Edit: so I just looked and it turns out you can enable tab bar scrolling on chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip. Why is that even disabled by default?
It's my understanding that on mobile, tabs are unloaded from memory nearly instantly. You lose state but they use almost no resources. (I wish this was an option out of the box on Desktop. I've had extensions that do this and it's a godsend)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
Is that really the only reason to install Brave?
Starting to wonder if I should just set up a Firefox that bundles uBlock Origin by default with a brand new name.
Tab list usability remains pretty much the same regardless of how many tabs are open.
What do you lose from closing tabs versus what do you gain from keeping them open? For me, if I use a site open it’s bookmarked or already in history so it’s fast to reopen. Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low and also makes me faster at switching between the open tabs as I don’t need to search or parse through many UI bits.
Infinite scroll is an especially bad offender here. If I'm 50 screens down on an infinite scroll that is work and a page refresh losing my place should be treated as a data-loss bug.
(an even better idea is not to use infinite scroll at all)
One is as a sort of ad-hoc to-do list. When I leave a tab open it's because something is unfinished and I mean to come back to it soon. (I just wish there was a chronological view so that I could easily delete the oldest tabs).
The second purpose is to store the scroll position of longer articles that I haven't finished reading.
And yeah fuck infinite scroll. I usually interact with such sites via their API or data export. Eg searching my YouTube Likes playlist is impossible on the web because I'd have to spend an hour scrolling before I can Ctrl+F
More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
Imagine you snap your browser to half your screen. Assuming it's not an ultrawide, you'll be able to fit maybe a dozen tabs before they're so tiny to be essentially useless.
It's not that my phone was memory-constrained, we're talking a recent Samsung Galaxy flagship[3] - it's purely overly aggressive memory management on part of Firefox.
--
[0] - Have 5 tabs open, all something trivial like HN, put away phone, grab it 5 minutes later, switch to other HN tab, ... wait half a minute for it to reload on a spotty connection at my in-laws' countryside home.
[1] - Talking with others about how we experience technology, I'm starting to feel that I'm abnormally annoyed by large or unpredictable UI latency.
[2] - TypingMind.
[3] - I learned to save up and only buy high-end, thanks to the experience with my first smartphone, that turned out to be underspecced for its own functionality. It's probably a case of [1], but one time I deviated from this rule and got my wife a mid-range phone, we both started to regret it in a few months, so it's not only me who has low tolerance for jank.
The only things I hoard are books. They are more like my antilibrary (things I’d like to have read already) than collecting everything I encounter.
Firefox: https://yld.moe/raw/nVE.png
Chrome: https://yld.moe/raw/vu8.png
Also, if you're wondering why my tabs look like they're from 2017, that's just another benefit of using Firefox [1]. Although as nice as it being able to actually customize our browsers, it would be nice for Mozilla to stop breaking things for sake of breaking things.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
With vertical tabs, you don't have this problem. Every tab is the same width, making them easier to interact with. You'll need to vertically scroll the list if it gets too large, but that's a natural enough action. In this situation, you now close tabs because you want to, not because the browser is strong-arming you into it.
Where things really get fun is with vertical tabs that track ancestry, like Tree Style Tabs or Firefox or what's built into Orion. These tabs will nest as you follow links from one page to another, capturing context.
HN is a perfect example of where this works well. I can go to the home page, see a few stories that look interesting, open each comment page as a child tab. Then on each child I can open the associated article. And, as I read the comments, I can open new links that look interesting and that page is now associated with the root story.
I could bookmark all of these pages, but short of creating folders for each story there's no good way to capture that context. Naturally, that makes it harder to restore the same state when opening bookmarks. Instead, I leave the tabs open and when I'm ready to take an action on them (read an article, make notes in Obsidian, bookmark into a topic of interest) I do so and then I close them out. It makes context switching much easier when I know I'm not going to lose the context I just left. As an added benefit, I find if I leave tabs open I get better use of the browser cache than I do if I close an open later from a bookmark.
I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.
The donation getting publicised, going viral and becoming a shitstorm was what forced the end of his tenure as CEO, and I've heard comments since that his being replaced with a more business-y CEO has been a disappointing experience.
(I've no idea what percentage of the relevant subset of employees made such comments and/or held such opinions, and I'm not expressing an opinion on should/shouldn't about any given event, but it does seem to have been a little more complicated than "he got kicked out ... for being a homophobe")
If a closed tab only remains in the bookmarks or history it might as well not exist for my brain.
> Closing tabs keeps my machine fast and memory usage low
I just restart the browser now and then, which will unload all tabs again. They're still in the tab bar but require almost no memory until I use them.
Thanks.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
You cannot decide moral questions by couching them in terms of “rights” and assuming that whichever side “advances rights” must be the correct side. Why? Because you can do that arbitrarily either way and for anything. e.g. “admitting gay marriage denies people the right to live in a society where traditional marriage is protected”.
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
> Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
>Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
Not to me. The difference between us is that I am perfectly happy to work with people who do not share my political viewpoints.
