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Tabs Outliner vs. Bookmarks

Sirt 11 years ago updated by vladyslav volovyk 11 years ago 9

A brief evaluation of Tabs Outliner vs. Bookmarks

Thank for this very nice review. I think it worth duplicate it there and respond to it to clarify some things for people who will read that (the comment system in original blog is premoderated, and seems have some bugs, so not sure my comment will be visible). So, next go the original review from posted link.

+1

Tab management

Tabs Outliner is good for dumping selected tabs to it. It is not so good for retrieving selected tabs, as you have to sift through countless duplicates accumulated over different browser sessions. It does not provide for an easy way of organising things by grouping and/or tagging - especially if you're no fan of drag and drop. Search is also limited to Chrome's built-in Find, which can only search for words in web page titles in this case. Using Tabs Outliner for some time now, it ultimately made me look back to the potential of using Chrome's default bookmarks/search and tagging for tab management. The key here is not to let tabs accumulate, but rather save them as bookmarks and tag them, or even add them as todos in a task manager.

And now the my answer to this (short note - everything the original author mention is true, but the tool is not aimed meantime to cover this case, it is a bigger and more ambitious goal)

Tags are planned. Meantime i use set of predefined tags in notes like #design #toprint #ui #js-lib and then do search for this. Works for me. And it is a little more than "can only search for words in web page titles", no? Better search is also on its way, but the built in is not that bad actually and have some very nice features like highlighting the places in scrollbar. And this is definitely the first tool in which i do search through my tabs at all. And where do you find the tags in original browser bookmarks?


But the primary idea is not to organize anything. I never be able to do so. Nor with bookmarks, nor with the anything else. The primary idea to be some sort of free form notepad, and to deal with a problem of hundreds open tabs - to easily close them any moment you wish. And then, then next goal is not to organize all of this shit, but delete! But not trash all at once, but as selectively and timely as you wish. That is why drag and drop is so important, and the idea is that everything can be dragged on anything, that is why the delete screencast is one of the 2 screencast i post in Quick Start section.


So yes, for organizing, collecting and so on you will be better served with some other tool. When you find one please report - it is very interesting. No one is work for me despite i use dozen of them.


What i find as the best way to search and to retrieve the links - is the google!, not some limited personal bookmarks storage.


Saying all of this I should add that actually tags is fantastically useful, as i already said i use some primitive preserved keywords to emulate them, and this is the next big feature after adding the server side which i plan to implement - tags with autocompletion and the much better search (again, with tags auto completion and other cool features) 


Also will add that I use bookmarks very often, every day many times, to open often visited sites.

So this is not a replacement for bookmarks.

Take look on my bookmarks bar - a use them all every day (and as you see some of them in folders to open links in sets by one midleclick):

http://i.imgur.com/Vu4TIqv.png


that is a real screenshot from my current desktop, the bookmarks bar is actually longer... and you can even see some of my fake tags on it (really use it that way).


Thank you for your cascade of comments, Vladyslav. (560 words of comments on 132 words of a post is impressive! No wonder that the manual for Tabs Outliner is so convoluted... :) )


A few brief points in reply:

 everything the original author mention is true, but the tool is not aimed meantime to cover this case, it is a bigger and more ambitious goal

Thank you for agreeing with me. What can this goal for a tab management extension be other than tab management?

 And where do you find the tags in original browser bookmarks?

I add them to the bookmark title, prefixed with #. I can then search for them either in Google address bar (omnibox) or in the Bookmarks tab.

 But the primary idea is not to organize anything. I never be able to do so. Nor with bookmarks, nor with the anything else. The primary idea to be some sort of free form notepad, and to deal with a problem of hundreds open tabs - to easily close them any moment you wish. And then, then next goal is not to organize all of this shit, but delete! But not trash all at once, but as selectively and timely as you wish. That is why drag and drop is so important, and the idea is that everything can be dragged on anything, that is why the delete screencast is one of the 2 screencast i post in Quick Start section.

Organisation should be inherent in an extension called "Outliner". Tabs Outliner makes it easy to close tabs. But it does not render them useful for the future. And Tabs Outliner causes laborious and unnecessary work by sooner or later forcing the user to manually curate a long list of ever more duplicate tabs. This is all the more tedious since the only available tool is drag and drop.

So yes, for organizing, collecting and so on you will be better served with some other tool. When you find one please report - it is very interesting. No one is work for me despite i use dozen of them.

In case you missed it in my 132-word long post: "Using Tabs Outliner for some time now, it ultimately made me look back to the potential of using Chrome's default bookmarks/search and tagging for tab management. The key here is not to let tabs accumulate, but rather save them as bookmarks and tag them, or even add them as todos in a task manager."


> This is all the more tedious since the only available tool is drag and drop.

First of all it not just drag & drop. The tabs is mainly always grouped in some hierarchies, or at least by window nodes. So actually you most of the time will operate by dozen of tabs every time you will drag & drop something.


> But it does not render them useful for the future.

Seems our mileage is really vary, very useful for me for example, i often reopen and reorganize something saved, tag, comment and search all of this easily. That not to say that there is no room to improve. But to saying that it is useless... well, will not argue, want you money back? : )

Anyway, good to know this tool helps you to rediscover the bookmarks and find a better system for yourself. Hope Tabs Outliner will improves with a help of the users who really support it. And who knows, maybe one day it will acquit the Outliner title for you and you will install it back.


Best regards.

Yet you right - the better search is a must, and definitely must be done.


Also thinking about incorporating omnibox search as quick alternative...

+1

Also need to find better issue tracker, as i starting to dislike this system, which is cannot be configured to maintain chronological order of posts if they not cascaded on one another...