A Classic Extension Reborn: Tree Style Tab
This extension makes me sad. Not that this extension isn't done well, but I think the existence of it, and that it's on top of HN reflects a sad state of UI in our browsers.<p>Let talk about tabs. The reason that tabs exists is because we don't want to switching between windows when we have multiple tabs open. But think about it, why are tabs any better? When I have about a dozen tabs opened on Chrome, all I can see is a tiny favicon. Any more than that I only see an (x). Firefox and Safari are a little better in that their tab bar scrolls, but still only slightly.<p>The reasons we open multiple tabs is primarily for cross-referencing, and secondarily "preview", i.e. the intermediary state of article quality evaluation, the state between I-dont-want-to-open-this and I-want-to-save-this-for-reading-later, and/or I-like-it-so-much-I-want-to-bookmark-this-for-eternity.<p>How are tabs, tab ordering, top sites, tab preview thumbnails, tree tabs and any of these incremental "improvements" on tabs going to help us do xref and eval articles?<p>For cross referencing, I typically open one "root" page, and then drill down to the rest. For this use case, a hierarchical arrangement of pages is probably a good idea. An MRU and/or stack on top of that is even better because maintaining a tree traversal ordering in the head all the time is hard. Too bad FF took this one feature that doesn't scramble my thinking process away years ago. I know there's control tab, but that's not good enough because that's a "cross hierarchy" mechanism. As soon as I click on a tab that belongs to different "group", MRU is messed up. I really want MRU by groups.<p>To address this, I need to address why I'd click on a different tab in the middle of xrefing a group of tabs. This is usually because I'm taking a break, so I press Cmd-T and introduce a new group. The problem with how tab orderings are typically done now is, what the break is over, I still have a bunch of "pages" opened waiting to be evaled, but I do want to get back to the previous grouping. How do I do that now? My tab bar is full of tabs in various different states now. To solve this problem, I can open a new window and put a new group there, but the problem is, the screen is not that large a laptop, and I frequently maximize my browser. So any extra windows are just going to be hidden in the back and I'll forget about them until a month later.<p>I don't really need an actual side bar that takes up screen space all the time to show me the hierarchical relationships of tabs. I mean, it's only useful if MRU doesn't do what I want.<p>I don't know if it's just me, but I feel like the 40 year-old GUI pattern just doesn't work for browsers anymore.