Color-Coded Tabbed Browsing

Color-Coded Tabbed Browsing

Imaging you're doing a lot of research on the web, and you know you're going to have a lot of tabs opened. Imagine having search results loaded in a tab in Opera. And you've got a second tab opened with search results on a different topic. Now imagine that you could make one of those tabs blue, and the other tab red. In that case, any link you click to open a new tab from the search results with the red tab would be red, and all the links opened from the page with the blue tab would also have a blue tab. Add more tabs and more colors if you like.

I read a message earlier from someone who said it would be nice if he could select multiple tabs and close them all at once instead of only being able to close them individually. But just imagine the convenience of seeing eight red tabs and knowing that you're through researching the topic that you'd set to have red tabs on all spawned links from your original search results page. You'd then be able to right click any red tab and select "close all tabs of this color", or "close all {%%%%} tabs", that percent thing being a colored block on the menu.

What do you think? That would be at least as effective as being able to CTRL+Click or SHIFT+Click individual tabs or ranges of tabs to close them.

Damaeus

I would like that, I don't think I personally would use it a lot but it can be very useful when having a lot of tabs opened.

+1

Only if it was something I could turn off.

Originally posted by ViperAFK:

Only if it was something I could turn off.

You wouldn't have to turn it off. There's no reason to. It's there lying dormant until you actually use it by selecting a color for a tab. There could be a menu selection available by right-clicking on any tab to "remove colors from tabs of this color" or "remove colors from all tabs". Having an option to turn off the ability to color your tabs would be like being able to turn off Opera's ability to maximize, restore or minimize the browser as a whole. You'd either use it or you wouldn't.

I would not want to see Opera make every newly spawned tab a new color, so if you were thinking something like that, yes, I'd want to have the ability to turn that off, but I didn't have that in mind at all. Say you already have ten regularly-colored tabs open, then you open an eleventh in a search engine, and you want to open five different pages from the search results in new tabs. First, you could select red for that tab, then all links you click into new tabs from there would be red, as well.

Damaeus

Also see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1368

I'm not sure if it can do what you want though, but it's interesting as something to get some inspiration from.

I installed it in Firefox. It has the ability to color tabs based on the domain, according to its description, but it actually changed the color of the tab when only the subdomain was changed (news.yahoo.com launched from www.yahoo.com). The color for each tab can be configured to change randomly, but since you can't select multiple tabs in Firefox, you can't even set a range of tabs to a specific color. You can set it to not specify a color at all, allowing you to set each color manually. If it could launch colors for new tabs according to the existing one, then that would be a significant improvement. It's certainly nothing to make me want to switch back to Firefox.

I find it improves usage of Firefox (just with the random colors), but I certainly wouldn't want to switch to it.

+1

+1 but with an option of turning it off

+1 with option to turn off for those who don't want it.

Also cross-ref this similar proposal.

personally -1, was enabled in IE at my work place. Was really annoying (until I downloaded Opera with the blessing of my IT-Guy, that is )

Originally posted by serious:

personally -1, was enabled in IE at my work place. Was really annoying (until I downloaded Opera with the blessing of my IT-Guy, that is )

Others have said they'd like it with the option to turn it off. I don't see why you -1ed it since it's not something that would work unless you actually made a choice to actually color the tab manually. Even those who said they want the option to turn it off aren't getting it. It's not necessary to have an option to turn it off. It would not even color the tabs automatically unless you select a color for the tab first. Then all tabs spawned from the colored tab would be of that same color. There's no need for an option to turn that off. You either use the feature, or you don't. Turning off such a feature would be like disabling the ability to minimize, restore, or maximize your browser.

Color-Coded Tabbed Browsing would make my life a lot easier. I'm typing this message with 17 tabs open. It takes some time having to find the right tabs when you're multi tasking.

I sort of like the idea. In my Firefox installation I also had an add-in which simply placed the background colour of the page your viewing on the tab as color there. This was VERY helpful as it gave you a visual clue and no need to read the tab title (especially with many tabs open and/ or long tab titles)
But as others say: Only if it is optional....

Multiple rows of tabs would be nice, too. Sometimes they get so small I can't read anything that's on them anyway.

Originally posted by Damaeus:

Multiple rows of tabs would be nice, too. Sometimes they get so small I can't read anything that's on them anyway.

You've had that a long time. Right click on the tab bar, choose "customise" and choose "wrapping".

+1

Originally posted by Stilezy:

Originally posted by Damaeus:

Multiple rows of tabs would be nice, too. Sometimes they get so small I can't read anything that's on them anyway.

You've had that a long time. Right click on the tab bar, choose "customise" and choose "wrapping".

Ah, nice. That's available on the bookmarks bar, too, but you have to select "customize" and then "appearance" to find it. "Wrapping" is not actually on the menu, and enabling wrapping disables the thumbnail preview on the tab bar.