Given these statements out-of-context, I’d be highly tempted to think that OneTab plus Pocket and some Pocket Beeminder goals would do quite well for serving the same purpose, while also keeping your workspace much less cluttered and much more conducive to deep-work-style concentration.
But maybe I’m missing something?
OneTab, Pocket, browser bookmarks, an ad-hoc Excel spreadsheet, and so forth are all the same in category of where tabs go to die.
Perhaps with a Beeminder goal for it you’d be able to go back and dig some out occasionally. Maybe. But activation costs are important. If it’s not right there it’s not going to happen, at least not without a surprising amount of difficulty. (Which, yes, Beeminder can help overcome. But you’re just making it hard on yourself. It’s enough of a challenge when the activation cost is low.)
Or put it another way: Tree-style tabs are an amazing way of organizing information. You’ll pry them from my cold, dead hands. The difference between having 1000 tabs open and organized, in neat clusters and easily accessible with a click, versus a flat dead list is like night and day.
But to be fair, I guess that non-tree-style tabs are themselves that kind of flat unorganized list. I can understand that if you don’t use tree-style tabs, this would be comparable. Even possibly, strange as it sounds to me, tabs stored in Pocket or OneTab or whatnot might be more accessible and searchable than if they were in your browser’s linear tab bar.
Don’t get me wrong, do what works for you. But in my mind, organizing research and digesting research are two different things. I would think that a linear backlog in something like Pocket supported by a Beeminder goal would be a sufficient process for staying on top of reading & review. At that point, you could then decide how to store that research long-term, if it indeed proves to be valuable.
Note that this is explicitly not meant as long-term storage. That’s a separate problem, as you know.
Nothing beats accessibility of having them right there as tabs, capable of being flicked through at will. (And flicked through in a far more efficient way than if they were linear, because nested things can be bunched into topics.) I think it is similar to why some people like to use e.g. Workflowy. It lets you hold ideas in a simple yet graspable way.
To be clear, I don’t really spend any time organizing or curating them except incidentally to accessing/reading/browsing them. But the nature of tree-style tabs leads naturally to related things grouping together.
But I think that different people have different styles of working: it is said that some people are best able to concentrate with a tidy desk, whereas others get irritated if they don’t have exactly what they need within arms reach, easily accessible when needed. Insofar as our browser tabs are the virtual equivalent, it’s perfectly reasonable that different people have different ways of relating to them.
Can you elaborate on the workflow you’re envisioning using OneTab and Pocket? I’m not sure how OneTab works but you’d need to be able to add and remove tabs to the list.
They would be if they worked well. But TreeStyleTab is extremely buggy. Often I’ll click on a tab and it’ll open a completely different tab. Or I’ll close tabs and they stay open on the top tab bar.
And I don’t know how you get Firefox to work well with that many tabs open. It’s incredibly slow and constantly crashes, and when you reopen, the tabs aren’t loaded, obviating the convenience factor of having them all open.
I use TreeStyleTab because it’s the only game in town (that I know of) but it’s buggier than Beeminder and extremely frustrating. Are you not getting these problems?
Also - can you tell me how you process tabs? Like, say a tab is there as a reminder of a larger project that will take hours to do and you can’t do it now. Will you close it and add the project to a list somewhere? Or do you only close it when the project is actually done?
I have around 4 Firefox profiles, each with maybe ~300 tabs right now. On my computer, opening one takes ~3 seconds. (Opening an empty profile is almost instantaneous, maybe a quarter second.) So that’s slower than it would be if I had no tabs open. I’ve not experienced any slowness of anything else other than startup based on the number of tabs open. I don’t think that Firefox crashed on me at all in the past year or more.
What’s the specs of the computer you’re using? How much RAM, how much swap, what operating system, is your swap on an SSD or an HDD?
I do suspect these things matter more than most people give it credit for. For instance, I notice that often half or more of the RAM that Firefox is using at any one time is typically swapped out (and this swaps in an out as Firefox). If my swap space where on an HDD I’d imagine that I really would have a lot of slowness while browsing that I don’t currently experience. I’m not saying that specifically this is what’s happening to you, but my point is that these things really can matter.
It is true that TreeStyleTabs is a bit buggy like that sometimes. It’s a bit annoying, but it’s not all that frequently that it does that, and when it does I Ctrl-q and reopen Firefox, which as I mentioned takes around 3 seconds. So a bit annoying, but not the end of the world.
(By the way, I don’t use the top tab bar at all. I hide it with userChrome.css. My userChrome.css file looks more or less like this:
#TabsToolbar, #sidebar-header {
visibility: collapse !important;
}
#TabsToolbar {
margin-bottom: -21px !important;
}
That conveniently hides the sidebar header and the tabs bar. I also use the following CSS in the TreeStyleTabs preferences:
.tab:not(:hover) .closebox {
display: none;
}
.tab {
padding-top: 3px;
padding-bottom: 3px;
transition: background none !important;
}
This hides the ⨯ symbol to close tabs except on one I’m hovering over, and it shrinks the tabs vertically slightly so that more of them fit.)
The convenience factor of having tabs open comes, in my experience, not in that they are already loaded, but in that they are right there, accessible and browsable. I really don’t like it when I’m trying to focus on something, but I need to leave that aside and go dig something up. If it’s right there, in front of me in my tabs, it’s that much easier and that much less likely to disrupt a state of flow. (I also use the % prefix to search in my open tabs sometimes.)
This relates to what I was discussing with @narthur: some people like having clean desks because it helps them focus, whereas others can’t focus unless they have everything they need within arms reach, without the threat of being disturbed by not being able to find something that might be needed.
I try not to use tabs as reminders: I’ve got other reminder systems for that. That said, yes, I’ve got groups of tabs open that are meant as a resource for when I get to this or that project. (This turns out to incidentally make my Beeminder goal for my tabs also nudge me into getting certain projects done, if it means that I’ll get to close 10+ tabs. (Or into realizing that I’ll never get around to a certain project that’s not actually important to me, and deciding not to do it, in which case I also will close the tabs.))
Hey zzq, since you’re a fellow Tree Style Tabs fan, do you know of any way of getting past the width limit on the side bar? I can’t seem to drag it wider than about 415 pixels.
ETA: figured it out!! This works!!
#sidebar {
max-width: none !important;
}
Also, do you know how I can get numbers back on the tabs? I used to have them.