The real solution Vivaldi offers to the tabpocalypse has been here for ages: tabs on the side instead of on top! We all have widescreen monitors now, so losing 50 or 100 pixels on the horizontal plane isn't really a big problem. And the tabs then become scrollable downwards, while still keeping their readability. It took me a couple of days to get used to them over on the sidebar, but I could never go back.
I've been trying out the side tabs for a week now and cannot get used to it. So many sites I use have left hand menus, e.g. JIRA, AWS, that is seems like cognitive overload to see both menus butted up against each other.
With top tabs there's at least the URL bar to provide some spatial separation between the two.
Yeah, I do mine on the right, and keep the browser on my right-hand monitor, so the list of tabs is way at one side of my view. It's worked really well for me.
Exactly what I am doing. Tabs on the right on the right-hand monitor on Mac (which has window controls on the left).
They never get in the way, basically I only see them when I am going to use them.
Same here, using Tree-Style Tabs on Firefox. I’m on a Mac and would like to use Safari but it has no support for tabs down the side - impossible to go back.
I've been using Tree Style Tabs for a long time now. The transition was rough, but I never want to go back. Tabs are grouped automatically (you can of course drag/drop them), everything is in trees and branches you can close them as groups and subgroups, reload, favorite a tree, restore a tree, move to new window and so on and so on. It's absolutely amazing.
The transition wasn't rough to me at all. When I finally decided to give it a try it was like seeing the seas part before me. I can legitimately not go back to non tree based desktop browsing.
I like the concept of the tab sidebar, but I can't get over having tabs in a different location. Even though I'm fully aware that I have more horizontal screen relestate than vertical, I never remember to use the sidebar.
I've wanted to use tab groups for a while, but it never stuck because of the UI. I'm hoping this helps, and I love that they offer a sidebar layout, too.
I don't need the tab text on screen all the time, so while sometimes I'll pull up a tab sidebar I spend the vast majority of my time with a line of favicons and it doesn't make a significant difference where you put that line.
The real solution to tabpocalypse is closing those browser tabs!
I periodically bookmark my open tabs to a dated folder and close all for sanity. Bookmarks search via address bar will find any previous tabs that I still need to access.
I’ve been using 2 hidden features in Chrome and Edge called Tab Groups and Minimize Tab Groups, which let you assign a bunch of tabs to a group and minimize them down to a size the length of text that you named that group. Color coding too. Game changer.
You can enable them in the chrome://flags and edge://flags.
I think a lot of tech companies would benefit from having a team that does nothing but install and run old software and operating systems to mine them for good features that have been forgotten.
Is there a way to persist the name, color across sessions.
I'd love to be able to open all the bookmarks in a folder and then have them assigned to the same group/color. Then that way I can recreate one of a handful of different multi-tab environments at the start of each session.
I wrote a Firefox extension for exactly this almost 20 years ago back in their XUL iteration of extensions. Everything old is new again I guess. Brings back memories.
Crazy Browser, IE browser shell I used 20 years ago, had this same capability (actually, "more powerful", since it was not limited to two).
If I were them, frankly I'd be ashamed a bit (or a lot) of bragging about it in 2020.... but that's just me, I guess.
(Nowdays [more like many a year], a Firefox user with even heavier TreeStyleTab addiction. Now, if only Mozilla would finally get its session API in order...)
I want to give other browsers a try, especially Vivaldi with its many settings to fiddle. But Firefox's multi-account containers add-on is a godsend since I have to switch between multiple accounts for work.
I committed to switching to Vivaldi back in 2019 or so. I installed it on all of my machines (including Mac and PC). But I found it to be unstable and prone to crashes and weird issues, even though the features were nice. I eventually gave up in frustration and switched to Firefox, which I've found to be rock solid by comparison.
I personally am not planning to give Vivaldi another shot any time soon after that mess.
I believe this as well. That's the reason why I have a triple-digit number tabs open, and haven't bookmarked a site in twenty years. I much prefer having only a single interface to manage, which for me is tabs. I suspect many others with a similar tab-count are the same.
I feel like there's some paradigm we haven't reached yet. As the parent said, bookmarks and history are just 2 different views of the same underlying data and tabs provide an isolation of the context
If we go back to the root of what the web is, we have a graph where nodes are documents and edges are a user clicking on a link at a given time, and the user wants to keep a few of the documents in the current context. So not only is there's a graph, which is not easy to represent and navigate, but the edges depend on time. Maybe some VR thing can help us see something new here
We could generalize further and say that's what the entire window manager of an OS represents. Though, there's a difference between 'currently loaded' and just the address, and for less-than-high-end computers, that difference can mean a lot.
That graph also contains a lot of noise - e.g. documents that aren't needed. I wonder if VR would help, by letting us see more, or if that better paradigm could also be implemented on 2D screens.
There's already various graph visualization tools. But the tricky part would be wrapping that up into something useful - like a tree graph vs. tree style tabs. And if this would be more than 1-dimensional, like TST, then it would likely have to be a full page.
If that were true then Firefox's autocomplete in the address bar would be all I needed, but in fact I regularly use the different Awesome Bar shortcuts to search either currently open tabs (%) or bookmarks (*). In fact the lack of this feature is one of the things I don't like about Chrome.
Opera has, since a while, the concept of workspace. A vertical icon bar is created at the edge of the screen, which basically acts as if there were multiple windows where to group tabs by topic. For instance, personal, work, media, research, topic x, y, z. The only improvement I see would be to optionally isolate the workspace from one another (so as to have different sessions on the same websites).
They have it since before Blink migration, I still remember when they announced this feature. The implementation a bit different because back then screen resolution is not as good as today, now we can easily afford literally 2 tab rows.
I like the fact that it's on the side, with widescreen monitors I prefer to sacrifice 30px of lateral space. They also integrate the most common instant messengers in there, which means less open tabs. Since last release, Spotify is docked too.
Download fresh Vivaldi Stable - 3.6 (2165.34). Open non existent domain to land on a very light "this page doesnt exist" ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED error page. Start Cloning Tabs by Shift clicking in the Tab bar, then Right clicking and selecting Clone. First you clone one tab into two, then two into four, etc. At cloning 64 Tabs to 128 opening every new Tab will be taking ~1 second per Tab. Cloning up to 256 open tabs will take you anywhere between 5-15 minutes!!! At this point switching between Tabs will FREEZE UI for 8 seconds.
Let me repeat - EIGHT second freeze while switching between empty error page Tabs.
At all times Vivaldi UI will be freezing with one maxed out thread of 16 thread 4GHz CPU, other 15 threads resting at minimal load.
Right clicking on the first open tab and selecting "close Tabs to the Right" will close 255 Tabs at once - this will FREEZE UI for ~1.5 minutes. >100 seconds of frozen UI while browser is closing 255 empty html only Tabs. Again one CPU thread maxed out, rest idle.
It’s honestly terrible, I’ve mentioned this before, there’s absolutely no way I’ll ever use a browser this slow. I abandoned Firefox back in the day for much less.
There is a difference between 100 and 200 tabs, plus which Vivaldi version are you on? Builds up to 3.6.2160.3 work fine with ~400 tabs, and by fine I mean ~1 second Tab switching. Instant is very subjective. You will probably also call going fullscreen on YT instant, yet here it is measured https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-uCA2qIIG1M
Tree Style Tab [1] is a generalisation of this to arbitrary levels of nesting. It also goes down the side of the browser window, which is a far better use of space. I'd say it's the number 1 reason I (still) use Firefox.
I used it before but I am not a huge fan of it, I do not remember the exact reason however so I might try it again. So far I have been using tab manager plus but it does not let you group tabs together (unless if you create new windows).
I miss the old firefox panorama.
Primarily tabs losing their position, not maintaining their hierarchy, weird behaviour around moving tabs around, crashing and freezing. Also all-around bad performance. Maybe it's improved since I last used it a year ago, but it was so infuriatingly buggy for such a long time that I'm just not willing to give them another chance. Especially when Sidebery just works (99% of the time) and it's more performant than TST ever was.
Tree Style Tabs has more features and is arguably better. In the year following the core changes in Firefox (Chrome extensions, threaded tabs) I had many bugs (high cpu load, broken tree, no restoring at startup...) but I haven't seen a bug in the past year. Configuration was not easy though, and It don't know if it still requires fidgeting with Firefox's files in order to remove the default tab bar.
Firefox-csshacks [1] will let you do multi-level tabs in Firefox. I've been using it to give me 3 rows of tabs since Firefox broke Tabmix Plus. It's not as slick as an addon, but it shouldn't be a problem for anyone who lurks here. Clone a repo into your firefox profile directory and copy and paste a few lines of config to enable that feature. This is the sole feature that has kept me on the Firefox side of things.
Talking about tabs can only remind me of how bad I am (was??) at hoarding them [0]. Years and years worth. All the best organization systems in the world can't save you from clicking more and more. It was at least a little terrifying whenever I close Firefox and it says I'm closing 5 windows with 768 tabs (which it will restore, but I worry)...
“The solution to too many tabs is here – a second Tab Bar.”
Why stop at two?
If you think that this is the feature that you have been waiting for, maybe consider the possibility that browser tabs are not the ideal way to store and organize information.
I beg to differ, tabs itself is information. Even though it's just "ephemeral", it's something ripe for any additional management tools. With all the tab chaos and context switching needs, this will be really helpful.
Most of your tabs are probably things that you intend to read later, or want to keep around to refer to, or something like that. Each one takes up a big chunk of RAM, and either a few or a lot of CPU cycles, depending on your browser and what’s running on the page. Each one takes up some screen real estate and makes it harder to navigate among the tabs that you’re actively using. If your browser crashes you may lose some tabs and the information that they represent. You can’t use this information easily if you switch to another browser.
If, however, you turn these tabs into notes on your file system, all these issues disappear. Plus, you can use any software, or write your own, to manage this information. But how do you turn these tabs, conveniently, into notes? Well, just check HN now and then. Every few days there is a new front page story about another system to do just that. I wrote my own, and so have many people, because this is the kind of thing that one wants to work exactly a certain way.
there is a tab tree extension for firefox that is kinda popular. I like the concept (often I want to follow a bunch of links out of the same page without losing my place), but I found the sidebar implementation clunky.
Whenever we have a discussions on Browser and topic of too many Tabs comes up, there are always a small portion of HN user suggest to me and those who uses lots of tabs are using the browser Wrong, ADHD or having mental problem.
And should seek changing workflow or treatment.
I currently have a relatively small number of Tabs opened, 150. I guess to those who only have a few tabs open at max think of us as crazy or alien.
I am one of those that keeps everything in tabs (currently 856 open tabs in 31 windows on my MacBook)
And tabs are imho the perfect abstraction. This is misguided effort.
The issue is with the way multiple browser windows are managed. When I have many tabs I must have a way to manage many windows as well. Visually!
Whether these can and should be improved on a browser level I can’t say.
MacOS is already very very good at this and much better than anything else
I extensively use app expose and spaces to visually and spatially find what I need and structure my environment by projects and topics. I have everything I need exactly where I left it, together with all other applications and information that was related to it
Adding more management features should not be the responsibility of the browser. That’s why I‘ve never been a fan of any of the popular tab management extensions or browser features
why do you have so many tabs open? if i need to see something then i save it to bookmarks or session buddy. How long will it take you to see the content of that amount of tabs if you are ever going to do it?
But why do you save it in bookmarks? With tabs it’s right there where I left it. Same scroll state, same visual content. Why go through the hassle of bookmarking if tabs are already built in and work well?
With bookmarks you lose so much important context. Our minds just don’t work well on lists of links
As I said it’s important the OS works the same way. I always have on the left most space my utility window for example with messengers and mail tabs open
I always have localhost for development for each project on the left most tab followed by the most common docs and tickets I need throughout the project. And then over time I build up tabs to the right. And naturally the ones in the far right are the latest ones so when I come back to the project that often helps recalling what was done last
And if it becomes too much and the tabs are still relevant then I just extract the middle part between localhost+docs on the one side and the latest research on the right and out it in its own window in the background
So essentially I use all the dimensions there are:
- within the tabs there is an order
- within the space there is an order (left half, right half on 34” wide screen)
- in depth there is an order (windows all the way to the back are the oldest and will be culled from time to time)
- and then there is the spaces themselves which are mainly for different projects
I downloaded 3.6 because I read it has a very customizable interface. I wanted to add a feature, only to find out it already has it. Example; when I am browsing Twitter I want the bookmarks bar across the top to only have my Twitter folders. I can do this in Vivaldi by right clicking on my Twitter folder and selecting "Set As Bookmark Bar Folder." Nice.
Tabs on the side is the real reason I am using Vivaldi as my primary browser.
Tab stacks are useful, too, although I typically only use them when doing research of some kind.
Just installed the new version with two-level tab stacks, seems pretty cool so far, but not yet sure how useful they will be in day-to-day browsing.
So this is basically Firefox' Tree Style Tabs but less powerful
and embedded in a slower UI?
The one and only reason I stopped using Vivaldi every time I
tried it is the performance. But it becomes more and more
obvious the developers simply have different priorities.
I'm curious what area of Vivaldi is perceived as slow. I use Vivaldi at home (on a 9-year-old desktop), and Firefox at work, and the only things that come to mind are tab opening/closing could be better, and some very CSS-heavy animations such as the NYT's map of coronavirus's spread from Wuhan are much better on Gecko than Blink. But day to day, I have no complaints about performance from either.
Then again, I also use uBlock Origin... perhaps Vivaldi is slow without it. I'll also admit that theoretically I'd expect Vivaldi's UI to be slower due to being based on web technologies instead of native, but I can't say I can perceive a difference except in edge cases.
Tab handling was at least x1000 slower than Chrome last time I tested. It got dramatically slower in the last few snapshots and the official 3.6 Stable build.
Its not just tabs, address bar handling is totally broken, opening new tab and starting to type quickly will result in eaten letters. Opening new tab, clicking CTRL-F and starting to type will again open with ~1 second delay and lost letters.
Then we get into broken javascript causality https://jsfiddle.net/rasz_pl/v36nozsw/ open in normal browser and Vivaldi, Vivaldi address bar handling code is overriding scrollTop with delayed location.hash update.
I have to keep a Chrome-like browser around just for things like MS Teams that supposedly won't run in anything else, I have Vivaldi and Brave. I hate Brave for the crypto nonsense it shoves in my face among other things, but Vivaldi is so unbelievably slow that I'm forced to use Brave. It boggles my mind that anyone would release something that slow and then never work on that problem
I wish, but it isn't. There was a request a few years ago for tree style tabs to be implemented in Vivaldi, but I think the dev didn't like the conflict with their own tab layout implementation.
Seems to me there's a subset of power users on Firefox just waiting for any other browser to implement tree style tabs.
I never understood how people not close (or bookmark) tabs.
When I'm heavily working i have 20-30 tabs open.
But after the work is done, i'll close what I don't need and bookmark the rest.
Then again I also tend not to have more than 5 mails in my inbox.
Background: I used Opera Presto as my main browser from 2007-2014, and Vivaldi since 2016 (2015 being a mix of Opera, Firefox, and Vivaldi). I've used Firefox as my main browser at work for most of the past four years.
One big factor for me is the customizability without having to rely on extensions. I trust Vivaldi (and von Tetzchner), and don't have to worry about whether I trust extension makers. The customization options in Vivaldi tend to work pretty darn well too, which can be more hit-and-miss with third party ones in Firefox.
Single-key shortcuts are also a big win for Vivaldi for me. I got used to these in Opera and they're great for efficiency while web browsing. Maybe I can get them with an extension for Firefox, but it's enabling one check box in Vivaldi. It's similar to why some people like vim plugins for browsers, but with less vim expertise required.
I've also seen Firefox remove a lot of features over the years. XUL extensions being the big one, but there are others. Firefox Hello. Firefox Panorama, just as I was starting to take a liking to it. Vivaldi has a philosophy of adding features that let you customize the browser to how you like it, and if only 0.2% of users use that feature but it makes them really happy, that's fine. Firefox will remove features if not enough users adopt it. Thus my trust that Firefox is going to keep features that I like has been lowered over the years, making me more hesitant to try new Firefox features, and generally more hesitant about Firefox.
Although I'm considering switching part of my home browsing back to Firefox because of its ability to not autoplay videos. Too many sites have those nowadays (and too often, self-hosted and not as third-party ads that are easily blocked), and Blink-based browsers can't stop them, and I'm getting pretty tired of having to pause/hide videos all the time so I can focus on reading articles.
As someone with like 150+ tabs open in Firefox, I should probably be happy about this, but I'm not. Feels like they're encouraging my sick obsession with tabs when I should in fact be put on rehab.
As someone with currently 3500 tabs open and regularly hits 6000, I can only say: Amateur!
(Kidding. I just never close anything until I get annoyed because I like to use them as active working memory for a period of about a month or longer.)
I remember seeing that in some browser, but was it Opera? I remember having 100 tabs and miniscule tab titles in Opera, but can't recall that option. I still use 12.18 on occasion, and fired up 11.52 but can't find any such option in its tab settings.
It looks like Firefox and Tab Mix Plus offered it back in the day; I'm thinking that might be where I remember it from.
what is their business model? ,i'm not able to find anything related to it. Firefox runs on donation, google runs on tracking, vivaldi seems not have both based on their about page
No browser I ever used offers a good solution to not only store
bookmarks but also being good at finding them again.
In contrast a hierarchical tab structure can act both as the
stuff I'm currently working on as well as a way to store all
things I find interesting in named groups. If you didn't
manually tag all your bookmarks, ideally with a consistent
naming scheme, finding certain sites again can be quite a task.
But I know what tab group a certain website that I last used 2
years ago and can't remember the name/url of has to be in. It's
basically the web version of a file manager. Why would I spend
time to organise bookmarks in some folder structure if the
structure already exists in the tab bar, always up to date?
You are wrong on both claims. Firefox usually still preserves
the session despite crashes, and even if it doesn't you can
still restore it again via "recently closed windows". Although I
only had to do that once, after a certain bug-riddled Windows 10
update. I have at least 300 tabs opened constantly in two
Firefox windows, and I never lost a session.
And Firefox automatically searches all tabs in addition to
bookmarks whenever you type in the address bar, and lets you
jump to that tab directly.
That argument makes no sense. Both bookmarks as well as
persistent tabs are not something you'd use in incognito mode.
Also, if you use incognito mode for anything that should survive
a crash you're probably using it wrong. Firefox and Chrome let
you use separate profiles for a reason.
> 300 tabs! I guess there is nothing more to discuss.
No need to be condescending. Especially not considering a few
years ago I also thought it's crazy. Truth is, it's simply how
bookmarks should have been designed from the start. If you
disagree that doesn't bother me, but your point about browser
crashes is still not accurate.
forgive my ignorance, but why are these browsers based on chromium only? cant they build on firefox codebase just like palemoon and basilisk, waterfox, seamonkey, iceweasel?
if these small browsers can be working products with bare minimum staff, why cant vivaldi or opera or whatever do the same? is it because of "oh, firefox bad" thing ? or something else?
> At the time, we found that the Chromium engine was secure and the most widely used – that was important to us. Moreover, Chromium was becoming the de facto web standard meaning that if we wanted web pages to not break, we’d have to fork Chromium.
I'll also observe that they made this decision around or before the time that Mozilla started oxidizing Firefox. So at the time, there was a lot of code churn, into an at-the-time unproven language, and the benefits had not materialized yet. If they were to start over now instead of then, the decision might be different.
They'd basically have to fork Firefox. There isn't a clear distinction between the engine and the browser. They had an embedding API at one point but dropped it because the design made it hard to evolve both.
This is on top of people wanting quick market share which requires compatibility with the "big player" :(
The point is that reskinning Firefox is pretty difficult because there's no stable API between the "skin" and underlying engine. Firefox used to have an option for embedding Gecko, but it's no longer maintained.
