Grouped Tabs | Hacker News Reader

Grouped Tabs

jasonvanlue.com

10 pointsduck15 comments

Seems like a variant of tab stacking in Opera:

http://www.opera.com/browser/tips/stacking/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hqSGGk1YTI

This might be a controversial opinion, but: in-window tabs are a broken implementation of something that's the window manager's job.

This plugin on firefox is what is keeping me using it on a day to day basis at work. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... it is IMHO the best way to manage tabs where you need to be able to stack tabs based on ideas and concepts so that you can quickly move between them when you're working on different things at the same time.

How usable is this with 200-300 tabs opened?

Sorry but is that an exaggeration, or is it really possible to have that many tabs open in firefox at the same time?

I can confirm that Firefox is usable with upwards of 400+ tabs open (Windows XP, semi-recent but not bleeding-edge machine). And this was before it started lazily-loading tabs like it does today. There's a speed loss, certainly, but the tab accumulation happened so gradually that I didn't notice the difference until I performed a mass tab purge.

Not really exaggeration.

I got better results with Chrome/Chromium, which were doing fine until 350+ open tabs.

In Firefox I started to have problems after 200-250 open tabs since half a year ago. Below 200 all is fine.

Ubuntu 10.04 / 32 bit / OS - 4GB.

Tabs collapse really well from large nested tab groups so you can have lots of tabs open without much issue. I've had 100+ open without much stress.

Erm. Firefox. Ctrl-Shift-E, or go to the all-tabs arrow in the upper right corner and click on Tab Groups.

Is the implementation perfect? No.

Does it do about what he wants? Yes, I think so.

First there were separate browser windows for each page, then there were tabs inside a single window, and now we have tabs within tabs. I believe this is one grouping too many and personally I'm fine with just dragging tabs between Chrome windows.

As another commenter pointed out, Opera already has something very similar to this. YMMV, but while I didn't really see the point at first, now I love it. I'm usually developing several websites at a time, each of which I have several tabs open for (one for the admin panel, one for the public side, misc ones for CSS tricks I'm experimenting with, etc). So I group tabs by what project they belong to, and when I switch to working something else I can just collapse the current stack and expand the other one. You get the best of both worlds: keeping your tab bar relatively clean and readable, and not having to put in all the URLs or search for relevant pages everytime you switch tasks (while sticking to a single browser window).

Also the UI (at least Opera's) makes it very clear which tabs are actually tab stacks, and presents it in an intuitive looking way. People who have never heard of the concept and then use my browser typically grok it almost immediately just from the design.

Seeing grouped tabs in IE confused me for a while - why are these 2 tabs randomly both green?

I agree, we're iterating this concept too far for my UI tastes.

You had me riveted the entire time, and I was so disappointed at the end to realize that this was just a concept.

To any brilliant developers out there with some free time: I would pay $5 for this firefox plugin.

check out aza raskin's blog ( http://azarask.in )

he designed something similar while at mozilla called firefox panorama. here's one of his blog posts while conceiving it: http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/panorama-search/

For some reason, it still felt too sluggish for me to use, plus I tend to just use virtual desktops and separate browser windows to group things.

I've been looking for something like this for a long time. Please someone make this.

Great job!

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