Whenever I'm researching or buying something, having tabs ordered in the parent/child tree makes finding things and going back to listings or indexes much easier and the general experience much more pleasant.
I heard a theory somewhere that the reason people use their smartphones for everything nowadays is because they never used the potential of their laptops/desktops and don't see much difference in usability. Things like TST show you how much more efficient you can be on a real computer.
My bookmarks are dumped in a large pile to be one day sorted out. I have hundreds of them. And rather annoyingly are there now with forgotten context. I can't even access the creation dates on Chrome/ium unless I export and data wrangle.
I have decided I'm just going to write a system where I paste the address/or use a bookmarklet, and insist on small text or context and/or the ability to tag and group. But it must be a simple and cross-browser/system.
The most annoying thing about bookmark managers is presentation.
OTOH, with horizontal tabs, once you’ve reached a certain number of tabs, they all condense into indistinguishable icons, and even before they have, you can easily only see a couple of the tabs entire titles at a time (on a laptop screen).
So even if you don’t manage tens or hundreds of tabs (although many others do), vertical tabs are still useful because they allow you to never have to think about closing a tab, and still have a great experience with the 5-10 tabs you are interested in at any one point of time.
That's Firefox, and while I've got plenty of extensions, none are affecting my tab behaviour.
Some people seem to strongly prefer Chrome's behavior. The only advantage I can see is that it forcibly prevents your tab count from getting out of hand.
OneTab works similar to bookmarks but preserves the date & time they were added. It’s even possible to add a title, i.e. context, to a group of links along with the timestamp. Links can be moved around with drag and drop.
A great improvement to OneTab would be to be TST aware and maintain the tree structure.
Pocket makes reading bookmarks a lot more pleasant and the tagging system helps to preserve some context.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/onetab/ (also available for Chrome)
I use Firefox's tag feature for this, helps you give a one or two or three word context like: linux, firewall, iptables or devops, cicd
If I have > 10 tabs open, I feel stressed because it means I'm not actually completing tasks. Anything more than this seems like ADD.
When I want to save pages in the long term, I use bookmarks.
Perhaps it's a sign that the bookmark UX isn't good (or prevalent) enough.
I generally have four pinned tabs open for email, Slack and Trello, plus another five related to what I'm working on.
It's just that:
1) What goes to bookmarks rarely goes out.
2) usually I and many other people have a few dozens at least of 'related to what I'm working on'. Like a few documentation pages for this, a few documentation pages for that, ten SO pages, ten blog articles on the same topic linked from SO etc. Plus some tabs unrelated to work, but the ones you absolutetly want to visit later and finish reading or something and don't have the time to put them into something like Things or Bear.
Tabs make lots of sense, windows let me organise them into groups of things I'm currently working on. That's all sensible. Anything I come across that I think might be useful to my future self, I bookmark it. Again, working with the provided functionality. Sensible.
When people have 200 tabs open and can't remember what's where, that's what puzzles me. I've seen people flick through dozens of tabs looking for a piece of documentation they saw yesterday afternoon.
We already have the tools that make browsing and researching efficient. People just need to learn to use them.
The problem with bookmarks for most of us is that users don’t typically manage their bookmarks and delete the links they don’t need.
Bookmarks can definitely work, but yeah, a flat list can't. I think a better approach would be something like a mind-map.
Rhetorical question of course. With an open tab I have that information and can go back and forth up the path. Its very useful context to have when I revisit the tab. In my line of work I research many things every day. Firefox open tabs have been a godsend. I literally have 900 to 1200 open at any given time
Photoshop has work flow like this - you can split the undo history into a tree like structure (to a degree, it's not infinite).
Adding and deleting bookmarks at this frequency would be a massive hassle.
What I find invaluable is the super quick ramp-up after context switching, especially if whatever pulled me away turned out to be more work/time than expected.
At least on my phone, Firefox Focus has helped immensely.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
Source code: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
I can't stand 10's of tabs let alone 100's!!
firefox --no-remote --profile-manager
I have that as an alias in bash, and a shortcut on my Windows desktop.
Heck, most of the sites I visit on anything like a regular basis I only need to type in the first letter or two and they auto-complete.
I have a personal wiki where I save links together with self-made notes and links/references associated with it. This provides a persistent record that is richer than that which bookmarks can provide, and can be accessed from any device that I happen to be on (my own devices, or devices that aren't my own, or links shared to others).
For regular sites, I too type in the URL and it usually autocompletes.
For myself, bookmarks have always fallen into a middle ground that I don't have much use for.
So while it comes down to preference, I think the preference was highly influenced by the technology.
That's a weird assumption, I have several hundred bookmarks. Bookmarks and tabs have different UX and fill different roles. That's why you use 10 tabs and bookmarks, instead of 1 tab and bookmarks. That's why I use 30-40 tabs and bookmarks.
I have 500 tabs open on my iPhone. It is sort of like a queue of content that I can read when I have excessive free time.
I'd like to write an extension that killed your old tabs after a while. I already have an idea to do that with a todo list app that automatically gets rid of your old items.
Either you spend too much time looking for new things to add to the queue, too little time processing the queue, both of the above, or you cast too wide a net for what you might possibly read one day.
If you can knock one off every day you've got two and a half year's worth of items in your queue that you haven't even looked at yet? This is on top of all the things you are already consuming as part of your work or for leisure and at the same time assuming you don't add more things to the queue.
That's madness, and I don't care if you call me judgmental.
It is unreasonable to have that many items in your to-read queue. Stop adding things or start reading things faster (or better yet, both!)
And oh I sure have looked at them, but havent grokked them. Once I do that or I come back to them again and again then they get bumped to a bookmark. Lets say they are part of my job and leisure, sometimes I lose track which is which.
Think generational garbage collection. Tabs and bookmarks are the different generations. I still like tabs better as they preserve more context.
Btw some jobs require more researching than others. Regarding "madness" yes I agree.
But having so many tabs open makes the tab UI useless, so I prefer to close them.
Generally when researching something I'll pick a number of search terms, and for each, I'll actually open a few of the hits (in a new tab each time). Of those hits, most get closed right away once I actually look at them and see they're useless, of the rest, I might read a few, or follow the most relevant seeming links. (But usually close some large number of them)
Wash rinse repeat until I'm actually left with a very small set of things that are pertinent to the task at hand.
(This process does seem to leak slightly. I have to do a separate garbage collection pass once in a while.)
I have never been able to use Chrome effectively because my browsing habits are so tied to being able see many tabs open at once. I almost always open links by opening them in a new tab and I always open a new tab when starting something new.
Bookmarks are an improvement over writing addresses down on paper or copying and pasting into a text file. That's about it.
At least this was the case last I checked, haven't really bothered with chrome's technology since its popularity soared ~6 years ago and all my friends started switching to it.
Even if this is fixed it will always be my major sore point about that browser.
Even in Firefox where the security story is still not quite as far along, I still am not really concerned about JS exploits. And most people now run browsers that automatically update. Few parties are going to spend that much money just for it to only be useful for a limited number of targets.
Now that Flash Player and ActiveX are pretty much gone from desktop browsers for most users, I feel the game has changed. People now need to be much more concerned with phishing, XSS, and other flaws. Social engineering is probably more of a threat to the general public than browser exploits.
(I do use firejail to sandbox my Firefox instance from the rest of my machine, but that's more a layer of last defense, and doesn't really prevent too much.)
Another thing that helps with tab-hoarding is a clever userCSS hack (from someone on Reddit) that puts my tabs into multiple rows so I can still read their titles, even if I have 20+ in one window.
As for why it's not supported out-of-the-box, to put it a bit harshly, deep hierarchies scare "the normies". I find that more than 2-3 levels of trees are too much to remember for most people (hence the cluttered desktops and "bucket" folders).
Using tab groups ('Panorama View' or 'Tab Stash' extensions etc) instead, for instance? I do like to add some organization to tabs, order by topic etc, but I personally never really saw value (yet perhaps, we'll see) in having a tree for that, 1 level seems sufficient for me. And I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of TST users actuallt use it with just 1 level deep as well.
I probably wouldn't have more than window-width of tabs open at once in a single window, and no more than 2-3 windows open at once.
A tree is a nicer structure for the "where did I open this from", though; especially if the screen space is available.