My Problem With Tabs
Day 22 of the #100DaysToOffload Series:
Hi, my name is Mike, and I’m a taboholic. I open tabs. Lots of tabs. And then I leave them open for a really long time. My browser of choice makes it easier for me to handle large numbers of tabs, and it’s one of my favorite things about it. Recently Google Chrome introduced a new feature to do the same, and I think I like it.
There’s a joke I’ve read. “How do you know know if someone uses Vivaldi? They’ll tell you.” So, apparently, Vivaldi is the Arch of the browser market.
Not to disappoint, I use Vivaldi.
Right now on my desktop computer, I have 68 tabs open, 59 on my phone, and 23 on my laptop (been slacking I guess). When you have that many tabs open, you need to have some tools to manage them.
One of the best tools to do that is the Tab Stack. It takes multiple tabs, compresses them down into a single tab that has multiple tabs in it. It’s basically a “folder” full of tabs.
Using Tab Stacks, you can group together tabs that are similar, like links you’ve gotten from Fosstodon or news sites you visit daily.
There are lots of things you can do with Tab Stacks, but I’m not going to get into all of them today, simply because I really want to talk about the new feature that Google has proposed.
Now, let me get this out of the way right away. This is a cool feature, but it won’t make me use Chrome again. Especially since I fully expect to see a similar feature in Vivaldi in the very near future.
As you can see by this promotional image I swiped from Google’s site, Google is putting a colored “label” in the tab list, and any tabs that come after it are share a colored highlight below it. If a tab is moved past the next label, the color on that tab will change. There’s even the option to move between groups if you right click on a tab and choose the group from the menu.
All in all, pretty cool feature.
It doesn’t begin to come close to how well Vivaldi handles tabs, but I look forward to seeing Vivaldi implement a similar feature.
Before I get any feedback about this, yes I know Vivaldi is not open source. It makes use of propriety code and isn’t unified under a single license. It’s also based on Chromium, so if you’re trying to avoid Chromium Vivaldi is not the choice for you.
Looking for comments? There are no comments. It's not that I don't care what you think, it's just that I don't want to manage a comments section.
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Also, don't feel obligated, but if you feel like buying me a ☕ cup of coffee ☕ I won't say no.