I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in terms of focus.
Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).
I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful" browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless" session, with the understanding that I can close any of these tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing anything important. If I do come across something important, it gets noted down elsewhere.
I actively use tree style tabs, and have dozens to hundreds. With auto tab discard, it's not taxing.
This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured, but are much more high-ceremony to create.
To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so that you can track, from which page did you open this link, what links did you open on this page, etc.
I can see the appeal of this, and more broadly, not having to think about tab management. But for me, I find I actively benefit from the process of deciding what to keep around.
Certainly, you should keep this ability. Close it to not keep around :) Hiding stuff by subtree is not really flexible, I realize, and won't match everyone's tastes equally. Synching tabs and bookmarks could be a configurable option.
I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches using %s?
> I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches using %s?
I outsourced that. Since I have seen leah2's anarchaias [1] tumblelog (and one of its successors project.ioni.st from the rails guys, I fail to find a snapshot online - it was pretty) I iterated through multiple software solutions. My bookmark manager is also a tumblog [2] and online accessible.
I would quickly get to overwhelmed by to many bookmarks and the lack of (plattform independent) organisation tools. I have a bookmarklet that adds the current site as entry (non puplic, and I edit it later (or delete)). It also mirrors and downloads stuff (images, reddit videos, etc).
> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
Have you tried Arc? It's essentially completely designed around the concept you describe. I believe someone is actively working on an "ArcFox" clone of its behavior for Firefox, but I'm not sure what the current state of the project is.
> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one.
Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two. For example: I have groups of bookmarks that I like to open as tabs in a separate window. If I only need them once a week, I want to close the window when I am done and pull them up again when they are needed. Fishing them out of a history of all of my browsing is something that I don't want to endure (even if they are stored in the history as a group).
Other people have other needs. Some only want an extremely limited number of tabs open at one time (presumably to help them focus).
> Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two.
I agree entirely. I don't use the bookmark facilities in the browser at all, because I prefer using separate a bookmark server that I run. That way my bookmarks are available from any machine using any browser that happens to be available.
But I do use tabs. Not to the extent that they need management, though -- I rarely have more than two or three going at a time[1]. Combining bookmarks and tabs implies the addition of complexity that wouldn't benefit me, so I'd prefer not to have it.
[1] If I'm doing something where I need to have many sites open at a time, meaning research, I prefer to have multiple browser instances to organize things, because then I can have multiple pages visible simultaneously and can use the DE to organize things at a higher level.
I do this too; have you found effective ways to tell firefox to maybe chill on eating all memory? I find if I don't restart ~1/week, it will end up reserving ~32GB of RAM for itself, which is just absurd.
I tell it to never discard certain tabs, like gmail or snack or calendar. Also in some situations it's very convenient to ask it to discard tabs in all other windows, or all tabs but the current one. Otherwise it just discards tabs after some time of inactivity.
It integrates with TST and can operate in terms of subtrees.
Crazy that I haven't heard of this one before. Just installed it and after forcibly putting all the tabs in all my windows to sleep my machine's memory usage dropped from 60% to 30%.
Sidebary has this functionality as well. On top of that it has a setting that allows you to have it auto-unload the parent and its child tabs whenever you collapse the group. I l have a few resource hog sites I use frequently that I keep grouped so I can just collapse the group and get back my ram.
I tried the auto tab discard extension but it didn't help for me. I occasionally force kill FF and have it recover the previous session when it starts up again. Same thing to not lose state when rebooting my computer.
In my experience it is not the amount of tabs that is the problem but that certain tabs (ie reddit) sometimes start to misbehave and eat way too much, so I tend to list the tabs by memory usage and handle it on a by tab-basis.
I'm using TST too, but instead of grouping relevant projects into one branch, I'm using the Simple Tab Groups extension to switch between long-term projects. It simply replaces one set of tabs with another. I have a few groups related to work and several groups related to personal stuff (homelab, Hackintosh, Clojure, finance, etc.). I don't access some of these groups for months, but once I have a bit of free time, they are just two clicks away.
Why not use actual bookmarks at that point? They also are able to be nested into a tree structure via folders. I never had tabs open after a session but I keep bookmarks (it turns out I never actually look at the bookmarks, but let's not talk about that).
Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.
I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.
Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.
Vivaldi has this built-in, they call it Workspaces. It's the #1 thing I like about the browser.
Firefox had this to back in ancient times, it was called Tab Candy, Panorama, or tab groups, depending on the release number. Then they killed it because "nobody used it."
I use this and love it. One of the most useful adons. Really helps me to differentiate work mode form non work mode. I do wish it was built in because it appears to do it a hacky way by using bookmarks. Which is fine, because you can think of these tabs like temporary bookmarks.
Usually how I do it is at my office desk I have a second monitor I hook my laptop up to. So I open a new window, let that be the group, and then I use my mac for the terminal and my ipad sits to the side with spotify and any chat apps, out of the way and easy to dismiss.
What's extra satisfying is I'm a tab hoarder. But you finish a project and get to see all those tabs go away.
That's good to know. I've found that it is helpful to add Auto Discard Tabs, if you're a real tab hoarder.
What is "the Chrome way"? What I'd like to see is that the addresses are not cached to ram, but either disk or swap (or a combination). I figure these tools are more used by tab hoarders as well, and if they're working as pseudo bookmarks (at least conceptually) I am very willing to trade some loading time and have non-active tabs have high niceness.
Unfortunately it doesn't work for pinned tabs - I use them for pages that I want to keep for longer and remember about them. Bookmarks are used for something that I store and go back to it seldom (e.g. when I store a recipe).
Tbh I do prefer that it doesn't apply to pinned tabs. I keep tabs pinned when I want them to stay in a window even when I switch tabs. Things like my schedule, etc that I generally want in one place to be able to easily look at regardless of what I'm doing.
I put together a simple TST hack / extension that puts recently active tabs in the horizontal space (with a "user-defined" timeout). Have been using it actively for the last few years.
It's nowhere near perfect (see comments in the gist), but I genuinely enjoy the paradigm of easy access active tabs alongside a full laundry list. I find myself reinstalling it on new machines as I go. It's also just a few lines of CSS.
That said, keen to try out the nightly version of vertical tabs. Tho I'm hoping my active tabs hack might work with it too.
That's the next feature on my list of things to use in sidebary!
$Work is actively merging teams from different companies so I'm going to be juggling having to use different accounts on some SaaS platforms until we've gotten everything combined.
Sidebary has so many very useful and powerful features but I'm trying to be disciplined and mixing them in with my typical workflow 1 at a time and actually using it for a while before moving on to the next. (Ok, I might have gone full ham when I first installed it but it was so different from my normal flow that I quickly realized it was counter productive).
I switched to Sidebery from TreeStyleTabs and I much prefer it. Tab groups are great as I can separate different styles of browsing such as news browsing or work etc.
You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_). But that many tabs can only happen with a vertical tab-bar. I started with tree-style tabs but I'm now using "Sideberry" which seems to be a little nicer.
> You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_).
People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12 tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close attention to organization and establishing routines to cut down on distractions and reduce the possibility of variation in daily activities are very common coping strategies.
> People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term)
The old naming scheme made more sense than the current one. Under the current definition there are three types of ADHD, of which the "inattentive" type used to be called ADD because it doesn't have the "hyperactivity" trademark. So for that type "ADHD" is a misnomer that causes people to not even consider they may have it.
That's a fair point and I'm probably just being overly touchy. I have ADHD-C and (perhaps unsurprisingly) favor ADHD-* nomenclature for distinguishing inside the umbrella. I think a large part of my aversion to "ADD" is because in the past I've mostly heard it used by people who saying they're "so ADD" when describing normal behavior (the same way people refer to being "OCD about X").
'ADD' does seem more likely to be used in that flippant way by people who don't have it, but IME ADHDers who self-describe with the term 'ADD' are just older, and for whatever reason have some kind of identity attachment to the nomenclature that was current when they were diagnosed.
That makes sense. I think the earliest evaluation I have is a 1996 one (probably for school accommodations) which uses "ADHD". This tracks with the 1987 terminology switch.
I heard they wanted to change it to just ADD in the DSM5, but it would apparently cause a lot of trouble in various statutes that specifically reference ADHD.
I'm on 1018 right now, I think you're the first person I've ever seen with more open tabs than me ))
I've actually been working hard to have less open tabs every evening than what I had when I started work. Maybe in 1018 day I'll close that last tab. And yes, there is a reason that every single one of them is open.
Genuinely curious, what are some of the reasons you keep them around?
Every time I read about someone with that kind of tab count I immediately wonder:
1) if they have that many persistent tabs and actually need (probably the wrong word here) them, how many tabs do they actually close?
2) Does closing a long standing tab invoke a physiological/emotional response?
I'm only poking a little fun with #2. I have to actively overrule my subconscious when it comes to a few categories of physical things. Small electronics and computer parts/peripherals are a couple of things that if I don't verbally tell myself "you won't ever need this random old PC case panel thumb screw" I could very easily end up in hoarder territory.
> 1) if they have that many persistent tabs and actually need (probably the wrong word here) them, how many tabs do they actually close?
I don't have any persistent tabs, I can open and close e.g. Gmail whenever I need. Rather these are all tabs related to some project or another that I've been interrupted in the middle. Most of them I just need to copy some definition or idea to e.g. Anki. Others may have lists of potential solutions to potential problems. For instance I know that I have a bunch of tabs dealing with OCR open somewhere - those I just need to copy the URLs and I could then close. I just need a spare week to do all these little things.
> 2) Does closing a long standing tab invoke a physiological/emotional response?
Haha, no. Some tabs are more important than others, but if they get lost I can move on. I just might need to redo research that I've already done.
Hey fellow tab hoarder! I "only" have 744 tabs open right now (in Edge). Though chrome, firefox, brave, arc, and supermium have a few hundred each... (they've been force closed by task manager so my laptop still technically runs haha).
It's funny finding fellow tab hoarders online, people rarely hit the thousands - you're pretty much the first person I've encountered who's got more tabs open than me.
Btw what's your PC specs? I'm using a Framework 13 (7840u, 32gb ram) and am currently at 56% RAM usage. I find a fairly big difference when I'm connected to power and when I'm not, for some reason.
I've got a recent macbook. I use Firefox which lazily load tabs which makes it fairly efficient. I also use "Auto Tab Discard" so tabs unload quickly to keep memory down long term. My Firefox is currently using 6GB of RAM. For comparison I also have Chrome open with about 15 tabs and it's taking 4GB.
I've got ADHD and work hard to keep my tabs under control. As soon as they get too small to read (at least part of) the title, I lose the ability to keep track of what I've got open, so there's no value in keeping them open. That threshold is about 20 tabs per window, and at most about 4 windows, and ideally closer to 5 tabs each in 2 windows, when things are under control.
I used to be like that until I installed a plugin that autocloses all non-pinned tabs. Now I couldn't even imagine having so many. Why don't you just close the window? Is there something in there that you can somehow more easily obtain than just searching the history?
Fellow tab hoarder here (though I pale in comparison to your 2630). I had the exact same experience starting with tree style tabs and switching to sideberry. Very comparable, but I agree that Sideberry feels a bit nicer, and it has wicked customizability settings.
A few years ago, the main advantage was merely that "Sidebery is far less buggy and much more performant than Tree Style Tab".
Nowadays, the gap has... widened. The little details matter, but there's big feature differences too: panels, saving/restore to JSON, better appearance, tons of options for tweaking (but with sane defaults), ...
> I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
I followed the same trajectory. I now keep one window for more stable things that will be left open for a while (calendar, email, some long-lived task) and another for stuff I'm actively working on (the app I'm developing, docs for some API, etc). If I go over more than two windows with ~6 tabs each I just start closing things because I've almost certainly gone past the point of needing some of those tabs and if I need to get back to them it's usually faster to just retrace the steps I took to get to them in the first place or search in my history.
It really depends on your workflows. I dread tree style on work laptop as I go through tickets a lot, and only what matters to me is last 4 digits out of 10 the tickets have. If I use horizontal tabs second half of tab name is truncated but opposite on tree styled ones
Nobody will probably read this anymore but I had the same problem and used the same solution - starting my browsers as
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customera (nice dark theme, custom list of extensions and corporate bookmarks)
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customerb (yeallow-blue theme to stand out)
and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy
That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev
anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)
I recommend Tree Tabs over Tree Style Tabs as it let's you make tab groups. I will basically have one group per ticket or project, coloring the group depending on the state of that ticket (eventually going green when I've completed it but want to keep it around for a short while in case questions arise). Once the ticket has been done for a sprint I'll close the entire tab group.
I feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate.
These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.
In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
The ancestry information in Tree Style Tabs (and also with Orion's built-in vertical tabs) is an undersold feature, I think. Edge has vertical tabs and they're not terribly useful. You get a constant-sized click target, which is a huge UX bump over Chrome's shrinking targets, but having trees of tabs is amazingly useful for organization.
I hadn't really thought about the side-by-side window thing, though, so I'll keep that in mind when debating vertical tabs. I usually run with a multi-monitor and while I do side-by-side with i3, that's on a large monitor so screen real estate isn't a problem.
I use Edge on my work PC, and one thing that keeps me sane when dealing with a lot of tabs is using the "tab groups" feature it inherited from Chromium. It ain't quite as powerful as an actual tree, but having at least one level of grouping is nice for things like "I want to keep all the tabs for this ticket together".
> In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
Firefox has multiple ways you can do the tab search.
- Firefox View is an icon originally configured at the front of the tab bar that takes you to a dedicated page listing your tabs, recently visited, and lets you search tabs and otherwise manage them.
- Firefox has a tab search built into the address bar as soon as you enter the character '%' followed by a space. So for two sets of two keystrokes you're doing tab search: `Ctrl<L> + '% '`.
IMO the latter especially is fast and easy enough that I don't miss Chrome's tab search, and I often go into Firefox View just to see what I've got open and trim it down.
I use Edge currently because of the vertical tabs and I switch between the two modes to suit my needs. 90% of the time, I only use horizontal tabs. For the other 10%, it suits my needs when doing research, keeping all my tabs available and so on.
Yeah, I gave an honest shot at using vertical tabs for a few months because it frankly does seem like a more logical use of screen real estate. Web pages don't tend to take up much horizontal space, so you might as well put a bigger list of tabs there where they can all show more text.
For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and right. And all my other apps with tabs still use horizontal tabs, so I couldn't fully switch over to that model in my head. Additionally the URL is still at the top so it was more work to glance back and forth between the left of my browser for the tab and the URL at the top which in my mind are more "closely linked" for that to make sense.
But you also highlighted a good point, the limited space of traditional tabs does keep my organization in check. Once I get around the 20-tab mark and I'm unable to see any text beyond the website's favicon, I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to clean up.
I think vertical tabs has the exact same effect of being artificially space limiting if that's valuable to you, without the amount of visible text changing every single time you open or close a tab.
I tend to sit with 20-40 tabs open, which is in the vicinity of how many a vertical tab list can accommodate comfortably, but I get about 4 letters per tab. If I needed to be able to see the text, I'd have to cap a window out at maybe 8 tabs, which is just unreasonable for some workflows.
This is a failure of the browser setup if you have to resort to a text file for tabs
Also don't get the benefit of the stateless session as a private window - you can just as well close a regular second browser window and not look back at history?
I don't use a text file for tabs, I use a text file for taking notes.
The fact that the second window is private isn't hugely relevant, it just helps to stop me from accidentally doing stateful things in it (and reduces cross-site tracking in the process). The point is that I never have to ask "is this tab important?", the decision was already made up-front, based on where I opened the tab in the first place.
I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in terms of focus.
Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).
I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful" browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless" session, with the understanding that I can close any of these tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing anything important. If I do come across something important, it gets noted down elsewhere.