Poll: A browser without tabs?
I'm really getting annoyed a little more everyday with browser tabs. They don't seem to fit in my workflow anymore. I have a couple tabs that should stay alive and at the tip of my finger (gmail, slack, HN, ...) and many others that I just need once and would love not to have to manually close.
The browser should be simpler and more intuitive especially given it could know pretty much what I'm going to need at any moment just by looking at my usage.
This poll is pretext for discussion, feel free to share your feeling on this!
41 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 98.4 ms ] threadThe candid question is whether or not there is a better experience out there?
Any opinion on that?
You might consider rewording your poll. As it reads, it more seems as though you're asking if people would rather have a browser with tabs or without tabs, as opposed to asking if people think tabs is the best user interface option to deal with having multiple pages open.
Is there a different model that you'd want to use?
I remember when tabs hit the browsers (a zillion years ago) - it was revolutionary! Suddenly you had one docked window rather than a zillion windows all over the place. To me they are a god-send.
Originally there was an option in Firefox to turn them off - I wouldn't be surprised if that option is still there.
Slack.app may be an example of how browsers will work in the future.
Reminds me of Windows 98.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Desktop
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Channel
Pinned sites in IE kinda does this, saving websites on your home screen on iOS or on Android kinda does this, and ChromeOS kinda does this, but I agree, it's not quite there yet.
Tabs work well for most; if regular tabs aren't for you, try Quick Tabs (Chrome) or the variety of add-ons which can add Spotlight-like tab search or shortcut keys to favorite or recently used tabs. If your needs are still more specific, write your own! :)
However, I have a similar issue of always needing quick access to a few key web applications (trello, our build server, etc...), that I really want to be logically separate from the rest of my browser somehow. My solution so far has been to use http://fluidapp.com for the things I really want to exist on their own rather than just as a browser tab.
Occasionally, I'll accumulate a bunch of extra trees I don't need, and I'll go through and bookmark and close or just close them. (The extension has an option to bookmark a whole tree.)
Since I find no downside to having tons of tabs just sit around, I am comfortable without a new browser management system.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
I can get rid of ephemeral tabs myself: I read it and I closed it.
I wish the browser could recognize the current set of long-running tabs, somehow mark and remember them, and free the resources of long-unused but long-opened tabs without closing the tab, ready to load it when clicked.
It should also not conflate the long-running contextual tabs with permanent, context-independent tabs.
Usually I manually separate different sets of long-running tabs into separate windows. I won't mind the browser being able to recognize my usage patterns and offer to split a window into two, or merge two windows that keep being used together.
Might be adaptable to browsers but I'm not convinced it's really worth it.
Not really proposing solutions here, but it does make tabs look a bit clunky.
Side note: For the last few months, I've been using a Chrome plugin that prevents me from opening more than a predetermined number of tabs at a time. Otherwise I just end up with 45 tabs open.
I would quite like to be able to group tabs together, collapse groups, move them between instances, tile 'em, bookmark a group to open it later...
it closes all your tabs, gives them to you in a single tab for you to save, open all, or open one at a time. pinned tabs can be saved.
2) tabs alone are starting to feel limited as the average number of tabs and the relation between them gets larger and more complex.
3) browsers are just too fucking big. I tried I think it was surf, or something, I mean, a browser that's basically WebKit + V8 + a few keyboard navigation bindings, along with I think it was uzbl, a tabber system, and it worked decently. I like the idea of small, independent, lightweight single-tab browser instances along with another application that would supply the rest of the functionalities of a traditional browser. Unfortunately I quit this setup because changing is hard and I'm lazy.
4) I use like one thousandth of my favourite browser's UI elements and functionalities. The UI I really need is a set of quick shortcuts to navigate tabs and click and edit stuff in the dom.
I utterly abuse every form of fuzzy-matching autocomplete I encounter, which is why I'm a terminal zsh fan (see what I did there?); one of the coolest UI experience I had in a browser was with the Viperator plugin on Firefox. The few letters controlling the few navigation features I used were juuuuust at the right place, and hitting t or o to autocomplete the url of the page I wanted or to autocomplete the web search syntax shorthand it provided was immediately natural and extremely fast and fun to use. With the caveat that whatever questionable website or search query I typed in tended to stay rather high in the autocomplete matches. With awkward results. But that's my problem.
It has a shorthand that puts a numeric id on every link and allows (what else) fuzzy-matching autocompleting them, as a mean to replace mouse clicks, but I never really got the hang of it. The numeric labels were really invasive, and I almost always had to use the numeric key as I almost never got the matcher to select the link I wanted quickly enough; I just used my nipple mouse instead. Which is sad because I really liked the idea; the implementation was just not quite good enough.
It was missing a few features that I consider pointy enough to have to script myself, for example, I wanted keyboard hooks to save images, text copy-pastes and stuff, in a directory set in advance or specified on the spot or whatever, but since Vimperator uses vimscrip (or a subset thereof, I don't recall), I never made it. Actually I can barely script my actual vim, but that's besides the point.
It was supposed to open my editor of choice on a certain keyboard hook in text fields, but I never got it to work, which is a shame; I really wanted that feature. There's a built-in vim-style editor, but I never got the hang of the modal transition in and out of it, so I never used it.
In the end I stopped using it because it was f%$king slow; having the browser freeze for several seconds after a keyboard shortcut makes the shortcut moot, you see? The keyboard focus also tended to be hard to follow; the worse being (I know it's now Vimperator's fault) flash, which captured the focus so hard I had to click on the page to get my freaking focus back. Sometimes to get it back in some random mode I don't care about, which made me develop the habit of smashing escape all the time not only once, as I already do in Vim, but several times. Just to make sure. Whenever I wasn't trapped into the raw input mode.
(Edit: it got gradually slower and slower, but out of the box, FF + Vimperator on my p.o.s mid '00 laptops was already, uh, not this fast.)
So I'd say that my perfect eternal browser would be a cleaner subset of Vimperator, lightning fast, with a functional and efficient set of navigation/link-clicker bindings, without Firefox's huge baggage of UI bloat, and with a healthy dose of It Just Works.