[xmonad] Dealing with large amounts of pages in a common web browser

[Ben Boeckel]

On Sat, 10 Jan, 2015 at 09:12:19 GMT, Troels Henriksen wrote:
> I have been using xmonad for some years now, and all throughout, the
> browser I have been using has been a private fork of surf[0], which is
> essentially just a Webkit webview in a window by itself.  However, I
> would like to switch to a more widely used browser (Chrome, Firefox,
> Conkeror, whatever) for usability and security reasons.

I'm an uzbl developer; nice to see others using that class of browser :)
. Anyways, I'm in a similar boat with the security bits (though I find
Firefox usability to be less than stellar) though. I do have TODO items
to implement at least request-policy, https-everywhere, adblock, and
some other addons I use ported over to uzbl at...some point, but time is
not always plentiful (there's also the WebKit2 port that needs to happen
and is more urgent).

> The nice thing about surf is that it opens a window per page, which
> means that they are all visible to xmonad, and navigable through things
> like GridSelect, which would not be the case if I simply had two dozen
> tabs open in Firefox.  However, sometimes tabs are nice - specifically,
> it's practical to use CTRL-clicking to open new pages in the background.
>
> Do you have any suggestions on how to deal with this?  Some combination
> of Firefox hacks and xmonad layouts?  How do you set up your browsers?

Personally, I just drag Firefox tabs around as needed. As for uzbl, I
use a mix of Tall, TwoPane, and Full layouts to manage lots of windows
depending on the case. Tall is used by default, TwoPane when I'm going
through a list of things (bug tracker, emails, images, etc.), and Full
for focusing on a single window. It also helps that I have things set
to, by default, pop up behind the current window and without focus.

--Ben