I like Vivaldi, but I'm having major problems and I have major suggestions
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@xtremalraven WHY would anyone design a browser to do that? I have trouble enough keeping track of what tab to click on when I have up to ten open. I close most if not all of them when I find this many open, there is NO way to use them all at once, or even remember where they are on the tab bar.
Might as well just open them all in thumbnails and not focus on one, you couldn't even see them and then you could shut off the computer since it would be useless to you, and go do something productive, like put up a wall or dig a ditch or clean your toilet.
No one needs this functionality, at all. Use bookmarks instead! No need to keep hundreds of websites loaded on your computer, it's more like having several HUNDRED dishes from various countries hot (or cold) on the table in front of you. The dishes would not fit, and the table would collapse.
I suggest people that do this change their browsing style, maybe do without tabs for a few weeks, and only have one browser window with one tab open, to break such a bad habit.
I mean after all you can only interact with ONE page at a time anyway, why have all that stuff cluttering up your computer? -
@fixitmanaz Because that's how a lot of people, including me, work with their browsers? Asking people to adapt the way they work to the tools/browsers, is looking at things completely backwards. The tools should adapt to how people work best and most comfortably. And that's what a lot of other browsers do very well. Firefox, for example, is known to work well and fast with a thousand or more tabs open. If they can do it, others should be able to, as well.
Tabs are not about working on several things at once. You would need multiple or split windows for that. Usually, one browser window only shows one tab at a time. So if that is your reasoning for why having many tabs doesn't make sense, then the logical conclusion would be that browser should not support tabs at all.
Bookmarks are not equivalent. They add a considerable number of indirections. Let me give you a quick example of how and why I work with hundreds of tabs. I may go through a number of newsletters, or product listings, forum topics, etc. I middle-click all of the entries (news stories, products, forum threads) that I'm interested in and want to have a look at. These are all opened in tabs. In a way, this is a stack of "to-do" items that I go through. When I'm done with something, I close it. Bookmarks don't fit that paradigm, they're designed for more permanent storage. In my case, I had to create, manage and delete hundreds of bookmarks every week, or even daily, just so I could keep track of which URLs to still check out. That's at least two click for setting a bookmark, one or two to open it from the folder, two more to delete it, for each bookmark. When working with tabs, that's one click to open the tab and one to close it, and I don't have to bother with keeping track of anything, because the tab list does it for me. And I get a good sense of how much things I still need to look at by the number of tabs I have open. If one tab is interesting for further study, that is an appropriate use case for a bookmark.
Your statement of "no one needs this functionality, at all" is certifiably very wrong. Look at how many extensions, tips and workarounds there are out there for making it easier to get Chromium browsers to work better with dozens or hundreds of tabs. Clearly, that would not be the case if it was such a rare scenario. The amount of time, work and frustration I save by Firefox allowing me to quickly work with hundreds of tabs, is the main reason why it's still my main browser. Doing the same work in Chrome or Vivaldi would take me an inordinate amount of time.
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It seems there are really two related questions here:
- Does Vivaldi have a repeatable, internal problem with opening very large numbers of tabs under certain installation or usage scenarios?
- Are the developer resources necessary to identify cause and solve such a problem justified by the number of users needing a browser to open very large numbers of tabs, in light of the other pending design and feature needs of the evolving browser?
With respect to #1, there indeed have been scattered reports of Vivaldi usage issues with tab counts in the hundreds. Unfortunately, these reports seem not yet to demonstrate an evident pattern, either in usage or in system configuration. Many high-tab users do not see these issues, and detailed reports of tab usage (content type) are lacking; system hardware and other software suite details either are unreported or show no discernible pattern across the users having issues. All of this makes it extremely difficult to pin down a repeatable set of details for duplicating the user issues. If the problems cannot be duplicated, a fix cannot be developed beyond simple guesswork... but guesswork is not a realistic path for writing or debugging software code.
Regarding #2, while I have no doubt that Vivaldi developers would love to solve all the reported problems and add all the requested features for their browser, in the real world, resource limitations govern what actions can and should be taken. Having been down the path in the past with browser makers discounting the importance of my particular browsing-methodology needs, I can empathize with how high-tab-count users might feel on this. However, I also realize that the further my usage diverges from the usage in the 'mainstream', the less likely that developers will be justified in taking away from precious resources and time to support my divergent needs.
At the end of the day, users can only choose the browser that best supports what they do while knowing (and constructively reporting with supporting detail) the limitations that it exhibits while on their own systems. After that, it's up to the browser maker to determine what needs to actually get fixed or added... or not.
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@anamon There must be an easier way to do that, maybe RSS feeds or a web crawler that works online instead of on your local machine? Sounds like you spend 10 to 12 hours reading stuff that could be summarized in minutes in another manner. Maybe using a backhoe with a jackhammer attachment instead of a pick & shovel..
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600 tabs, IMO, is stretching the limits of the usability of the GUI, and would be doing the same to the computer hardware, were it not for Vivaldi's ability to hibernate idle tabs and not open existing tabs until they are given focus.
Perhaps a tab organizing extension would be good for you.
The stacking function is a very good step forward, but there is plenty of room for improvement in it at this point.
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@dleon Succinctly put, Thank you.
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@steffie LOL
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@fixitmanaz I don't think there is a more efficient way. As I tried to explain, when I work this way, the overhead of handling all those pages and tabs is at an absolute minimum. If I see a link that I want to look into, I middle-click it and it immediately opens in the background, without stopping my browsing the list, or whatever I'm doing.
For example, I can go through a newsletter of new music releases that contains links to 300 new records. I will have the 50 that seem interesting to me opened up in background tabs pretty much as fast as I can even go through the newsletter. I don't think there can be a faster way of "remembering" these URLs than this. Likewise, when going through the tabs, it's a matter of one click, or Ctrl+W, to dismiss one and automatically jump to the next. I go through the tabs practically as fast as I can make the decision.
Yes, I sometimes might spend 10 hours reading or browsing stuff in this fashion, but 9h50 of that will be pure reading time. I don't spend time managing bookmarks or working crawlers. My hundreds-of-tabs sessions can sometimes last for several days. I work alongside them in other tabs, and whenever I have a little time, I work through a few dozen tabs I "remembered". I honestly don't think I could come up with a more efficient solution, as long as the browser performance plays along.
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Sorry for reviving a stale post, but wanted to support @Anamon and others, arguing for modern browsers supporting powerful tab managers. And apologies in advance to the "don't have time for these long posts" people, this is a mini version of the OP's
TLDR: 1. tabs are the browser's units of work; 2. many people juggle lots of work; 3. extensions have shown us that organizing lots of tabs effectively is possible; 4. any browser that wants to be part of the future of work needs to catch up.
I agree with another poster too, that claiming a person shouldn't work in a way they find effective, is not constructive in a discussion about productivity-tool development.
Conceptually, tabs, tab history and bookmarks all exist on a continuum, even though we think of them as being different types of things. And certain tab management methods, those that allow us to avoid drawing arbitrary past-present-future lines on our work plan, unlock powerful productivity.
There is no reason (other than "it's hard to design a good tab management system") for siloing work into different modalities like "opened but didn't view yet," "still working on it," "saw but didn't save," "saw and saved and closed," and "saw and closed but didn't put away."
Firefox had been my go to browser for long past its shelf life, simply because it had the Tree Style Tabs extension, which allowed easy management of hundreds of tabs, past present and future, into topic- or project-organized sets.
Now that I use Chrome, I stick with it long past its own shelf life, simply because nothing manages tabs and windows like Tabs Outliner. It's solo-developer quirky, and I wish a big team would tame it's UX, but I would be much less productive without it.
I always have four or five thousand tabs organized. I use three levels: per chrome login to get an instance of Tabs Outliner for each of my companies, then by project into windows, and by task into tree branches.
They are hibernated when I'm not using them, they don't open on browser launch, and overall there is no significant impact on the browser, as long as one remembers to put away work when switching projects.
Since 99% of them are really just lines-of-text placeholders, organized topically, claiming that one "shouldn't have many tabs in the first place" is kind of like saying "it's bad to have many documents tucked away in project folders in the file cabinet in your office."
For me, the browser is my office. Seventy percent of my tools have web interfaces. "Don't keep very many tabs" is pretty much the same philosophical position as "an empty inbox or task list means I'm more productive."
For all three cases, I agree with Google (don't bother to delete any emails, storage is virtually free and you may need to look at them again) and Marissa Meyer "Look, I just make a to-do list every day in priority order from most important to least important and celebrate the fact that I'd never get to the bottom of it, because if I did, I would have spent a bunch of time doing relatively unimportant things."
I check in with Vivaldi's tab management system development every month or two. It's getting really good! But it still has a long way to go, to pry me away from a much-worse browser with a much-better tab manager.
I can imagine that it might be possible to let Tabs Outliner sit inside a web panel in Vivaldi. That I'd like to see!
For part of the OP's core complaint: just setting up lazy loading on launch should fix the "browser hogs 100% of my network bandwidth for ten minutes trying to open six hundred tabs all at once" problem
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@brucetm If it takes more than 500 words to make a point, people will skim read it and miss much of what is being said.
One can be too concise too, but if you want people to take notice, don't ramble.
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@pesala Thank you for the advice. The TLDR at the top was for for you. The rest was detailed feedback about this feature and use cases, for the devs.
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