Fri, 16 Feb 2018 19:23:28 GMT
I HATE BROWSERS! Seriously!
I am used to the following Workflow: I have a feedreader with lots and lots of feeds and I first filter them according to their titles. Everything that sounds interesting will be opened in a new tab. The tabs load, the PC fan spins, and after a while, everything is loaded.
This way, I can load pages before I read them. Loading modern webpages can take seconds, while switching tabs usually took less than a second, and I can do something different while the tabs are loading. Especially when I am in a train, I like to read tabs which have already a loaded website. I usually had a multi-line tab-bar for the about 500 tabs I kept open.
Then, furthermore, I use tabs as bookmarks. I don't really see the big difference – from a user perspective – between bookmarks and tabs. Why the distinction? Why can't I just organize my tabs in groups, which are directories of tabs?
Well, Firefox was never battery saving, but at least it had lots and lots of extensions like, for example, Tab Mix Plus and Tab Groups Manager. Well… Until Mozilla decided to drop support for them. Now, Firefox is just another browser, and especially, it is a browser which does not perform too well. It has an extension Tree Style Tabs which does a good job at organizing tabs.
Palemoon still supports old extensions. I used palemoon for some time. But I am sceptical whether Palemoon will stay tuned with newer web standards and security.
And anyway, both Firefox and Palemoon are rather slow and keep draining my battery.
The obvious alternative to both is Chrom{e,ium} – which performs good for the casual user I guess, but is just terrible at handling many tabs. The tabs will degenerate to small "spikes" when too many are loaded. There are extensions which at least try to be a substitute for tree style tabs, but currently, none of them worked flawlessly for me.
And there is another drawback: Another feature of Firefox is that I could switch to a Socks-Proxy during runtime. This is not possible with Chromium.
I haven't tried Opera for long – it used to be an alternative, but meanwhile it appears like just being a clone of Chrome.
Now I am back at Vivaldi. Which has reasonable tab management in the sense that it at least supports grouping. I configured XFCE to remove the title bars from my windows when they are maximized. Unfortunately, Vivaldi draws its own window borders. You can make it show native window borders, but there will still be a bar above the window when maximized, in which there is only the Vivaldi-Symbol. And when switching to a side-tab-bar, the pinned tabs are expanded. I have openned lots of messengers, so that becomes a problem. Anyway, at least these are just minor UI flaws.