Random Snooze Tabs thoughts

[sheppy (Eric Shepherd)]

A few random thoughts about an add-on I think could be a huge win for my productivity!

• It would be helpful if, optionally, there could be a sound effect played when a tab is restored. Currently it’s somewhat hard to tell when this happens.

• Can the tab’s icon be made to flash when restored? Having it alternate between the site’s icon and something like a red bell or an exclamation point or whatever would make it easier to spot restored tabs.

• Options for where to put restored tabs would potentially be helpful: “Try to put it in the same tab” would try to put it back where it came from, then fall back to one of the other options if that tab isn’t available. Other options might include “New window” and “Current window”. It might also be helpful to have options to say where in the window to put it: “Before before first tab”, “Insert after last tab”, “Insert before/after current tab”, etc.

• Select which Container Tabs container to use for the restored tab, or whether to restore to the same container.

• Add a “Snoozed Tabs” submenu near the top of the Bookmarks menu; yeah, I know it’s a folder somewhere already, but it can be buried pretty deeply.

I’m sure I have other ideas – I love this thing and it has so much potential to become a key part of my workflow!

[adala]

Interesting ideas.

One thing I’ve concluded is that you might have too many tabs open. Is that correct?

No judgement here, but if that’s it, have you considered drastically reducing them?

Looking forward to your reply.

[sheppy (Eric Shepherd)]

I have about 334 tabs open across 22 windows. Compared with some people I know, that’s not many at all. That said, what made you come to the conclusion I have too many tabs open? All of the things I mentioned could happen even with just a dozen or so tabs open in one window.

Certainly the number of tabs I have open doesn’t affect the usefulness of any of these ideas, as far as I can tell…

[lorchard]

Sorry about the long delay in replying, but:

It would be helpful if, optionally, there could be a sound effect played when a tab is restored. Currently it’s somewhat hard to tell when this happens.

This should actually be happening - or, at least, it uses system notifications that should make a sound and summon a toast or bubble or whatever it is your OS does.

Can the tab’s icon be made to flash when restored? Having it alternate between the site’s icon and something like a red bell or an exclamation point or whatever would make it easier to spot restored tabs.

This is also something that should be happening - the tab favicon should cycle between the site’s and a gold bell over the course of (I think) 10 seconds. In fact, we have an issue open right now because it seems a little overzealous. If you’re not seeing that, that’s interesting. Though, the feature is a bit of a hack in that it injects code into the page to make the favicon change happen

Options for where to put restored tabs would potentially be helpful: “Try to put it in the same tab” would try to put it back where it came from, then fall back to one of the other options if that tab isn’t available. Other options might include “New window” and “Current window”. It might also be helpful to have options to say where in the window to put it: “Before before first tab”, “Insert after last tab”, “Insert before/after current tab”, etc.

Sounds like a good feature request! I think we try to restore to the window it came from, if that window is still available. Original tab order is hard to preserve over time, since the reference points go away after an opening or closing or two. But, first / last / current seem like interesting anchors.

Select which Container Tabs container to use for the restored tab, or whether to restore to the same container.

Yeah, I think that could be interesting for an ultimate Firefox feature. In our current WebExtension prototype form, I don’t think we cooperate very well with Containers.

Add a “Snoozed Tabs” submenu near the top of the Bookmarks menu; yeah, I know it’s a folder somewhere already, but it can be buried pretty deeply.

We should probably communicate the purpose of that bookmarks folder better. It’s only loosely related to Snooze Tabs in that it’s a backup we maintain of the tabs snoozed. That’s because if you uninstall Snooze Tabs, we have no hook to react to uninstall and so can’t give an option to save the current set of tabs snoozed somewhere else. In a proper Firefox feature, we’d probably have something more like a peer to bookmarks or at least a top-level item in the library

[adala]

You are quite right that the number of open tabs does not affect the usefulness of those ideas.

Basically what I got from your ideas was that there are so many open tabs that it’s hard to notice restored tabs, something hard to happen if you have only a few tabs open.

You might have good reasons for all these tabs and windows, but it seems to me that the effect it has on one’s brain can’t be that positive. For instance, you might have lots of pages constantly giving you updates on social media, email, news, etc. After a certain point this surely must be a source of anxiety and stress. There’s also the fear of missing something that makes one go through the tabs. Not to talk about the resources on a computer and the effect it has on the browser.

At some point the number of tabs may be a problem.

Sorry for the unsolicited advice, but I think that people could gain a lot by improving their information consumption or reducing its overflow.

But maybe I’m totally wrong and that’s just your alternative to bookmarking and using Pocket-like systems.

Peace!

[raffiking1]

Options for where to put restored tabs would potentially be helpful: “Try to put it in the same tab” would try to put it back where it came from, then fall back to one of the other options if that tab isn’t available. Other options might include “New window” and “Current window”. It might also be helpful to have options to say where in the window to put it: “Before before first tab”, “Insert after last tab”, “Insert before/after current tab”, etc.

I would like to be able to snooze entire windows with all tabs contained in them.

[sheppy (Eric Shepherd)]

I have lots of tabs because I work in the browser. As a writer on MDN, I may have four documentation projects ongoing at once. Each one has two windows: a work window, with one tab per page I am writing, adding, or updating, and a reference window, with source code, blog posts, multiple specification sections open in different tabs, etc.

I want to be able to snooze one-off pages that come along so I can look at them after I finish working; for example if I happen upon a link to an article I want to read about another topic. Those can be hard to find when they wake back up, if they get buried in a work window with 25 tabs for all the pages in a given API’s doc set.