I'm pretty certain the Chrome PMs actively decided long ago that people who use lots of tabs make up too small of a population to support in-browser with special features. The featureset has worsened with time, moving from correct rendering of more than one horizontal page of tabs (but infinitely compressing them to the point that you cannot click on any specific one) to an obvious graphical bug (rendering tab handles behind the + button and then off the right edge of the screen), to today: no graphics glitch, it is just impossible to tell you have more than a certain number of tabs. They're there, just without any indication at all.
I know those things because I frequently have >200 tabs open, and have done so for many years. But I'm not surprised that it would be considered too niche to fix, because the reactions of most people (among a fairly tech-savvy sample of people looking at my web browser) go to the point of making comments about their surprise at how many tabs are open on my screen. It just isn't very common behaviour.
During the 'graphical glitch' era, I was an intern on the WebKit team at Google and asked about the bug, and some people knowingly chuckled and said, "yeah, that isn't something that's going to be fixed soon." I imagine it was also a tough bug.
Anyway, it would still be cool to support better tab features.
"Have you actually seen how people use web browsers? Honestly it's kind of horrifying. It's not unusual for people to have 100+ tabs open across several different browser windows in a session that's been running continuously since sometime in the late 90s."
I was one of those 1k+ tabs people until recently, when I just admitted I'm not going back to read any of this stuff. Considering Chrome team has finite resources I'm glad they spend it on use cases resolving around actually browsing things over just keeping them unread forever.
Having that many tabs open is nuts. It makes the tab bar completely unusable. However, I too suffer from the same tabophilia. So I have a couple solutions, (a) a bookmark bar folder titled "to-do" where I just save anything that I haven't even skimmed over yet but want to and (b) Pocket for when I've read/skimmed and want to store the info for later use.
With these two methods I frequently hover around ~20 tabs open and I usaully dump to either method when I cross the close-button threshold (tabophiliacs will know what I mean).
Recently I've been trying to force myself to use Firefox to use their tab groups feature and I think I really like it especially for organizing tabs needed for projects. Makes it easy to just click the tab group button and select which project I'm working on and immediately have all the tabs I need.
I'm genuinely curious as to the thought process of having that many tabs open. I often feel like I'm missing something when I see people doing it. Is is the muscle memory of knowing where each tab is? If so, how does that work when you move to a device that has a different resolution?
The cynical interpretation is that discouraging people from opening many tabs means having less tabs open which means the browser performs better. This is particularly true in Chrome, which tries to use a process-per-tab, something you can't really do with 200 tabs.
The conclusion they've drawn is rather naive because this is definitely a chicken-egg problem.
They've completely disregarded the possibility that the lack of effective tab management is limiting most users to use only a tiny number of tabs.
Tree Style Tabs for Firefox has been an integral part of my browsing experience ever since I discovered it: http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png
I just wish some browser vendor would release an official vertical tabs solution that had a more seamless implementation of autohide/autoexpand (for non-maximized windows where horizontal space is at a premium).
I'm replying to your comment because it is on the top... But there is almost a majority of users in this thread using their browsers similarly - maybe we should get together and solve this. Maybe it will be a redesign of the difference between bookmarks and tabs as sort of "temporary bookmarks." I could see unused tabs getting popped off the stack into a bookmarks category which should automatically be selected by use of some simple search-engine based heuristic. One should be able to run their bookmarks through this categorizer to build consistent and limited categories.
Yeah, it's not going to happen. I've known people at both Mozilla and Chrome and the data shows heavy tabbers are in the extreme minority. I've run informal surveys and heavy tabbing has around ~30% penetration in the extreme techy circles which is why everyone thinks everyone else is doing it and it needs to be fixed.
Out in the wild though, it's something like, 95% of people never have more than 10 tabs open and 99% of people never have more than 20 tabs open. Don't quote me on the exact figures but those are in the ballpark of correct. It's hard to justify building a feature set for less than 1% of your users.
They should not underestimate the value of power users though. How many regular users does a power user influence in browser choice? I don't know but I suspect it's high and has a lot to do with the early FF to Chrome migration.
Besides that with the # of people using browsers a tiny minority can actually still be a huge # of users.
It isn't just that we are a minority of the userbase: those of us who are part of that minority probably have vastly different preferences as to how a tab manager would best work so keeping the majority of that minority happy isn't going to be easy. It makes far more sense to concentrate on the majority and let plug-in authors take the support strain of keeping the others happy!
Jeez it is so hidden! Ctrl-shift-E if anyone is wondering. I had no idea.
Slightly annoying it is per window though. I sort of expected the next window I opened to be able to 'boot' up an existing group. This seems to be just tab grouping rather than projects in any meaningful sense. They are only in session data and they don't sync.
I've really been blown away by Firefox lately, it's looking better and better. I'm still not confident enough to make it my primary browser for dev though; Chrome's dev tools are just amazing.
I've been happily using this feature for a long time (since 4.0?). I usually promotes this under-promoted feature to my friends. I also tell people that Firefox has a color picker and full-page screenshot taker built into its devtools.
To top it, they have been contemplating 'separating' this Tab Groups built-in functionality to an add-on. And they're bringing not so useful add-ons as Pocket to make them built-in.
I'm curious about the UX for such a feature, I'd presume it would be a nightmare to get right:
- How would a user quickly set the category on a tab?
- I would presume that a user would only want to categorize things once the browser becomes unwieldy. How could it be done in bulk?
- Where would the UI elements for this go? Considering that Chrome strives to be minimalistic.
- How would the categories be communicated to the user?
- I should be able to tell Chrome "Hi, [... snip ...]" How?
I'm fairly certain that this idea has been mulled over multiple times, even by Google. The problem isn't having the idea in the first place, it's the implementation. I think that if someone wanted Google to "steal" this, they would need to approach them with viable mockups demonstrating an elegant solution that fits in with the spirit of Chrome.
Opera 12 and before had this feature. You could save all open tabs/windows as a stored session with a name of your choice, then reopen it later.
Allowed you to have as many sessions as you wanted, though much of the time, I would end up realizing most of those tabs weren't that important and just delete the session later.
Usually when I have this issue in Chrome I just Bookmark -> Bookmark All Tabs -> Create a New Folder "Project A" do the same for "Project B". When I need to get back I open all the tabs in the Project x folder.
If you are on a Mac you can go a step further and create different desktops for different projects, the only draw back is if you accidentally Cmd + Q an app that is open on multiple desktops.
I'm surprised they haven't destroyed that feature in the stars enhanced bookmarks. Luckily those can be turned off at chrome://flags/#enhanced-bookmarks-experiment
Tabs Outliner[1] is great for this. It's lacking sync (an extra top layer in the tree for each device would make sense), but other than that, it is fantastic, and has really reduced my memory usage back to normal levels. It allows you to suspend entire windows, and quickly browse all tabs. Allows for unlimited* levels of named trees/notes/windows/tabs. It does however NOT save the state of the page, only the URL.
When the Chrome Sidebar API[2] is implemented, I'm sure it will only get better, as the need for an extra window should no longer be necessary.
Checked out Tabs Outliner a few years back. Too complex for me. But it feels like once you get the hang of it, it might be useful if you fear losing those golden tab gems.
IMHO you always come across more tabs than you ever have a chance to read. And you'll always get back to them again when you actually need them via Google search.
I would love a tab sidebar. This might make Firefox worth checking out.
I've been using T.O. for about a year, and want to like it but cannot. It's semi-OK for state management, so long as you don't mind losing what you had in a particular Web page. But it hasn't made managing my tabs any easier. Not being _directly_ attached to the present browser window hurts a lot.
It also is utter pants when used with a focus-follows-mouse windowmanager policy.
Talking about tabs, I am really curious why links which get opened in new tabs don't feature a working back button. It really bothers me when reading an article that contains a lot of references, I open them, each one on a new tab, read through each one of them and then can't get back to the old one (I usually resort for Ctrl+Shift+T too many times).
People keep talking about "power tab users" are in the minority. But you don't need to be a power tab user to want better tab management. I usually only have 10-15 tabs open but I really wish Chrome let me manage them better. Chrome has that setting to reopen the last tabs used when you close the browser. But it often gets confused when multiple windows are open. It only remembers the tabs of the last window closed. I feel like once every couple weeks I find myself re-opening/re-pinning my main tabs. I'd love to be able to just store/open a group of tabs I want to use.
I'd like to thank everyone who responded here. I'm now aware of OneTab, but their support for cross-syncing isn't done yet, and it doesn't help in the (somewhat degenerate case) of Chrome on Android (which always seems to be left behind when you're doing cool stuff).
Solving this with an extension seems suboptimal when Google may already have an internal unreleased project that does what I want.
If OneTab (or Spaces, another similar extension) could sync across my computers, this would probably be 90% of what I requested.
Because it's the perfect example of a power user feature. Nothing wrong with that, just that it's the kind of thing that browser extensions are made for.
I don't usually have more than 30 tabs open, my problem is separating them by 'topic'.
To a degree I can solve that with different browsers or profiles, but when clicking a link on irc or in a mail or twitter it always opens in the default browser.
My main gripe there's no way to have real context switches there, then again maybe I would just have to find a way to send a certain tab to a certain browser instance with a keyboard shortcut...
Tabbed browsing itself is a band-aid over miserable browser document and state management.
Bookmarks are both too painful to manage or navigate (and despite both limitations, I use them extensively). Tabs address the situation of "I want to read this but not right now". Chrome's implementation makes managing, prioritizing, and relating tabs all but impossible.
The larger problem is that the entire browser paradigm is approaching its end-of-life date, and what is now "the browser" almost certainly wants to be four distinct classes of application:
* Reader: a document-oriented applicaton with commenting, bookmarking, newsfeed, bibliographic management, annotation, and commenting capabilities. A bit lof the love-child of the original Web browser model, eBook reader, RSS/Atom feed, Readability or similar "simplified Web" presentation tool, Usenet newsreader, and tools such as Zotero or Calibre. Actually, Zotero, Calibre, or an eBook reader might well assume this role.
* A generalized application platform. A cross between current "full-featured" browsers and mobile development environments. Likely based on the concept of downloading the App framework only when it updates, containing it within a sandboxed runtime, and interacting with cloud-based services as needed.
* A dedicated commerce platform. Firewalled from other uses, increasing both privacy and security, with purchase, order-fulfillment, and related functions offered securely. Possibly growing out of a dedicated commerce app, e.g., Amazon or iTunes.
* A dedicated media player. Rather than having dozens of videos and audio players scattered among browser tabs, a single application which can enqueue, play, and/or schedule playback. VLC is closest to this, and has many of the features I'd like, though none of the stability. youtube-dl, local filesystem storage, and mplayer are my usual solution these days.
Yes, I've heard the "but heavy tab users are a minority case".
Answering that:
1. They're power users. Power users are a minority case. They're also a strong influencer community, and they lead migrations. Google Chrome (as with much else at Google) is no longer attractive, it's simply not sufficiently repulsive. But it's a tool people are using because they perceive either alternatives or siwtching costs as insufficiently better. That can change rapidly.
2. If you make something sufficiently painful, well, NO SHIT. People will tend to avoid it if they can. Power user's can't avoid it, and will find alternatives, eventually.
It's not even a matter of "oh, I'll get around to reading that stuff. It's that the state of tab management, on top of memory issues with Chrome, is so fucking abysmal that I cannot sort out what the fuck is in tabs, or how they're related.
Eventually the session crashes and I start over, but there's always painful state loss involved.
Why do I still use Chrome? Stylebot + Developer Tools. The state of Web design is so fucking abysmal that I've got 1700+ local stylesheets applied to various websites that I'd have to port and load somehow in Stylish on Firefox. And ... as annoying as other bits of Chrome are, the Developer Tools are decent, so fixing fucked-up Web design's a tad easier. And given the option of wanting to stab my eyes out staring at crap pages or dealing with Chrome's utterly fucked up memory and tab management ... tabs win, just barely.
[+] [-] wcarss|10 years ago|reply
I know those things because I frequently have >200 tabs open, and have done so for many years. But I'm not surprised that it would be considered too niche to fix, because the reactions of most people (among a fairly tech-savvy sample of people looking at my web browser) go to the point of making comments about their surprise at how many tabs are open on my screen. It just isn't very common behaviour.
During the 'graphical glitch' era, I was an intern on the WebKit team at Google and asked about the bug, and some people knowingly chuckled and said, "yeah, that isn't something that's going to be fixed soon." I imagine it was also a tough bug.
Anyway, it would still be cool to support better tab features.
[+] [-] fridek|10 years ago|reply
"Have you actually seen how people use web browsers? Honestly it's kind of horrifying. It's not unusual for people to have 100+ tabs open across several different browser windows in a session that's been running continuously since sometime in the late 90s."
I was one of those 1k+ tabs people until recently, when I just admitted I'm not going back to read any of this stuff. Considering Chrome team has finite resources I'm glad they spend it on use cases resolving around actually browsing things over just keeping them unread forever.
[+] [-] MadcapJake|10 years ago|reply
With these two methods I frequently hover around ~20 tabs open and I usaully dump to either method when I cross the close-button threshold (tabophiliacs will know what I mean).
Recently I've been trying to force myself to use Firefox to use their tab groups feature and I think I really like it especially for organizing tabs needed for projects. Makes it easy to just click the tab group button and select which project I'm working on and immediately have all the tabs I need.
[+] [-] mscrivo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mccr8|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lewisl9029|10 years ago|reply
They've completely disregarded the possibility that the lack of effective tab management is limiting most users to use only a tiny number of tabs.
Tree Style Tabs for Firefox has been an integral part of my browsing experience ever since I discovered it: http://i.imgur.com/PnpZwos.png
I just wish some browser vendor would release an official vertical tabs solution that had a more seamless implementation of autohide/autoexpand (for non-maximized windows where horizontal space is at a premium).
[+] [-] derptacious|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kmicklas|10 years ago|reply
I suspect a lot more users would use a lot more tabs if it were actually convenient to do so.
[+] [-] shalmanese|10 years ago|reply
Out in the wild though, it's something like, 95% of people never have more than 10 tabs open and 99% of people never have more than 20 tabs open. Don't quote me on the exact figures but those are in the ballpark of correct. It's hard to justify building a feature set for less than 1% of your users.
[+] [-] wanderr|10 years ago|reply
Besides that with the # of people using browsers a tiny minority can actually still be a huge # of users.
[+] [-] dspillett|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grue3|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glomph|10 years ago|reply
Slightly annoying it is per window though. I sort of expected the next window I opened to be able to 'boot' up an existing group. This seems to be just tab grouping rather than projects in any meaningful sense. They are only in session data and they don't sync.
[+] [-] magicmu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenrick95|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Rondom|10 years ago|reply
In my opinion, managing tabs as a tree allows greater flexibility and enables one to see the "history" behind tabs (which tab opened which other tab).
[+] [-] piyush_soni|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zamalek|10 years ago|reply
- How would a user quickly set the category on a tab?
- I would presume that a user would only want to categorize things once the browser becomes unwieldy. How could it be done in bulk?
- Where would the UI elements for this go? Considering that Chrome strives to be minimalistic.
- How would the categories be communicated to the user?
- I should be able to tell Chrome "Hi, [... snip ...]" How?
I'm fairly certain that this idea has been mulled over multiple times, even by Google. The problem isn't having the idea in the first place, it's the implementation. I think that if someone wanted Google to "steal" this, they would need to approach them with viable mockups demonstrating an elegant solution that fits in with the spirit of Chrome.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yareally|10 years ago|reply
Allowed you to have as many sessions as you wanted, though much of the time, I would end up realizing most of those tabs weren't that important and just delete the session later.
http://help.opera.com/Windows/12.10/en/sessions.html
[+] [-] gazab|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wil421|10 years ago|reply
If you are on a Mac you can go a step further and create different desktops for different projects, the only draw back is if you accidentally Cmd + Q an app that is open on multiple desktops.
[+] [-] glomph|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abandonliberty|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andrewstuart2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ohaal|10 years ago|reply
When the Chrome Sidebar API[2] is implemented, I'm sure it will only get better, as the need for an extra window should no longer be necessary.
Here's a video overview of its features: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjcrfKjobY
* I haven't reached the maximum yet...
[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
[2]: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=51084
[+] [-] erlich|10 years ago|reply
IMHO you always come across more tabs than you ever have a chance to read. And you'll always get back to them again when you actually need them via Google search.
I would love a tab sidebar. This might make Firefox worth checking out.
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
It also is utter pants when used with a focus-follows-mouse windowmanager policy.
[+] [-] ddandd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alaskamiller|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loceng|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hrbrtglm|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hobs|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DiabloD3|10 years ago|reply
Solving this with an extension seems suboptimal when Google may already have an internal unreleased project that does what I want.
If OneTab (or Spaces, another similar extension) could sync across my computers, this would probably be 90% of what I requested.
[+] [-] untog|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wink|10 years ago|reply
To a degree I can solve that with different browsers or profiles, but when clicking a link on irc or in a mail or twitter it always opens in the default browser.
My main gripe there's no way to have real context switches there, then again maybe I would just have to find a way to send a certain tab to a certain browser instance with a keyboard shortcut...
[+] [-] js4all|10 years ago|reply
Manage Tabs - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/manage-tabs/kijdih...
[+] [-] neumino|10 years ago|reply
But then people don't want to use a tiling windows management because it's too hard to learn...
[+] [-] dredmorbius|10 years ago|reply
Bookmarks are both too painful to manage or navigate (and despite both limitations, I use them extensively). Tabs address the situation of "I want to read this but not right now". Chrome's implementation makes managing, prioritizing, and relating tabs all but impossible.
The larger problem is that the entire browser paradigm is approaching its end-of-life date, and what is now "the browser" almost certainly wants to be four distinct classes of application:
* Reader: a document-oriented applicaton with commenting, bookmarking, newsfeed, bibliographic management, annotation, and commenting capabilities. A bit lof the love-child of the original Web browser model, eBook reader, RSS/Atom feed, Readability or similar "simplified Web" presentation tool, Usenet newsreader, and tools such as Zotero or Calibre. Actually, Zotero, Calibre, or an eBook reader might well assume this role.
* A generalized application platform. A cross between current "full-featured" browsers and mobile development environments. Likely based on the concept of downloading the App framework only when it updates, containing it within a sandboxed runtime, and interacting with cloud-based services as needed.
* A dedicated commerce platform. Firewalled from other uses, increasing both privacy and security, with purchase, order-fulfillment, and related functions offered securely. Possibly growing out of a dedicated commerce app, e.g., Amazon or iTunes.
* A dedicated media player. Rather than having dozens of videos and audio players scattered among browser tabs, a single application which can enqueue, play, and/or schedule playback. VLC is closest to this, and has many of the features I'd like, though none of the stability. youtube-dl, local filesystem storage, and mplayer are my usual solution these days.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/256lxu/tabbed_...
Yes, I've heard the "but heavy tab users are a minority case".
Answering that:
1. They're power users. Power users are a minority case. They're also a strong influencer community, and they lead migrations. Google Chrome (as with much else at Google) is no longer attractive, it's simply not sufficiently repulsive. But it's a tool people are using because they perceive either alternatives or siwtching costs as insufficiently better. That can change rapidly.
2. If you make something sufficiently painful, well, NO SHIT. People will tend to avoid it if they can. Power user's can't avoid it, and will find alternatives, eventually.
It's not even a matter of "oh, I'll get around to reading that stuff. It's that the state of tab management, on top of memory issues with Chrome, is so fucking abysmal that I cannot sort out what the fuck is in tabs, or how they're related.
Eventually the session crashes and I start over, but there's always painful state loss involved.
Why do I still use Chrome? Stylebot + Developer Tools. The state of Web design is so fucking abysmal that I've got 1700+ local stylesheets applied to various websites that I'd have to port and load somehow in Stylish on Firefox. And ... as annoying as other bits of Chrome are, the Developer Tools are decent, so fixing fucked-up Web design's a tad easier. And given the option of wanting to stab my eyes out staring at crap pages or dealing with Chrome's utterly fucked up memory and tab management ... tabs win, just barely.
But love Chrome? Who the fuck are you kidding?
[+] [-] Zigurd|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akilism|10 years ago|reply