Tab Candy Retrospective
Eric Kolotyluk
to Chrome, but Tab Candy brought me back.
I'm what you might call a "tab power user" or "tab abuser"
My home computer has 8 cores with 16 hardware threads and 12 GB of RAM,
while my work computer has 6 cores with 12 hardware threads and 24 GB of
RAM. For the most part Chrome is still the best, performance-wise, at
handling large numbers of tabs. I suspect it is because each tab gets
its own process (which really clutters up your task manager). However,
Chrome is really lousy at organizing tabs, in particular there is no
overflow mechanism like in Firefox.
Anyway, I really love being able group my tabs - this is the best
browser feature since tabs. Having the discipline to organize bookmarks
does not work well for me, and having tab groups makes it easier to
switch back and forth from one context to the next. As much as I love
tab groups, here are some area I hope see improvement some day:
1. When you start Firefox it seems to be trying to load every tab
everywhere.
* One problem with this is that I get open to a tab or page I
am working on, and some other tab demands input, which
switches to that tab, and they I cannot find my way back to
the tab, or even tab group I was last in.
* One feature that might be nice it to be able to navigate
back to the previous tabs you were just in. For example,
ctrl-(left arrow) or back and ctrl-(right arrow) for
forward. This would be different than ctrl-tab or
ctrl-shift-tab in that it would remember what tab you last
visited.
* Another feature that might be nice is that Firefox delays
loading tabs in groups that are not selected yet. For
example, when Firefox starts it only opens tabs in the
current tab group. This would speed some things up, as well
as minimize tabs from other groups grabbing focus.
2. Even with all the computing resources I have, once you have on the
order of 100 or more tabs going, things slow down noticeably. It
would be nice to be able to move tabs and tab groups to the
background or inactive state, and have this managed somewhat
automatically. Outside of tabs and tab groups, it would be nice to
be able to make some tabs inactive by pausing scripts and media
when they do not have focus.
3. Groups of groups. I don't need to say more on this, but I want it :-)
4. The current flat tiling of tab groups breaks down quickly with
large numbers of tabs. Groups of groups and multi-dimensional
viewing might help here.
5. I often have multiple tabs open to the same page because I forgot
where I was. It would be nice to be able to close all other tabs
open to the same page - kind of like a garbage collector for tabs.
Anyway, I thought I would post some of my experience with tab groups.
Cheers, Eric