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TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

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Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#22

This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".

Onetab is great for dealing with that.

https://www.one-tab.com/

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#23
A different kind of tab-based filesystem that would be nice:

Expose all the resources used in each tab in a virtual filesystem (JS, CSS, images, HTML, fonts, etc) in a folder for each tab. Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer.

This would be great for scraping with headless browsers. It'd let you use shell scripts or your favorite programming language's filesystem library to read/copy assets, rather than writing code with Puppeteer to copy files/data.

It would have to copy from Chrome directly though, rather than re-fetch the content

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#24
Wow, this is awesome!

My OS is heavily scripted and keybound, thanks to 15 years of cumulative incremental fixes and a kick-ass WM. The one thing that's frustrated me is the relative black box that my browser represents, and writing a shim between my WM and browser tabs has been on my TODO list for a long, long time (through a couple of aborted attempts due to a combination of Chrome's at-the-time obsolete documentation and probably-necessary security model).

I'm cautiously optimistic that this is going to represent a dramatic step function in ease-of-use of my OS, in the same way that i3 was.

EDIT: I should clarify that I did read the author's note that this is experimental, not secure, etc. I'm mainly just excited about having a jumping-off point to play around with and possibly hack on a little.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#26

This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".

1 - Right-click empty space next to the tabs and select 'Bookmark all tabs' 2 - Name the bookmark folder (within the top-level bookmark folder) something like: 'Tab-mess-from- ' 3 - Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time. You can close 200+ tabs in a minute. (or as other suggested, right-click any tab and use the option 'close other tabs').

> Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time.

Ctrl-F4 shuts down entire browser, Ctrl-W closes each tab with a press of w. This is behavior in Ubuntu and it holds true for most application windows.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#27
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As someone who has thousands of tabs open This behavior always confuses me. To what end? Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

Yes–I go back and read them occasionally. By keeping things open I get frequent reminders to look at things and sometimes I do.

I used to do this now I just search again and occasionally I will bookmark a page that is too valuable to miss in future searches.

This keeps my bookmarks clean.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#28
post #23

A different kind of tab-based filesystem that would be nice: Expose all the resources used in each tab in a virtual filesystem (JS, CSS, images, HTML, fonts, etc) in a folder for each tab. Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. This would be great for scraping with headless browsers. It'd let you use shell scripts or your favorite programming language's filesystem lib…

> Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer.

Isn’t that what happens when you save a page? Or is that not possible with Puppeteer?

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#29
post #13

This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".

> As someone who has thousands of tabs open This behavior always confuses me. To what end? Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'm organizing; everything from gift-buying to medical devices for a family issue to building a new workout routine for the pandemic. You can rack up tons of relevant tabs pretty quickly in these scenarios, and there's really no advantage to closing them in any well-managed environment (ie one that has non-rudimentary window management and a browser/extension that handles idle tabs with negligible ongoing resource use).

I probably have hundreds of "productive" tabs open, and that's before even getting to tabs that are serving as an "L1 cache" version of a read-it-later service. And all of this comes with extremely quick clean-up; once I buy the gift/finalize the routine/purchase the item, it's trivial to close the entire window for that task.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#30
post #28
post #23

A different kind of tab-based filesystem that would be nice: Expose all the resources used in each tab in a virtual filesystem (JS, CSS, images, HTML, fonts, etc) in a folder for each tab. Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. This would be great for scraping with headless browsers. It'd let you use shell scripts or your favorite programming language's filesystem lib…

> Basically Chrome Developer Tool's Sources tab but as files and folders on your computer. Isn’t that what happens when you save a page? Or is that not possible with Puppeteer?

I think they were thinking more along the lines of a live system. Where you could change the settings of the page in real time using the filesystem interface.
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