How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi
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@potmeklecbohdan said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
@Catweazle said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
letter opener
Is there a specialised knife for that? Do people buy them?
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I think Opera as well has one of the best solutions for tab management - workspaces.
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@yevklim , for this reason, a comparison with Opera would have been more indicated instead with Browsers with some rudimentary functions in this regard.
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thanks for this overview, this is very enlightening. I just started with Vivaldi browser coming from Firefox with Tree-Style-Tabs. I shrug a bit at hearing you consider 20 tabs a "too many browser tabs" use case. Though I do have UnloadTabs (similar to former Hibernating Tabs in Vivaldi) to keep memory usage low, I usually have about 300-500 tabs open per Browser Window. Without a proper tree and its expand/collapse functionality I am usually boned.
I do like the notion that Vivaldi is allowing native vertical tabs out-of-the-box but as you can imagine the two level stack is just cluttering my display with another vertical tab bar and is not self evident as the behaviour in Tree Style Tabs. I.e. if you open a new tab it will be a new root tab, if you open a link in a new tab it will be a new child of the current tab. That is your tree structure is naturally building up.
Please correct me on the usage of tab stacks, but how do I open a link in a new tab stack ?
That would at least give me an option to create a stack directly from a search result and open all resulting and interesting links together in a new stack. This is my common workflow. I may be able to squeeze my workflow into those two levels eventually, i.e. if the same action (open link in new stacked tab) in a sub-stack would move the current tab out of that current stack and open a new stack below with the new link as a sub tab.It somehow looses traction of the actual research trees but Vivaldi is the closest that I have seen since Firefox Mozilla engine and piroo's Tree Style Tabs extension. And I am looking for a viable alternative to Mozilla engine for years.
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@isnotvalid said
I shrug a bit at hearing you consider 20 tabs a "too many browser tabs" use case.
That is what survey results suggest. My earlier survey gave similar results:
In How Many Tabs do you Usually Open?:- Total = 89 votes
- 10 tabs or fewer = 24/89 (27%)
- 50 tabs or fewer = 58/89 (65%)
- More than 50 tabs = 29/89 (33%)
- More than 100 tabs = 13/89 (15%)
@isnotvalid said
I usually have about 300-500 tabs open per Browser Window.
Vivaldi is designed to cope with large numbers of tabs, but personally I don't understand what the benefit is. Why not use bookmarks or sessions?
I can only read one tab at a time, or maybe three or four if I tile related tabs. With two windows on my two monitors, I might have five tabs open at once. I sometimes open a third window with a pair of tiled tabs.
@isnotvalid saidPlease correct me on the usage of tab stacks, but how do I open a link in a new tab stack?
You don't have to use two-level tab stacks. See the tab-stacking options in settings. Links will only open in a tab stack, not in a single tab. Stack tabs by host on the tab context menu is also useful.I have seen hundreds of posts complaining about the difficulty of managing very large numbers of tabs: performance issues, hard to find open tabs so people open the same tabs more than once increasing the clutter.
- Twenty is plenty
- Thirty is dirty
- Forty is naughty
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I only have 2-3 tabs maximum open as i am sure the majority of people do so this is probably aimed at a minority of users.
it seems slightly counter-productive to be using up time to sort tabs out.people want to browse not be forever sorting tabs.
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@Pesala thanks for explaining the reasoning and statistics behind the 20 tabs. So count me in the 15% of more than 100 tabs.
I am not really plagued with performance issues, as I use UnloadTabs in FF which is similar to HibernatingTabs in Vivaldi. That is the tree of tabs is the kind of structure I would get if I sort and categorize all my visited pages into Bookmarks. So for me the Browser itself with its tree of Tabs serves as a self organized Bookmark tree.
Yes this might look unstructured to some of you, but even on my smartphone I tend to have 500 tabs open, in case I need to look back to something. For me the visual clue of all those pages I have visited serves as a crumblepath to my memory. This is something I can not get from a Bookmark tree without spending considerable amount of time into organzing them.
That way when I want to focus on something new I start with a new (blank) tab or even with a new tree in TST. Herein I just keep the tabs open that are relevant and important to my research. If I would like to keep those for posterity I can reorganize the tabs in the structure by moving them in the tree (simply drag-and-drop) and later bookmark the whole tree.
To be honest I rarely use bookmarks anymore. Because I know when / in which context I researched / read something I simply go back to that context in my tab tree. Or I use the History search which kind of works like an auto bookmarking feature for myself in case I have already closed that tree of research. That is I simply type the relevant keywords into the URL field.
Luckily you didn't say what people with hundreds of tabs could be considered, so I can make up my own mind =^P
Cheers and thanks to @guigirl for reminding me that 15% of Vivaldi users are like me: performance-hungry power-mongers abusing a nice browser like Vivaldi or FF for their very own purposes.
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@Pesala said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
Please correct me on the usage of tab stacks, but how do I open a link in a new tab stack?
You don't have to use two-level tab stacks. See the tab-stacking options in settings. Links will only open in a tab stack, not in a single tab. Stack tabs by host on the tab context menu is also useful.Now I have spotted the fineprint see. I will try the compact style too.
If I have a two-level tab stack opening a link in a new tab will open it in the same stack. That is what I want and expect.
But I do not see how from a new Tab on the first level containing e.g. some search results I would create a new Stack simply by right clicking a link and say open in new tab.
What am I missing here, I read about Automatic Tab Stacking somewhere else ? -
You're not missing anything. Before you can open new tabs in the current stack you have to create a stack. Use this workflow:
- Search for the selected text which opens the results page in a new tab
- Middle-click, Ctrl+Click, or Mouse Gesture (I use GestureDown) on the first result to open it in a background tab
- Drag the search results tab onto the first search result tab to create a stack
- Continue opening search results in the background to add to the stack.
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@guigirl said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
@Priest72 said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
I only have 2-3 tabs maximum open as i am sure the majority of people do
Such a strange thing to say.
https://vivaldi.net/poll-how-many-opened-tabs/
Afaik 40% is rarely regarded as a majority.
88 votes is not really indicative of total vivaldi usage and of course the majority of vivaldi users may not even visit this forum so those percentages will not be accurate.
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Although I applaud tab management facilities, they all require advance planning. I have so many tabs open because I suddenly need to look something up, or I click on a link to read it, and so on. I'm busy with a task, I'm not going to plan where to put my tabs while I'm doing that.
What I really need is a way to search for tabs, like how searching for mails works in Vivaldi. Show the tabs that match the search.
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@stevenpemberton said in How to manage too many browser tabs in Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Vivaldi:
What I really need is a way to search for tabs, like how searching for mails works in Vivaldi. Show the tabs that match the search.
This is already present in Quick Commands.
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It'd be much more useful if one could jump from a desktop notification to the corresponding tab by clicking on it just like in all other browsers. At least on Linux that doesn't work.
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I really enjoy your article. And I'm a bit jealous of where you live. Good luck pursuing your professional basketball players. One day, I will get to Iceland.
I absolutely love Vivaldi. In fact, so much that I was switching from Firefox to Vivaldi when all of a sudden I figured out that I couldn't play certain videos from YouTube on Vivaldi. What I'm not thrilled about is that I can't even get a real answer from Vivaldi regarding this. I have posted bug reports, posted in the form and no real solution and no answer from them which is even more frustrating.
Anyway, all you say is true about the way Vivaldi handles tabs and I really wish I could move to it fully. But it doesn't do me much good if I can't use it all the time and have to switch to others just to be able to watch certain videos.
Reading your article makes me again hopeful that Vivaldi will respond to me and that we get this figured out. Your article inspires me to keep trying.
Thanks
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@Pesala thanks for the suggestion, I was able to use middle-click, which opens the tab as a new tab below the search page. Then I still have to drag the "sub"-tab with the target onto the first tab.
I checked the hint for Auto-Stack Related Tabs and I guess this is what I was missing.
Settings → Tabs→ New Tab Position→ Select “As Tab Stack With Related Tabs”
Now I am still struggling with the way tabs are stacked in the two levels. Actually the first search page is added to the top of the list in the second level. And the entry on the first level always shows what I selected in the second level.
This is clearly not trees and I have to get used to the constant switching/flickering of the two levels. I clearly prefer a tree structure like in TST, Bookmarks, Nemo File Manager or even Windows/Internet Explorer =^D Thanks.
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@stevenpemberton me still learning looked it up, it is there simply press F2 =^D
How to open the Quick Commands menu
First things first. The best way to see how this feature works is to open it up and give it a try.Open Quick Commands using F2 / ⌘E by default. You can also find it under Tools in the main menu. Use Esc to close Quick Commands.
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@isak lies and misinformation, what is workona? I mean , it is an add-on with 1900 users, are you serious? do you Vivaldi fanboys here really think that posts like this one can attract new users? I am a Vivaldi user from the first technical preview and every time I read one of this silly advertising posts the effect is that I stop using Vivaldi ROTFL - stacks and tiles are useless, and Vivaldi - compared to Firefox and just like every other chromium browser - uses too much RAM when you open a lot of tabs. In Firefox I can switch tabs from the address bar, just typing what I am looking for. With Vivaldi twenty open tabs and above and all you see is clutter, that never happens with Firefox (where tabs start rolling and they remain always readable - at the minimum/maximum size you can configure in about:config) stop the BS Vivaldia people and bring for real some features which improve browsing.
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I personnally use the extension url render. That permit me to search informations fastly without opening hundreds of tabs.
I takes down the problem at its core and my ram computer is happy. -
I think you're onto something with the 2nd tab stack
also love the "save session" option though my current fav for this feature is a chrome ext called toby (gettoby.com)i also like Opera's workspaces as someone else mentioned but it's limited to 5 which is not a bad thing but it's a limit
suggestion (unless there is already a setting for this):
- make the 2nd tab stack swap width with the 1st tab stack
I'm manually setting the width of the 2nd stack then manually setting it back when I move out from it making it function like a "tab drawer"; it would be great if the width of the 2nd stack would expand just by clicking into it (not necessarily on a tab there) and contract the main tab column at the same time (a toggle more or less)
- make the 2nd tab stack swap width with the 1st tab stack
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Completely missed the panorama tab groups addon for Firefox, based on how the original panorama tab grouping worked from Firefox 4 onwards until it was removed this is currently still the best tab grouping approach that I've seen. You don't get distracted by tabs that you don't need to see at the time, it's easy to group tabs, label/categorise the groups, move tabs between groups, access the groups view, close whole groups of tabs and so on. Also performance is more than fine as tabs which are hidden are not loaded into RAM but when you switch between groups then all the tabs will be loaded (performance is fine here too but I do have lots of RAM, >=4 CPU cores and high speed internet connection.)
Take a look at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-groups/ and the image, specifically https://addons.cdn.mozilla.net/user-media/previews/full/212/212439.png?modified=1545115863, to get a hint of how powerful and transformative tab grouping can be.I use tab groups rather than bookmarks, mainly because the tabs have a thumbnail which makes finding a specific tab far quicker. As such I usually have over 100 tabs, and that's over two profiles, one for my work on my work equipment using my work email address and then my personal account.
I just came to say this because this article seems to be popular, and whilst I think that Mozilla are driving the browser into the ground the do still have some of the best addons out there which another browser by replicating and supporting as part of the browser could entice me away from Firefox. (Addons, where they are fully verifiable and open source are not too much of a problem; especially when you can fork them and build your own package - so that an update doesn't do a The Great Suspender on you).
