Tab collapse features

[chrisparnin]

Thinking of incorporating some of the features of the one-tab chrome extension.

I really like this extension; however, think some of the workflow can be adjusted to targeting just developer specific sites and handling the compiled list a little better.

Currently when I use one-tab, I collapse my tabs, but then forget what is in the list and eventually close and lose it anyways. I think this is because our retrieval mode is often retroactive and not proactive.

[ashemedai]

I also suffer from the way too many tabs open syndrome. I have not used one-tab yet. The feature does seem interesting.

The way I currently work with my tabs in my daily development work (both work and hobby) is that I use it as an extension on my Evernote, Jira, and such tools. That is, I use the tabs to maintain context for various projects, tasks, issues I am working on or researching. Given how often "flow" gets disturbed, this allows me to build up context quickly again. It could be that I do not touch some tabs for a few weeks, but keep them open, simply because I know that if I bookmark it or otherwise file it, it will move out of my mind.

So some grouping like you suggest would be useful. I guess it would position itself between a list and bookmarks, based on a descriptive tag or term. Firefox has some tab managing feature that allows you to create groups of tabs. Something like that, but less graphically spectacular would work well, I guess.

[chrisparnin]

@ashemedai Great comments, thanks for the feedback. I think you are spot on that as soon as you "shelf" an item it gets removed from our thoughts. Specifically, prospective memory often requires visual cues that we constantly monitor to maintain prospective reminders. If we kill the visual cues, then we often will kill the prospective memories.

I think this is exactly why we have the "open-tab syndrome". We need the clutter to keep things in mind, but this overwhelms our attention to the point we have to indiscriminately kill everything.

This will be something that will require lots of mental time to chew on. Mozilla does have some nice UX research on this topic: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/10/save-for-later/

[brow]

In Chrome, I use windows as per-task tab groups that I can cycle through with ⌘-`. I keep all of the Chrome windows in one OS X "space" so that I can only see one group at a time (especially important since one group is usually devoted to Hacker News and other distractions). I almost never "Bookmark All Tabs...", and I rely on "History > Recently Closed" to recover accidentally closed windows.

Apart from the above use case, I studiously avoid opening more than one window in Chrome or overlapping any two application windows in my workspace.

I try to lean on Chrome history search and Google web search's memory of my past queries to avoid keeping tabs open, just like I avoid using labels and stars in Gmail. But history search tends to suck -- many false positives, occasional false negatives, and a tedious interface for browsing results.