Not only does it force me to focus a bit more, but in my experience it loads pages significantly faster than Chrome or Firefox. Which I wouldn't have thought possible, but there you go.
Also, make sure you use a recent version if you need the Web Inspector.
The browser you want is Internet Explorer.
(I know, right? But I'm serious!)
IE lets you turn off tabbed browsing completely with a simple settings change. The following steps are how you do it in Windows 7/IE 10, they may vary slightly for other versions of Windows or IE.
1) Go to Control Panel > Internet Options.
2) Go to the "General" tab.
3) Click the button labeled "Tabs".
4) In the dialog box that pops up, titled "Tabbed Browsing Settings," un-check the box labeled "Enable Tabbed Browsing."
5) Click "OK."
That's it, you now have your 1998-style tabless browser! Enjoy.
But smacktoward, I'm not on Windows! What do I do for a tabless browser on other platforms?
Despair, mostly. You can turn off most tabbed-browsing features in Firefox (go to Options > Tabs and un-check everything), but all that does is suppress things like new windows opening in new tabs; you can still manually open new tabs if you want to. AFAIK Chrome has no way to turn off or suppress tabbed browsing at all.
But come on, you're looking for a real Clinton-era browsing experience! Chrome didn't even exist back then, and nobody used Macs. So spin up a Windows VM, un-tabify IE, pop in a Third Eye Blind CD and go to town.
NOTE #1: K-Meleon's last update was 3 years ago.
NOTE #2: If you are using multiple proxies it has a built-in menu to switch between them. This is its "killer" feature
Nowadays I have a personal rule: If there are more than 10 tabs per browser, close until 10 tabs remain. Unless one of the tabs is this: http://i.imgur.com/9yacZ5b.jpg
Ideal solution (IMO) is multiple browser windows horizontally and tabbed content within each vertically.
My two cents: The human behavior on tabs is surprisingly akin to garbage collection. Therefore I think we need some solution inspired by the incremental, generational GC. Gradually disappearing tabs may be such solution, for example. Many tabs are created in a group, and such group is garbage-collected altogether; pinned tabs behave like a statically allocated memory; the GC has to be able to determine if the tab is created in the context of other tabs or it is independent to others; if I don't want tabs to be disappeared then I can go to the tab for the extended period to signal the GC not to hide this tab for now; etc.
Basically, I never use bookmarks anymore - when I'm researching some topic, I do a bunch of searches, open a bunch of interesting results, and when I need to task-switch to some other topic I shuffle them all off to a tab-group, name it, and come back to it weeks or months later.
Another good application is having a tab-group per project - I can have a collection of tabs with API docs, SQL docs, specifications and such, and stash all that state and restore it almost instantly. As added benefit, since Firefox's AwesomeBar will prefer to complete from the names and URLs of open tabs, an easy way to switch to, say, the "CREATE TABLE" docs when I have a dozen identically-iconned tabs open is to just say Ctrl-T, "CREATE T", Down, Enter.
I noticed that I am really using tabs as a form of nascent bookmarking. Each window is a group or project and serves as a reading list, and then each tab is an item to read.
With option + click it is easy to add items to the reading stack that you can go back to later.
This could all be replaced with a simple plugin that manages these stacks in a sidebar. You could then go back to using only a single window and the tabs as collections.
Bookmarks are too permanent, while tabs are too temporary - browsers need something in between that is a way of arranging what to read next.
They destroy state. They lose their place on the page. They're still not immediate. They've broken server sessions so often that I have (as most have, I imagine) conditioned myself to completely avoid using them.
Tabs were invaluable in the days of slow connections. But new pages load pretty fast these days. The problem is getting back to the original page is fraught with trouble.
My tab coping strategy is - just keep them open, every few days close all. If I havent checked it in 24 hours chances are it is not important.
"Whenever you find yourself with too many tabs, click the OneTab icon to convert all of your tabs into a list. When you need to access the tabs again, you can either restore them individually or all at once.
When your tabs are in the OneTab list, you will save up to 95% of memory because you will have reduced the number of tabs open in Google Chrome."
I do know by experience that 256 is NOT a limit.
Please forgive the ridiculous chrome webstore URL, but here's the extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-count/cfokcacd...
My current method is to split tabs across various windows. I have 61 tabs open across eight windows (general, project, travel research, accounting, time tracking, articles, etc). It was 80+ last night but I made an effort to cull a few.
Sometimes I use tabs like bookmarks, storing things for later. Articles to read, Wikipedia pages I want to explore, music mixes I plan to download or stream, something I will buy when I can be bothered remembering the password for that store account, etc. It's quite pathetic really.
* https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
- Tabs you don't care about will get closed. Even ones you think you care about but you don't really. If you cared you would have access the tab recently.
- Tabs you do care about you will action appropriately. Either by finishing the task or by putting it into some kind of todo list/kippt/bookmarking/read later/etc.
I find having too many tabs open is taxing on the brain. It makes you feel stressed because you have so many unfinished things to do. It also prevents you from focusing on what is important.
And since one window is rarely enough, I now have different windows for different contexts - HN and related reading have their own window, projects have their own etc. All in all it works out pretty well.
in other words, use disk-space instead of memory...
-bowerbird
