Tabs don’t scale
Even Firefox, the other big place I live, really wants to be Emacs. Tabs don’t scale. Tabbed browsing was revolutionary in the same way adding more tellers to a bank was revolutionary: it’s, like, 4x better. w00t. Emacs offers the unique ability to manage its open buffers in another first-class buffer, as a list. Imagine what your filesystem life would be like if the only view of a directory was one tab per file. Go to your pictures directory and watch it start vomiting tabs out like it tried to swallow a box of chiclets. Fun!
Steve is explaining why tabs don’t scale, they reach their limit rather quickly. He is explaining this from the context of the Emacs buffer system which is great but probably isn’t known to everyone. So in short: Emacs doesn’t used tabs, it simply displays a list in a global window. This list is searchable and scales vertically.
Is this useful ? If you’re using 3-5 tabs, I’d say: no. The switch to the global list can be annoying. If you’re using 10+ tabs the list kicks ass. It can contain a lot more data without having to resort to some gimmicky feature to show the hidden tabs.
Now to bring this slightly higher, the reason I wrote this was this tweet, browsers could use a list as well.
I want a chrome://tabs link, a window that shows me all my tabs, and is easily searchable and manageable. Model it after the chrome://downloads/ window, replace the buttons with useful buttons for tabs (ie save to bookmars, rename etc.) add keyboard shortcuts and I’m a happy camper.
Update
Damn, Firefox is already on the case
