Friday, January 13, 2012

Excellent plugin to view Firefox browsing trail as a hierarchical tree

I found a great plugin (add-on) for Firefox called "Tree Style Tab" that does an awesome job of organizing your open browser tabs in a hierarchical fashion that keeps track of nesting and the order in which you followed a trail while you chase down pages and information. It allows me to see the history of how I chased links and opened more tabs to go deeper down a search tree while researching some particular item. It gives an indication of the browser path or trail that you followed to get to a particular page in a tree hierarchy. It's similar to what I would call a "browser history tree" but is really about your current windows and tabs more than history.

Firefox Tree Style Tab Add-In


My problem: I use browser tabs. A lot. Meaning: it is not uncommon for me to have 50-100 of them open in 10-12 different windows at any given time. I usually know it's time to restart Firefox when it starts bumping up against the 2GB memory limit of a 32 bit process and I get 0.5 second delays when I type key strokes as it trundles through 2 GB of RAM trying to figure out what to do. Call it ADD, or whatever, but I use lots of browser tabs.

A typical use case for me is to chase down a technical solution to some problem I'm working on. It usually involves scouring Google and following trails of links looking for relevant information. One of the big drivers for having sooo many tabs is that I lose the ones I actually want to bookmark or otherwise make note of get lost among the other ones. I often want to go back up the tree a few pages to chase down the next set of potentially relevant links. Soon, I end up with so many horizontal tabs and windows that I can't keep track of ones that are actually useful as I assemble various pieces of the technical solution. The Tree Style Tab plugin allows me to get back up to the Google (or other) search that spawned my most recent train of thought. A similar case happens if I'm shopping for some technical item (e.g. a new PC) and need to do research around prices, specifications, etc. etc.

Awesome tool. I highly recommend it. I think it should be a standard feature of all browsers. Now, I just wish they had a version for Chrome, as well.


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