I don't know if I'm a "normal", but I kinda hate this trend to stick everything in tabs.
For example, I hate having to jump through hoops to disable tabs in Firefox. Which means using a janky extensions that usually is able to split the tab into a new window. Doesn't always work. I also have to go and manually tweak the browser chrome to hide the tab bar.
The way I see it, tabs and whatnot are a window manager's job. I don't want to have several levels of window management, each being handled differently by a separate app.
If you want to provide tabs, go ahead, but please don't force them on me and let me disable them. I'm OK with having to modify some obscure config file if you insist on removing preferences from your UI. Heck, if I could compile firefox with a special feature flag, that would still be better than the current situation.
Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
What window manager are you using? And how many windows can you comfortably manage with it? On my current machine (KDE on 1366x768 screen), after 10 open windows their titles disappear, leaving only window icons. And "comfortable" number for me is even lower - no more than 5 windows on a single virtual desktop.
But I'm a tab user, and would like to hear about other approaches.
I use i3 (standard, no gaps), so the tabbing mode works particularly well as a replacement for window tabs. I can probably go up to twenty windows open on a given virtual desktop in tab mode with no issue. I usually use a 24" 3840x2160 screen in 100% mode and zoom in the content. This works well enough even on my 14" 1920x1080 laptop, but I avoid doing "serious" work on it, since I don't like being hunched over and the screen is a bad joke.
Yes, when there are many tabs open, at some point, I can't distinguish them easily anymore, especially on the laptop. But the same happens with tabs. At least I can scroll my mouse wheel to change between them, which didn't use to work with tabs.
My coping mechanism is saving the tabs I want to keep for later as bookmarks. Getting back to them has the same kind of probability as when I used to use tabs. But the win of this approach is that I don't have open webpages hanging around eating resources.
I've also found that there are basically two ways I use my computer:
1. I'm just randomly browsing, and I am going to open a zillion tabs (say while browsing HN) but then I'll read them and close them sequentially. No jumping from one to another, so the tabs being small is not an issue.
2. Having several windows open that I all need while working. In this case, I'll set them up in some tiling setup, usually an editor / terminal where I work on one side of the screen, and multiple browser windows in tabbed mode on the other. I then jump back and forth between the two sides. If I need to access a specific browser window that's not visible and there are too many open to know where to click (which does happen, but rarely) I'll just use the jump to window function of rofi in fzf mode where I type in a part of its name and press enter. This isn't perfect, but it works well enough for me. Since i3 doesn't have an included "go back to previous window", I had to hack this on my own [0]. This could also be implemented by using window marks, though I've never tried that.
> Also, FWIW, the latest win 11 22h2 update brought tabs to the windows explorer.
Ah right, I remember reading that and noting that they always seem to playing catch up with KDE Plasma’s features. I doubt I have this update yes, but someday my work’s IT will thrust it upon us.
