I don’t know exactly what the driving purpose of Containers is, but I have been exploring it as a possible replacement for the wonderful treeTabs extension. I do lots of searching through github issues and navigation of my company’s internal wikis, both of which have me opening tons of short-lived tabs; I just need some way of wrangling them. The way I would do this with treeTabs is that tabs ‘spawned’ from some initial tab all end up in a hierarchy below it. It then becomes easy to manipulate all the tabs related to a specific task.
So far my experience with using containers has been great. It is much nicer looking, and being able to automatically open certain sub-domains in containers is lovely. However, there are some quality-of-life improvements that would make it even better for me:
- When looking through the tabs in a container, I find that the popup window is not wide enough for me to read the tab names effectively.
- When I mouse over a tab in the popup described above, the mouseover text isn’t the full name of the tab, it is the URL of the tab. I don’t think this is very friendly.
- It would be nice to create on-the-fly containers. If I am doing some sort of infrastructure management and am opening up 10 tabs to do so, it would be nice to make a container just for that. My current workaround is to have a container I’ve named ‘tmp’, but this feels dirty
- Along those same lines, it would be handy to have an option to close all tabs in a container. Currently I export them to a new window and close the window.
And the big one for me:
- I have two domains for work, each of which have a default tab group (wiki, code). When I am browsing the wiki (in my ‘wiki’ container) and I find a link to some code, I middle-click it. I would prefer if middle-click’s default behavior were to keep the current container for the new tab, but in this case Containers detects that the new tab has a default container and opens it in my ‘code’ container instead. I understand the current behavior, but it would be lovely if this were configurable.
Overall this is a very good feature and I am probably just a loud, opinionated developer, but I hope my feedback is helpful.