> I've seen mobile browsers handle many tabs better.
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)
> In most browsers on mobile, it’s difficult to keep track of many open tabs.
> We’ve integrated an elegant desktop-style Tab Bar in the UI by default.
I think there's a good reason why no mobile browsers implement desktop style tabs. Even the Vivaldi screenshots in this post show just 2.5 tabs with significant truncation of all the visible tabs. On tablet this might work (where other browsers have a more traditional tab view), but on portrait phone this seems like a terrible idea.
What mobile browsers actually have tabs that look like tabs? Honest question, I've only ever used firefox on android. If the others handle tabs anything like firefox does tabs are way more intuitive on a PC.
> Now if they could just fix Firefox Mobile's abysmal tab management. Chrome Mobile's tab screen is a stack of pages in the Z-axis with the one closest to the user being the most recent tab and so on. Firefox Mobile's is a grid with the number of rows and columns being variable depending on screen dimensions.
You can change it to a linear list easily. Settings -> General -> Compact Tabs.
Personally I strongly prefer the way Firefox does it. The order is actually pretty simple. Left to right, top to bottom is oldest to newest.
I'm pretty sure that's because Chrome's UX team don't expect you to have hundreds of tabs open. Why does your workflow require you to have that many tabs?
Hundreds of tabs just seems an insane number to me. Even if you could search by tab you'd likely forget the names of the ones that were there in the first place. Can you think of another app where you would have that many things open at once? If not, why are browsers with tabs different? The rule of thumb with UI design is that users can remember about 7 things in their short term memory.
> I think the core problem is still tab clutter. Every time I hop onto my iPad to do some light browsing, I have less anxiety. I don't keep many tabs open on mobile/tablet, but I'm already counting 8 opened here as I'm typing on my laptop.
If you have anxiety because your browser has 8 tabs open, you have issues that cannot be solved with computer programs.
> Firefox will respond by unloading memory-heavy but not actively used tabs.
A dropped tab cannot always be reloaded to the same content. No thanks, I'd rather get more RAM or swap space for paging.
The tabbing feature of "close all pages to the right of this one" is almost good enough for me.
What I would like is some UI where all the tabs are compactly shown as rows in a table. Here, you could select tabs and move them up or down, delete them, or farm them off to their own window.
>Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand.
how about multiple layer tabs
I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
> I can envision a much better UX where your tabs become some sort of history entry where they are frozen in time (serialized to disk) and can be rehydrated.
Mobile Firefox already has this. Desktop Firefox might have a version of it, but I'm not sure (sometimes I see a loading spinner on a gray background for a while).
I think you're totally on the right track. What I envision is the ability to drag a tree of tabs into a bookmarks folder to get back to it at another time.
Fundamentally tabs, bookmarks and history entries are all just references to URLs (with a bunch of metadata) anyway. It's weird to me that the UX of these hasn't really converged all that much yet.
> We need open tabs, we need to see what’s open at all times, and we need to be able to quickly jump to the tab we need in the here and now.
I’m working on Amna which tackles the too many tabs problem, and this is a huge generalization. I can have 22 tabs open just for single task. For example opening two HN articles in new tabs will bring the total to 3. Seeing what’s open all the time is overwhelming to most users. I’m a fan of the new tab groups and unlike chrome which puts a bunch of dots, Safari neatly sends tabs away to work with less clutter and a blank slate.
"In God we trust, all others must bring data." Best practices should be grounded in data rather than opinions whenever possible, especially when they're based on claims about users' cognitive load like in the NN/g recommendations.
> Per parent, it gobbles RAM on mobile devices, and this leads other tabs to close prematurely. It also turns older devices into helicopters when the fan kicks in.
I don't find that to be true with mobile devices. I much prefer having my links on mobile opening in a new tab, because a) mobile internet connection can be unreliable (and often a much bigger problem than lack of RAM), so I may not still have reception when trying to reload the original page, b) slow page loads makes browsing not as enjoyable since transitions take time, so I'd rather have everything in separate tabs and c) being on the move means I often put my phone down to do something else, so I don't necessarily remember every tab's browsing history.
Besides, mobile browsers have gotten a lot better at managing RAM and most have been able to optimize background tabs for a long time, so I think the RAM issue is way overrated.
> Besides the offender's unwarranted sense of entitlement (by keeping you around against your will), the main issue is that it breaks the back button. 15 years later, it's still an unwarranted sense of entitlement, and it's still breaking the back button.
I can see several reasons except for "unwarranted sense of entitlement" for this practice. It's all about reasonable expectations on the users' end: if a user can reasonably expect the website will behave some way, then not doing it this way can be detrimental to him. For example, many people expect "help" links (like the one next to the HN comment box) to not make you leave the page and rely on the "back" function to restore your painfully typed comment once you realize it does. They may be wrong in expecting this, but this seems like a perfectly rational safeguard against accidental data loss, so going against this could very well "increase the user's cognitive load".
As for the breaking the back button, my previous point was that the back button is not as important anymore, in part because a) a lot of things break the back button because dynamic content has made it much easier to do so and b) multi-tabbed browsing is now widespread and users may not be as confused by the fact each window/tab has its own browsing history anymore.
There are plenty of contradicting effects (precisely the reason why you and I can legitimately feel different about this issue) and the point of doing an actual study is to be able to measure them so we can compare them and say which trade-offs are worth it and which aren't.
> I think that desktop browser users expect that their tabs generally won't get reloaded
But they do get reloaded. There's absolutely no guarantee provided, and browser tabs will get swapped out of memory as necessary (eg opening lots of new tabs or apps).
This is easily solvable though: let me pin tabs that I really need to persist.
> it leads to "managing" them later in bookmarks UI to find+reload+delete them
I agree. There is definitely less UX friction with tabs, and I can live with 20-30 (50 maaax) and only some of the time.
But 100 ephemeral and much more? most of the time? IMO this is just unwillingness to improve the system. You can definitely get less friction dealing with most of them as organized bookmarks than wild tabs.
> tabs already have the HTML downloaded and visually pre-rendered
Most new browsers purge tabs from memory, so the instantaneity is not there anymore.
> And it is very easy to avoid having them without losing anything if you want
It wouldn't be for me. I tend to keep hundreds of tabs open for various reasons. And when I reboot and Chrome screws up reloading my session, it's super frustrating. Do I _need_ those tabs open? No. Does having them open save me a 5-10 seconds a hundred times a day? Sure does.
> > it’s hard to select text, hard to search on a page, hard to have multiple tabs, hard to move data between apps
> excuse me? It's harder to select text or search text in browser than in desktop apps? What? Text search is one ctrl-f away on ANY web page. Switching between tabs in a browser is alt-num.
That is clearly about mobile in contrast to Desktop.
> from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose context of the previous ones...
Could you give a few examples of this? I still can't think of anything particularly common that would reasonably justify more than a dozen tabs at once...
> i think browsers could be doing much more than just tabs and bookmarks to help people organize, because right now it seems like the equivalent of a desk with lots of papers strewn around where someone grabs yet another blank peice to start writing on...
Yes, I completely agree. I'm working on a piece of software that goes several levels beyond what browsers currently offer for information organization, and (per the topic) it optimizes for CPU consumption at the expense of memory, for the reasons I gave in my comment. However, for the browsers that we have now, bookmarks are much better for organization than tabs. You can tag them, name them, and put them into folders - none of which you can do with tabs.
> Finally, there are very few cases where you should have a large number of Chrome tabs open anyway.
from what i observe in others, it seems that tabs get created when a new task needs to be done in the same site (that is already open) but dont want to loose context of the previous ones...
from my own personal experience, i like to reuse them as much as i can, but it gets harder as more and more get added, its easier to start from scratch and get a new tab open and go where i want to go...
i think browsers could be doing much more than just tabs and bookmarks to help people organize, because right now it seems like the equivalent of a desk with lots of papers strewn around where someone grabs yet another blank peice to start writing on...
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)
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