Tabbed browsing as a band-aid over poor UI, and the Tabs Outliner Extension for Chrome*
I posted a long rant on a number of browser frustrations yesterday over at the dreddit, result of which is I may have found a solution to many frustrations (below). The rant: http://redd.it/256lxu
Among the topics explored:
There are emerging roles for the browser which likely should be split: a documents management and reading client, an applications platform, a commerce client, and (mostly addressed through existing tools) multimedia access. As is often the case (and has happened with browsers already), I suspect that the new paradigm may emerge not by evolution of existing tools but by the emergence of new ones.
Tabbed browsing is a crutch used to provide for state management which fails miserably due to the memory overhead of keeping tabs actively open in memory, as well as failing to provide sufficient context.
The joys of Readability (or similar site simplification tools). The very sorry state of Web styling: more often than not, site styling is a net detriment to readability and utility, not a benefit.
A slew of other feature requests.
From a related discussion on Hacker News I was pointed at something which, on an hours or so's use, looks like it may actually address numerous of my concerns: Chrome's Tab Outliner Extension
I'm still evaluating it, and it's not quite the solution I was looking for, but this could well be the most revolutionary change to browsing I've seen since tabs first appeared (Firefox's Vimperator being the other contestant).
#browser #extensions #productivity #dreddit #chrome #firefox #readability