Some usability notes from someone with too many tabs
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birdofprey last edited by
As someone who uses a TON of tabs for this that and the other five dozen things, I figured I'd make some public notes of some usability issues I have noticed.
First I would like to give some HUGE kudos to the Opera team for the tab hibernation feature and the ability to have tabs NOT load the second the browser starts. Browser crashes happen, no browser is 100% stable, but beyond that, sometimes Windows decides to restart to apply an update while I sleep, that means the browser has to be restarted. I have been using chrome for a while and that will decide to try and load several windows simultaneously which CRUSHES my machine, and even if I manually load each window in sequence, that's a lot of memory being used. That Opera can delay loading till I view a tab and automatically suspends is great (on chrome I use a tab suspender add-on to do the latter but it leaves MUCH to be desired whereas opera seems to manage just fine.)
Some issues, though is if I have enough tabs hibernated, opening new tabs doesn't actually work, you get a tab that forever loads and the URL bar says "about:blank". That's obviously a huge usability issue and the only solutions I have found are turning off hibernation (BAD) or reloading the browser (since tabs aren't immediately reloaded they aren't sitting there suspended which alleviates the issue for a time, but is a bit inconvenient). The irony, of course being that the problem occurs when I need the tab hibernation feature the most.
A second note. I really really miss the old session manager. I used to just save a set of windows I didn't need at the moment but may need later (eg. going between work, general time waster browsing and hobby window sets) so I could close them out. Didn't have to worry about stuff being in resident memory even hibernated, and didn't have extra windows to worry about. it was great. Now the options aren't as good. I have heard you can save windows to a speed dial group, but that's a terrible kludge. The other option is to use a session manager extension (for the record I have been using Session Buddy), that works reasonably well, but does still have some usability issues. BOTH of the options don't share state data (eg. tab history [ie. back and forward button]) and both bypass opera not loading tabs immediately since that only seems to happen on startup (obviously restoring a window with several tabs to a dozen doesn't cause that much of a problem unlike trying to load a hundred).
