Option for managing tabs based on sessions/collections (instead of windows)

nmhung1985 commented 5 years ago

Still a bit lost at the philosophy of managing tabs, so please excuse me. I'm a long time Firefox user, want to switch to Chrome for some reasons. Tried lots of tab management extensions on Chrome, but still have not found any work as well as the combo Tab Mix Plus + Session Manager on Firefox (Both are outdated on new Firefox too, so it's also one of the reason I want to switch).

Your extension has a nice way of popping out a bubble window to arrange, move tabs between columns. However, the way of managing tabs is windows-based (Each column is a window, moving tabs between columns means moving tabs from a window to another window).

And I have never liked the idea of managing tabs based on the windows they're allocated. With Tab Mix Plus, the first setting I chose was to make Firefox run in Single Window only, all kinds of links/popups will be forced to open as tabs in that Single Window. (The very good thing of that is ads popups are forced to be opened in my current Single Window, and could not slip and open hiddenly behind).

The irritating thing that Chrome extensions can't fix is the way Chrome do not transform tab bar into a scrollable or multi-row bar when there are many tabs, but instead resize the tabs to smaller, smaller, smaller tabs which makes it hard to see or click the tab we need.

That is why I really like the way your extension shows and manages tabs in vertical scrollable columns. However, as I don't like the philosophy of managing tabs via windows, I would like to suggest you create an option for users to switch to "Manage tabs via sessions/collections". With that option, a suggested interface is: there will be always a distinguishable section showing currently open tabs, and the rest is for saved sessions/collections

mikhoul commented 5 years ago

@nmhung1985 I was using Firefox too I think what you are looking is more like those extensions:

This extension https://morikko.github.io/synctabgroups/ would be great to manage tabs but it is NOT reliable at all with Chrome, it corrupt tab sessions sadly, moreover the dev seem to have abandoned the extension.

And to recover your session if Chrome crash use this extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/freshstart-cross-browser/nmidkjogcjnnlfimjcedenagjfacpobb

Regards :octocat:

nmhung1985 commented 5 years ago

Hi, thanks. I already had FreshStart and Cluster installed. (For session recovery, you may want to try Tabs Outliner, from my experience, it has always had good backups for (crashed) sessions). It looks like you have done quite some homework on tab management extensions as the ones you suggested are quite ok :)

Tab Manager works like Tab Organizer in its default favicon mode, a bit fun actually. However, when we need to see the tab titles/urls, it's not as good as Tab Organizer. Sync Tab Groups has potential, but yeah, it's sad that it has been abandoned, especially if it still has the bug you mentioned. TabSets does not have drag & drop function, outdated, and it uses some type of storage sync API that is limited to 8KB, so when I saved only 2 sets it started to give some "Quota exceeded" error.

I think in the end, we still have to use a combination of several extensions.

mikhoul commented 5 years ago

I've forked an extension to manage find and manage easily my tabs since I always have more than 25 at the same time usually and lot of time it is over 100 😉 .

It's especially targeted to people that use "The Great Discarder" extension . TGD will save you lot of memory✨.

Note: If you want to try TGD install it as an unpacked extension directly from Github since the Chrome Store version is outdated.

My extension is not published on the Chrome Store but it is easy to install as an unpacked extension, here's the link: Visual Tab Manager .

You can reorder the tabs via drag and drop, search quickly for any tabs and it will even search in the history for tabs.

Regards :octocat:

nmhung1985 commented 5 years ago

That explained why you seemed to had some knowledge on tab management extensions :)

Didn't know the author of The Greate Suspender created this TGD extension, even in his recent release of TGS, he didn't mention about TGD.

About your extension, sorry I didn't try testing it. But I have read the description and see the screenshots carefully. Actually, maybe many guys like the card view, but it's not my favorite, if my suggestion is taken, I would suggest a list view option. Maybe I'm in the minority, but the way Tab Organizer displays and manages tabs is exactly what I feel convenient: a bubble window, tabs are displayed in list view in scrollable vertical columns. So I usually suggest or seek those features while exploring extensions.

Hope you will improve and publish your extension on the Chrome store soon :)

Pauan commented 5 years ago

@nmhung1985 Thanks for your interest in Tab Organizer!

Tab Organizer v5 has a lot of planned features, including the ability to put tabs into different groups (even though the tabs are in the same window), and also auto-sorting the tabs by the time they were created or last focused.

However, I've actually done the opposite: I moved from Chrome to Firefox. And Chrome is missing some fundamental and important APIs which are necessary to make Tab Organizer v5 work.

So until Chrome gets the needed APIs (which probably won't happen anytime soon), I won't be creating a Chrome version of Tab Organizer.

@mikhoul Those links are really useful, thanks for sharing!

Pauan / tab-organizer

Option for managing tabs based on sessions/collections (instead of windows) #182