reason [0]. I feel most people that tell people not to have a ton of tabs open haven't experienced the increased productivity with tree style tabs. I can ctrl+click 15 source files on a github page, opened as background tabs, then (with multiple tab handler) I can click+drag across the 10 close buttons and close 10 tabs with one gesture. I almost want to take a video of me "power-using" the web with tree style tabs and multiple-tab gestures to help others understand.
I see it as vim:intellij::fewer-tab-argument:more-tab-argument. To each his own.
I was thinking about a similar way to bookmark multiple things at once, make the gesture just a click, hold, slide and then choose option. Love what you got so far.
Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I love and hoard) is nice. Big button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs.
Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop. Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as opposed to a specific article.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 255 ms ] threadI never understand any of my friends who keep having tens of tabs open. Just bookmark the thing and free up some CPU/RAM. It's a keystroke away.
My personal workflow usually involves opening huge number of tabs researching something, then closing most of them later. So we can say that there are peaks of tab usage followed by a phase of organizing stuff. The advances in the recent Firefox releases really help me.
But this is my own personal way of working, others may have different views.
Obviously this is unmanageable in Chrome from the UI but with the right extensions (tab mix plus w/ multi row tabs) in Firefox it's pretty usable.
Say you start on HN and open five articles. You've now got HN/Site1, HN/Site2, and so on. Then you find an interesting link on 3 of those 5 sites.
With normal tabbing, you now have 9 tabs open and a majority of the text hidden on one line, where with a proper tree view, you can see the entire site, and how you got there, which is probably more valuable to me than the actual content.
To make things even better, when you're done with that research point you just kill the parent level tab and the children all go away too.
Tens of tabs is pretty typical in my workday and improves my productivity vs. fewer tabs and forgetting how I got to a tangent.
This also has the advantage of loading the pages in the background so you don't have to waste your time on bloated webpages.
That reads like "while <more than I use> is ridiculous, <as many as I use> isn't that unreasonable".
I never have more than about ten tabs open, and a hundred strikes me as ridiculous too. To each his own, though, I guess.
That would indeed be a much better use of space.
Also Chrome might be faster but FF has some unique advantages that makes it really great for serious work.
Also the speed advantage that Chrome currently has might be about to disappear : )
The address bar used to be pretty helpful in calling up bookmarks (10+ years ago), but now there's too much featuritis there for me ever to rely on it again.
I bet Henry David Thoreau would say the same about browser tabs.
to "solve" the tab problem, you need to combine tabs, history, bookmarks, back/forward buttons, pinboard/tags/pagecache into groups that are instantly rearrangable by their proximity to each other: spatially, by topic, or temporally. i should be able to, in one command, show only tabs that are hacker news or originated from hacker news, but maybe something i googled while on one of those pages deserves to be related. now the machine should be making inferences on what goes where, and i give it feedback when it is wrong.
tabs should be more like a wiki document, where as i accumulate more about, say, stagecoaches, or good reads from redef, those metadata relationships to topics and origins are preserved. i should be able to go back and show only bookmarks from only hackernews/redef/longreads combined, and only the ones about stagecoaches.
i know mozilla has shown a demo of something like this, but its a long way from being more useful than tabs, because it neglects the content of the page itself.
Check out the Firefox Tree Style Tab plug-in [1], is this what you had in mind?
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Chrome might be faster than FF and a Ferrari might be faster than a pickup truck.
But:
FF and the pickup truck is more useful for work IMO
and the Ferrari and Chrome comes with a price I'm not comfortable with.
You might have better luck with trying to implement it as an extension to Firefox although the extension API is (at least for now) going to be a shadow of its former self AFAIK.
My tab tree is the closest thing I've come to an effort-less mind-map that works for me. (Effortless as in ctrl-click to open a new sub-tree so I can always see what is related to what and how I found something really hard-to-find-but useful.)
Even though my current setup works well I'm quite sure I or someone else will be able to create something event better in the future.
http://lifehacker.com/203915/download-of-the-day-pathway-mac
"Chrome is so much better for my usecase. Look how much Firefox usage has declined, Firefox should just die"
"Here's my use case which Firefox is better at"
"Your use case is invalid!"
from HN comments this week.
Leaving a tab open means I'll actually stumble across the page again.
I think it's the sort of thing where this works well enough for the same purpose that other people use a read-later or bookmarking system for, and it's reliable enough that people don't care to switch (or don't know there's an alternative).
It's good that Firefox is trying to adapt to the way people use technology, rather than trying to force people to adapt to how the technology works - I think that's a much faster road to widespread adoption, and it creates more goodwill on the part of their users.
With FF when you start to type it intelligently suggests tabs you already have open.
Perfect for keyboard lovers like me :)
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
source: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
http://www.azinman.com/stateless
It's not as though I have hundreds of tabs in one group, it would be inconvenient to access all but 20-30 of them. I think most users with similar amounts of tabs use plugins like tab groups or tree-based tabs to manage their tabs.
Reasons I have a lot of tabs open:
1. Google searching problem. The first result is rarely a complete solution to a problem if I've resorted to Google. Maybe it's a partial solution, maybe it's no good at all. Usually I'll open anything looking relevant from the first page, skim through them, if they don't have a quick answer I'll check the next. Then I'll eliminate any that are totally not relevant. If any have partial answers, I'll keep them around while searching related search terms. See also searching our jira instance for related issues when I know this is very similar to something that's came up before.
2. Programming docs have this annoying habit of sticking one class per page, meaning I usually have to have multiple pages open to understand some area of a library if I'm unfamiliar with it.
3. Reddit/HN threads often send me on tangents down links while I keep the parent threads open.
4. Sometimes I'll go on an aside and do something else while keeping my previous context open for when I return. Yes, I could bookmark them, but bookmarks are a lot more awkward to load back and also mentally feel like they're for something a lot more permanent than "I might need in 3-4 hours but won't need it tomorrow". Plus when it's not costing me much to not have to put up with the reload time...
5. Sometimes I open new windows to view multiple pieces of content at once. Sometimes I end up following links in these new windows.
6. Sometimes I open new windows to create a seperate context for a new piece of research when the previous one might be still relevant.
I have tried pinboard, pocket when it was readitlater, browser bookmarks, etc. None of them have really solved this use case and I tend to forget about using them after a while.
I tend to idle in the 5-20 range, go up to the 50s when researching. Hitting 100+ happens many days, and my record is closing out a browser with 354 open tabs.
It's generally from researching a topic while working on a project. It's a bit like a cache of bookmarks, you don't really know what you're going to need until you've made some headway and found what was truly helpful that you may need later versus what you can safely close.
We talk about privacy as fundamental right but are ok with chrome. We all know it's a memory hog but still are ok with it.
I currently have ~500 tabs open, unevenly distributed among 20 "tab groups". It's very much like expecting your editor/IDE to open a bunch of files and git status when you switch to a "project".
- I'm pursuing a multi-pronged agenda which requires context switches to get different things done (multiple projects/activities, each with their own group eg: communication, project1 at work, project2 at work, paying my bills, topic FOO that I've been reading about in the evenings, HN content, etc. ). I prefer for my browser to display the state at which I left things, including the possible resources I was consulting -- so that I can continue from exactly where I left off. Also, one might actually want to save the state of the javascript objects on the page or something, rather than just the URL!
- A lot of my browser activity has the flavor of research. A lot of searching, consulting references, trying out things in Jupyter notebooks, etc.
- A large part of it is keeping track of interesting things to look into. Whether you call those "bookmarks" or "open tabs" is just jargon, since Firefox only loads tabs on demand. So, for all practical purposes, it has an amazingly convenient way to save context, without having to click once for each page. And closing a tab feels easier than deleting a bookmark.
I sometimes think that this might be the electronic analogue of some (creative?) people who have messy offices and are able to get along just fine. As an example, refer to the recent discussions about Claude Shannon's style:
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14819377 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14774163 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776520
Who are these people with a shockingly low number of tabs, and how do we get them the help they need?
Those I usually see with few tabs are either those who only browse the web for extremely simple things (ie facebook, netflix and google for very simple questions), or those who only just maintain like a single docs page at any given moment.
The hell kind of absurd usage pattern is that? Do you keep one book on your shelf too? Do you just not have any interests? Nothing but one thing at a time? I keep around ~300 tabs and a heavily organized bookmarks storage with some 400 links; tabs are ram and bookmarks are disk.
How else would you naturally organize your web-information? I can only imagine you have very little information to organize...
I would argue that 300 tabs is like having 300 open books piled on your desk.
> Do you just not have any interests?
Yes, and my bookshelves - and bookmarks - are crammed full of them. But I don't need to have every project I'm working on on my desk.
I guess it's pretty arbitrary, but I find it easier to organize things in bookmarks - for certain things, hierarchically in folders; for others, with tags - but if I'm done working on Thing X, and want to start working on Thing Y, I don't want to have to search through my 300 open tabs to figure out where things are.
An advantage of many open tabs, I will freely admit, is that they're typically scrolled to where you last left off, sometimes with information pre-filled if it's something interactive.
That's reasonable. Do any browsers do this out of the box? I'm just boggled at the idea of keeping a vague map of thousands of open tabs, with no easy way to sort, filter, categorize, etc. them.
I need to jump from one to another trying to solve a problem. I will be able to close those tabs only when i am done with the debug. I guess clean slate is for people who have written their own tools and use.
To me, the tab bar is a working area. I don't keep stuff that is not immediately relevant to what I'm doing in the working area.
When you're soldering stuff, you don't want spatulas and eggs getting in your way. On the other hand, when you're cooking, you don't want solder to get mixed up with your food.
> How else would you naturally organize your web-information?
You don't. There's google for that :-)
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
No, just open a new tab. I simply never have more than 2 tasks in-flight. I can't focus on more than two things at a time, and even then the second one has to be really quick (no more than 1 tab deep). And of course, once I'm done with something, it goes away.
> Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
The latter. I don't commit things that can be searched to memory. For example, I don't go to Khronos website to search OpenGL APIs, I just google the function names. Same if I want to look for something in wikipedia. I also don't bother remembering website names. For example, if I know there's a particular article about shadow mapping I want to read, I can just google "article about shadowmapping by fabien" and the thing I'm looking for will be the top result.
> The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
Sure. It's just that > 10 is already pushing it and > 20 tabs is completely unsustainable for me.
And what'll you do for a large task thats interrupted by a small task? Wipe out the large and replace it with the small, then work up towards the large again? Obviously not; you stick it up with the large task's tabs, and just note which tab marks the differentiation between tasks (not literally... you mentally know a tab is associated with which task, unless both tasks are extremely similar)
And multiple small tasks interrupting each other? (Often a redult of each one being extremely boring). Obviously, more tab sequences.
The natural thing to do is accumulate tabs until it becomes unsustainable, and then garbage collect
You choose instead to artificially constrain yourself for some arbitrary notion of cleansliness (One window, one tab sequence, I bet !) and then attack those of the One True Way with your spatulas and eggs. Google is your organization? Either you have an amazing memory of arbitrary websites...or you dont have any memory of them (artificial or otherwise)
I'm one! I'm a happy software/systems/knowledge engineer.
> and how can we get them the help they need?
Thanks for asking! Here is my idea:
Make an even better solution! What I need:
An effortless[0] way to research big topics. This includes
- multi-path discovery (currently solved by ctrl-clicking to open links that looks useful or interesting in a sub-tab-tree while continuing to read the piece I'm already reading.)
- possibility to bookmark stuff I work on effortlessy and with cross-device sync. I currently use pinboard which is great. I'm not even fully utilizing it (.tags for instance is a part I'm sure I'm not utilizing as much as I should.)
My current setup has a few weaknesses, e.g.:
- I want a way to stash away everything down to the position of the windows (no, I actually don't think I need that, but I really would like: the current windows, the current tabs, nested the way they are etc etc). Why? In case I want to switch to another task (e.g. urgent request).
- I want an even better "OneNote" that integrates effortlessly with FF (or whatever you create to replace it).
- A tool to automatically transcribe booooring videos or at least extract the juicy few seconds that I need :-P
Feel free to suggest more great ideas here.
[0]: Yep, if you want a chance to replace my exiting system effortless is your goal.
This would be great for dynamic research tasks. You could collapse trees and get a top level view, useful if you're in the weeds; you could close trees by parent, great for killing avenues of research you no long need. It would also be good for when you need to quickly check the syntax of something or fix a minor bug without disrupting the larger project you're focusing on.
From a Dev/LiveOps perspective, it would be huge- grouping all my AWS pages, CMS pages, custom dashboards, would be a huge help. I can easily sprawl tens of separate tabs to get different services to talk to eachother.
Currently we are in a position where we'll push for devs to provide the necessary APIs going forward and I'll be happy to have more people along to push for that.
(Also, AFAIK Mozilla will provide a LTS version of the last version that will work with real extensions.)
You may want to give this extension a shot: https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/session-manager/
By telling them about OneTab.
I tried making a chrome plugin for this, but with a lot of tabs it didn't work reliably, and I didn't have time to put more work into it.
Maybe there are some other things that cause this on your machine?
Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 by the way.
This might be interesting to quantify.
People can blame mine (and many others) particular system as much as they want but the fact remains: FF on some MacOS systems is a big CPU hog while Safari, Chrome and Opera just work fine.
In Linux (with the same plugins) it works rather well though (except when using some stuff like Google docs).
I'm currently running >300 tabs on Firefox 54.0.1 spread across four Windows, on a 16 GB, 15-inch 2016 MacBook Pro, 2.9GHz Intel Core i7, under macOS Sierra.
The primary extensions I use to keep performance in check are Auto Unload Tab and Tree Style Tab. Post the two pages you are loading, and I'll check them out on my setup.
HTML5 games can ramp up the fan very quickly. For example, until Auto Unload Tab kicks in, Game of Bombs will pretty reliably chew up Firefox [1]. Most of my content that I keep open are text-heavy, and not crazy on Javascript ("crazy" to me is re-implementing the browser UI and taking over the entire screen experience with that; I don't mind the UI change, but heavy DOM manipulation with Javascript isn't kind to batteries or memory at this time).
[1] http://gameofbombs.com/landing#/play
(Biggest culprits are Discourse forums.. which is a shame b/c I really like the platform)
1. https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/pulse
I recently quit Firefox on Linux (they no longer support ALSA and require PulseAudio for sound). I used to think FF was a memory hog. Moved to Vivalidi (Chrome based). Consumes more memory and I'm sure it has a memory leak. On FF I would have ~ 30-60 tabs open. On Vivaldi it's 10-20. I have to close Vivaldi every few days to reclaim the memory.
Pulseaudio is sold as easier to manage, but for me it simply wasn't.
The assumption is that people are running systemd, and Pulseaudio presumably works well with that. But I'm not on systemd. If my distribution had a simple way of running pulseaudio and have it work more or less right out of the box, I'd go for it. But it doesn't.
They stopped supporting it because no developer stepped up to support it - that's all. Apparently the Pulseaudio API is straightforward for developers, whereas dealing with ALSA directly is not.
They already had the power users, which they have now told to get screwed when they killed the extensions to chase the performance benchmark
Trading Usability and the ability to customize the browser for something that is "fast" but you cant do anything with it...
Useless is what it is IMO
This is the difference between a sports car and a truck. Me I drive a truck, it might be slow and cumbersome but it is versatile and customizable, I haul people and things, I can add a camper, I can do all kinds of things with my truck. If I had a sports car it might be fast but I would be limited in the places I could go and the things I could do
They are taking the FF Pickup and turning it into a FF Sports car... I have no interest in a sports car
The new Chrome Replica Web Extensions can never be as powerful as the old system.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14849681
It will end up being a far cry from what we have today and more like the Ridiclous and unusable "SideTree" menus that are available in chrome.
No TreeStyle Tabs, no FF for me. that is non-optional. I will switch full time to vivalidi that has a less feature complete vertical tabs built in.
There are also many other Addons I use today that look like their are going to be discontinued post FF 57 for API or other reasons.
I have used Firefox since Version 1, I was beta testing Firefox back when mozilla suite was still the focus
I never adopted chrome, and I do not like the User Experience or the limitation of Chrome.
From EME/DRM, to Web Extensions, to who knows what else, Mozilla is killing the identiy of FF all in the name of chasing market share it will never get back.
FF should be focusing on privacy, stability, and the ability to customize the browser for you. Instead they are focusing on Mainstream placation, performance, DRM, etc
Mozilla has made it clear they no longer want people like me as users, that is fine after over a decade of support I will see myself out...
As long as I can still do that, it should be acceptable. Ideally this would be in the main version, though.
That's not to talk down the chromium forks out there. Opera and Vivaldi are great projects. I just think they can't change the core engine much
Safari is still a thing, if only on Apple's OSs.
If they're going to make me throw away all my addons, I have no reason not to use Chrome. Literally every non-enterprise Firefox user will have this dilemma in the near future.
The article that was originally posted was certainly more interesting and informative.
Still have more stuff to land, so expect things to keep getting better.
Mozilla really paved the way for electron with prism, shame it never really took off
https://github.com/mozilla/positron
https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/15/introducing-qbrt/
I haven't used Opera for a decade, so I don't know if the feature still exists.
[1] http://forums.opera.com/discussion/1866076/tab-stacks-in-sid...
I tried Pale Moon about a year ago. It had a nasty memory leak (my browser stays open for weeks). I really wanted to like it, but this was a serious problem.
Why would I want any of those in bookmarks when I can have them open when I need them, which is now.
> open when I need them
Well, what do you mean with "open". As I said IMHO there is something wrong here.
There's no use trying to change people's behavior. And this particular one really shouldn't need to be defended. Some people have simpler workflows than mine. Ahem...
Bookmarks are a pain to manage. Tabs are meant to be temporary - even if I have one open for weeks on end. They are like a TODO list. Bookmarking the tab blurs the line between temporary and permanent stores.
Blindly bookmarking to solve the problem will leave you with thousands of bookmarks.
>FF also has Pocket for keeping references to pages I want to read later.
And you'll end up with thousands of entries in your Pocket.
I'm in the camp that cannot understand how having hundreds of tabs open can be practical...to me it would be like having hundreds of files open in an IDE or file browser, hundreds of terminals open, or hundreds of documents scattered across my desk. At some point the number of things you have in front of you becomes overwhelming to keep in your head and you have to clear away the things you don't need right now.
Chrome's UI is terrible for multiple tabs. Chrome will shrink tabs down as much as possible. Firefox stops shrinking once they're like 75% of their original width, and lets you scroll instead. On top of that, addons like Tab Center Redux make it much easier to manage things by putting them on the side (so they don't get shrunk at all) and adding a dedicated search box.
I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs?
Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
The "tab search" is exactly the same effort as opening a new page, in fact, what often happens is I decide to switch to doing something else, and type in the URL bar for history search, and it tells me I already have tabs open for it (which means I also have existing state in those tabs), which is great. I usually know that there's a tab open, but my workflow is the same whether they are or aren't.
firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
open source here: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
---
Hi Manishearth! I know you work at Mozilla.
If you see this: Do you have anything to share WRT the possibility of having extensions like tree-style-tabs in future versions of FF?
This is probably the one thing that leaves most Chrome users awe-struck and also is really really really useful to many of us.
It works. It's a bit unpolished UI wise, but that should improve.
There are two crucial missing bits of functionality in it. One is respecting tab order. Currently it just lets you organize the tabs, but will not actually reorder them under the hood, i.e. the ordering that ctrl-tab respects. What it should do is reorder tabs as they are moved around. Tab Center Redux does this, so I suspect the webextension API exists (in fact IIRC the google chrome webextension tabs API, which Firefox definitely supports, has this), so it just needs the stuff to be fixed. I considered fixing it myself, but the extension doesn't seem to be open source (you can of course inspect the source of the bundle but then there's no easy way to contribute back)
This may even have been fixed by the time I looked at it last.
The second is that it doesn't actually hide the tab bar up top. Neither does Tab Center Redux. This is a matter of a missing webextensions api, but it's one that's probably easy to add.
The other missing bits are mostly minor, like configurability etc.
http://i.imgur.com/XEXHXJB.png
What if it's easy to easily have multiple "Research containers"?
Container tab allows you to hide all tabs related to a particular container, so I feel like you can easily improve your workflow.
What about combining that functionality with snooze tab extension? But instead of snoozing individual tabs, snooze a container.
sadly they will stop functioning after Firefox 57, because progress, yeah.
why not take the 30 seconds to mull it over to at least develop a sense of understanding/empathy before throwing out a micro agression around something so frivolous? i mean, if it's not hurting you, then let other people be, right?
and besides, shouldn't the computer conform to how the human wants to work and not the other way around?
I leave about a dozen or so tabs open; they track projects I'm in the middle of but can't complete right now for whatever reason. Leaving them put is organizationally helpful to my brain. (I do the same with physical items as well.)
But the few sites I'm addicted to… those stay closed until I need a fix.
i disagree of course, because that's a pretty judgemental slippery slope argument (i.e., that a single behavior implies a whole host of other negative behaviors & attributes).
Or, alternatively, from keeping an eye on your memory usage. If memory is an issue, not opening too many tabs sure helps.
On my 2GB-of-RAM netbook, I hardly open Firefox at all, on my 8 GB laptop, I just don't care. On my 12 GB work laptop, where I have stuff like mmc, multiple RDP sessions, Internet Explorer with multiple tabs (thank you, SharePoint!) and lots of other stuff opened, I still keep an eye on the number of tabs. Well, sometimes, at least. At 16 GB or above, I just don't give a flying ____.
When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.
Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.
Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.
I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.
Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with.
It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.
But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank.
I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.
This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox
We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism".
As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it.
Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched.
I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.
Completely agree. I am actually currently developing a tree-style-tab browser that has Chrome embedded for this reason [0]. I feel most people that tell people not to have a ton of tabs open haven't experienced the increased productivity with tree style tabs. I can ctrl+click 15 source files on a github page, opened as background tabs, then (with multiple tab handler) I can click+drag across the 10 close buttons and close 10 tabs with one gesture. I almost want to take a video of me "power-using" the web with tree style tabs and multiple-tab gestures to help others understand.
I see it as vim:intellij::fewer-tab-argument:more-tab-argument. To each his own.
0 - https://github.com/cretz/doogie
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/firefox-focus-the-privacy-br...
Removing the ability to even make tabs (which I love and hoard) is nice. Big button to delete your current page, which you have to do if you want something else. You're constantly at "inbox zero" for your tabs.
Will look through the comments here for similar solutions on the desktop. Perhaps something that limits the number of tabs you can open. Or automatically closes old tabs if they're on the website's "home page" as opposed to a specific article.
Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14823807
Original blog post: https://metafluff.com/2017/07/21/i-am-a-tab-hoarder/
17
Is someone flagging this or has it triggered a flamewar-detector?