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.<p>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.<p>This poll is pretext for discussion, feel free to share your feeling on this!
It's interesting to think about the different ways I use tabs and how they might be better served. For example, I will often open a new tab to create a sort of "checkpoint", resulting in 5 tabs that represent different points in time in a browsing session. Other times I will open 5 pages that are analogous to each other in order to compare (for example, 5 similar products on Amazon). Other times it's a method of "forking" a browsing session into several different paths, while keeping the parent node in its own tab.<p>Not really proposing solutions here, but it does make tabs look a bit clunky.<p>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.
As we move programs we use into the browser, window managers become less important. But we also lose some functionality offered by window managers. Maybe the "next browser" will be so intrinsically attached into your OS window manager there will be virtually not difference between an installed application and a website, their windows will behave the same way.<p>Slack.app may be an example of how browsers will work in the future.
I use tree style tabs [1] for Firefox, so lots of tabs don't take up a ton of space. I have certain tabs I always keep around (gmail, HN, AWS console, ...), and then a number of trees for projects I'm working on.<p>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.)<p>Since I find no downside to having tons of tabs just sit around, I am comfortable without a new browser management system.<p>[1] <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/" rel="nofollow">https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...</a>
My tabs are effectively my "bookmarks" for the current state. This includes some 'permanent' tabs like mail and calendar, some long-running tabs like the current project and references, and a lot of ephemeral tabs like searches.<p>I can get rid of ephemeral tabs myself: I read it and I closed it.<p>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.<p>It should also not conflate the long-running contextual tabs with permanent, context-independent tabs.<p>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.
1) I like tabs and I use a whole lot of them<p>2) tabs alone are starting to feel limited as the average number of tabs and the relation between them gets larger and more complex.<p>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.<p>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 love tabs and use them heavily, but I wish they behaved on the desktop like they do in Chrome on Android, where hitting the back button when there's no prior history closes the tab. Sometimes I open a link in the same tab (plain old forward navigation), sometimes in a new tab. I then need to remember that the first one requires a back button when I'm done, while the second requires a Ctrl-W. If I forget and use Ctrl-W when I should have used the back button, then I lose my history (and have to go to the "Recently Closed Tabs" menu to restore it).
What do you mean "and would love not to have to manually close"? What's the difference between hitting cmd-w as opposed cmd-q?<p>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.<p>Originally there was an option in Firefox to turn them off - I wouldn't be surprised if that option is still there.
tabs have got to stay.<p>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 <a href="http://fluidapp.com" rel="nofollow">http://fluidapp.com</a> for the things I really want to exist on their own rather than just as a browser tab.
Part of the beauty of modern browsers is the ability to very easily add extensions to fit your personal workflow.<p>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! :)
Kind of reminds me of Sublime Text's tabs, which auto-close when you visit another tab unless you double click the file name or interact with the file in some way. Works well for taming the workspace.<p>Might be adaptable to browsers but I'm not convinced it's really worth it.
We really need Web Apps in windows with a dock icon, no tabs etc, and websites into tabs as they are now.<p>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.
Yup Why not But Whats new in that ? iOS is already doing it in the Mobile Safari. They have Taken an alternate approach to tabs due screen space limitations. So any interface you will come up with will more or less be another mobile safari.
Have you tried pinning tabs that you'd like to persist? Both Firefox and Chrome support this; just right click on a tab and choose "Pin tab" from the context menu.
"Annoyed"? Just don't use them then - like seriously, what difference does it make? How does getting rid of tabs make the browser "more intuitive"?