Originally published at: Do You Use It? Browser Tab Management - TidBITS
Tab overload in traditional Web browsers prompted many people to try Arc, The Browser Company’s innovative browser that completely rethinks how tabs work (see “Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web,” 1 May 2023):
- Arc positions tabs in a left-hand sidebar, which enables users with more than a handful of open tabs to read their names. Other browsers are increasingly following suit (see “A Roundup of Vertical Tab Support in Mac Web Browsers,” 5 June 2023).
- Arc replaces bookmarks with a unique and more sensible concept: pinned tabs. These pinned tabs remember their designated URLs, open in place rather than creating new tab entries each time you click them, remain in the sidebar even when closed, and can be organized into easily accessible folders, much like the Finder’s List view. This behavior differs from Safari’s pinned tabs, which automatically update to reflect the last page loaded. It also contrasts with Google Chrome’s easily closed pinned tabs, which are essentially just left-aligned regular tabs.
- Arc can automatically archive unpinned tabs (“Today tabs” in its parlance), ensuring that tabs you haven’t used in hours or days no longer clutter the interface.
- Arc defaults to opening external links in standalone Little Arc windows. Since Little Arc windows don’t support multiple tabs, when you’re done with one, you either close it or convert it into a Today tab in one of your workspaces. Little Arc windows make it easy to avoid building up random tabs when you links in other apps.
Unfortunately, The Browser Company claimed that portions of this approach were too high of a “novelty tax” and prevented many people from switching to Arc, so it took a different direction with its new Dia browser. Although Dia retains Arc’s approach to pinned tabs as persistent pages rather than sticky but changeable (Safari) or ephemeral (Chrome) pages, it gives up on the sidebar.
Dia reverts to positioning tabs at the top of the window, similar to Chrome. Unlike Chrome, which allows you to open so many tabs that their favicons overlap, Dia prevents its icons from becoming too small. After a certain point, remaining tabs become accessible through a drop-down menu on the left side of the tab bar. When you switch to those tabs, Dia provides no visual indication of your location in the tab stack, which can be disorienting.
Personally, I think allowing an arbitrary number of top-mounted tabs is poor interface design. It works in a dashboard with a small, fixed number of tabs, each with enough space for a readable name. But when the number of tabs grows, it quickly becomes unmanageable. I’ve been using Dia for only a few weeks, and I’ve organically ended up with 58 open tabs. Many point to different pages on the same sites, and most can and should be closed, of course, but nothing in Dia’s usage model automates or even encourages that.
While I hope I’ve helped you think more about how tabs and bookmarks can and should work, my real goal here is to determine if tab overload is actually a problem. If most people open only a few tabs at a time and close them when finished, then maybe The Browser Company was off-base with Arc’s approach, even if it made me vastly more productive. But if many people have more tabs than can easily fit in a top-mounted tab bar and find it easier to open a new one than to locate an old one pointing to the same site, then persistent pinned tabs might be the direction we should be going.
So, I ask: *How many tabs do you currently have open across all windows in the browsers you use regularly?* As you’ll see, the questions distinguish between pinned tabs and standard tabs, partly to see how common pinned tab usage is. (Feel free to fudge if something has caused the number to deviate significantly from your norm.)
- 1-10
- 11-25
- 26-50
- 51-100
- 101+
- 0
- 1-5
- 6-10
- 11-15
- 16-20
- 21-50
- 51-100
- 101+
