I was certain Wavebox was going to be my last stop in a very long battle with browser tabs. I had studied the level of abstraction in numerous products. And even though I had passed on Wavebox about 8 months prior, when I came back to it, the organization of it was pure genius.
But then a recent update led to thrashing – something about what I did with cloud sync and google drive led to it taking a very long time to simply open a google sheet… it may have had something to do with a new antivirus I put in. But one thing was certain: the tab opened in Chrome in 1 second and took forever to never in wavebox.
OK, maybe I should create a chrome extension
My first solution to Wavebox thrashing was to go back to a chrome browser… and then I figured I would write a chrome plugin that would give me mac Finder type navigation of the hierarchies of tab abstraction:
I had in fact suggested this to the wavebox team awhile back and figured: now is the time to do it. But I decided to look into prior art before beginning.
so I hit up chatgpt (actually perplexity mobile) and began my usual foray into the world tab managers and hit upon Tab Extend.
Without going into detail let’s just say:
- Wavebox operates with the following containers Spaces -> Groups -> Tabs
- tab Extend operates with these containers: Workspaces -> Category -> Groups of Cards of Tabs
what this means is that you can pack more data in a single view of tabExtend than Wavebox. Now, granted Wavebox does have collections, but collections are an afterthought and not a natural way of using the browser…
So how does this play out?
- Let’s take a simple example of a Space called “Job”. This would be a Workspace called “Job” in tabExtend.
- Ok, now let’s say we add a Group in Wavebox under Job called “Morning routine”. We can create a category called “Morning routine” in tabExtend as well.
- Now let’s say that the morning routine has 4 sections, each of which has 10 tabs. Natively in wavebox, you are stuck with just tabs. Again, you could resort to collections within your groups, but it is not the natural flow of using Wavebox. To the contrary, tabExtend would easily accomodate 4 cards, each holding 10 tabs.
Vertical tabs in MS Edge to the rescue
as nice and tab Extend is, and as quick and memoryefficient as Chrome is, I need vertical tabs… Edge even allows me to nest them one deep if I want. thank god it is chrome-based… so I can use TabExtend on any chrome browser but strongly prefer edge because of the vertical tabs….
I had used MS Edge exclusively in the past as part of my war with tabs. But I had issues creating new profiles when needed.
tab Extend is not perfect
it certainly has some rough edges from my viewpoint. But I wont go into that. I’m cancelling my wavebox extension and riding the tabExtend train for now.
Ghost Browser costs $21/mo
A lot of my issues with tab Extend are probably solved in Ghost Browser, especially if one subscripiton allows meto use it on multiple profiles (containers for workspaces). But it better do magick for costing $21/mo. Both Wavebox and tab Extend have reasonable monthly payment plans.