DEV Community

Cover image for Increase your browser count to improve productivity
Lee Noble
Lee Noble

Posted on

2

Increase your browser count to improve productivity

The proliferation of SaaS and other web-based applications has led to my routinely having multiple windows open with dozens of tabs. I'll try to limit task-specific tabs by closing them down when task switching but that's not always possible, especially if the task(s) I'm switching to are temporary and I need to keep my main task tabs accessible. But what's harder to manage are things like Jira, the odd PHPMyAdmin window, github pages and sites I use to consume audio in the background. These tabs tend to stay open permanently, and they can get lost in background windows or buried in a myriad of tiny tab icons. Finding the one I want in a hurry isn't always possible. I've used various browser plugins over the years to manage task specific sessions but task switching remains painful.

Last week I idly Googled for site specific browsers and what came back was Fluid. This might be old news to some, but it's absolutely been revolutionary for me. Jira now has its own application icon on the Command-tab overlay and Dock, along with Overcast, Workflowy and client specific PHPMyAdmin instances. This has freed up my main browser for tabs relating ONLY to the task I'm working on (side-tasks in separate windows notwithstanding), which eases the burden of task-switching considerably. It's also made the possibility of switching to a new main browser more likely, since I'm no longer invested so much in the ad-hoc window and tab formations of Chrome.

Image of Datadog

The Essential Toolkit for Front-end Developers

Take a user-centric approach to front-end monitoring that evolves alongside increasingly complex frameworks and single-page applications.

Get The Kit

Top comments (0)

Billboard image

The Next Generation Developer Platform

Coherence is the first Platform-as-a-Service you can control. Unlike "black-box" platforms that are opinionated about the infra you can deploy, Coherence is powered by CNC, the open-source IaC framework, which offers limitless customization.

Learn more