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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

#91
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect it would be harder to pull off these days without launching chrome headless for example. Opening the page itself wouldn't include images/resources loaded over JS. It would also not work great with image atlases.

I think KDE still supports Konqueror, which implements things like this. It used to be KDE's file manager and web browser all in one app. I always found this to be quite logical. The underlying abstraction is called KIO. Unfortunately I have no KDE installation at hand, so I can't tell if dowloading all images of a webpage still works as easily. The Audio CD ripping feature should work without problems, though. Btw K…

KHTML came from kde before apple times

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#92
post #41

KDE on Linux used to have something similar in the late 90s - it allowed you to open a website URL as a directory listing, so you could browse the site's asset directories and open image files, etc. Think like a client-side generated version of Apache's index pages, but using your local file manager. It was a plugin to the VFS framework (KIO) the desktop and all the apps use, so it would also work e.g. in Open File d…

> Ripping a music CD into MP3s was similar - you'd open the volume in the file manager and see your tracks along with a virtual folder full of MP3 files.

AudioCD KIO is still working the same way. I'm ripping an old audio CD of mine to FLAC as I write this comment.

KDE's one of the oldest and best maintained feature is KIO backend. It's still alive and kicking as hard as in 3.5.x days.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#93
post #86

This is the best idea I've seen all year. You can make it so that every website is fully searchable and the data easily viewable/extractable. Set up the marketplace for user created plugins, the possibilities are endless. I would happily contribute $25k to this. reply if interested.

> This is the best idea I've seen all year.

Ba-dum tsshhh

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#94
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?

I derive close to zero value from bookmarks. The only value they provide is that they appear in the address bar during searches. They are organized in a linear fashion, they require constant maintenance and they are also not immediately accessible often requiring you to open a separate window. Worst of all even if you choose to do something as stupid as manage bookmarks you will now have to have to manage both tabs and bookmarks at the same time.

Tabs? They are easy to organize, easily accessible because they are always visible and they are powerful enough to completely remove the need for bookmarks which makes using bookmarks always inferior because of the downsides of bookmarks.

Now lets get to the actual point:

>Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?

I close tabs that I don't need eventually, bookmarks just keep accumulating because there is an easy method to add them, but actually finding or deleting bookmarks is a lot of effort.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#95

It would be cool if the DOM was exposed. Then you could write one liner bash scripts to do simple tasks like “download all images” or “delete script tags referencing spammyads.js”, all with nothing more advanced than find, cp, rm and mv in the shell. E.g. cp html/body/*/img/.hero-img/hello.png ~Downloads/ You would need some clever way to express the DOM with ids and classes etc but it could be done with some subdire…

This is exactly the kind of dumb idea I expected to see on HN

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#98
post #83

It would be cool if the DOM was exposed. Then you could write one liner bash scripts to do simple tasks like “download all images” or “delete script tags referencing spammyads.js”, all with nothing more advanced than find, cp, rm and mv in the shell. E.g. cp html/body/*/img/.hero-img/hello.png ~Downloads/ You would need some clever way to express the DOM with ids and classes etc but it could be done with some subdire…

Cool idea, but I'd worry about all the malformed markup.

I'm finding malformed markup has not been a concern of mine for many years. It used to be bad, real bad, but now I cannot think of the last time that I had to deal with malformed markup while scraping.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#99
This is the type of tool that I would love to love.

But experience tell me that any tool that interfaces with the browser will break in a year and a half. Depending on this tool will put me into a situation where I'll have to decide between preserving my workflow or updating my browser and possibly other software.

Maybe once there's more than 5 forks or a few hundred Github stars, I'll start to see where I can incorporate it into my workflow. But as it is, I've become wary of super-useful tools that are not yet in widespread use.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome only preserves browsing history for 90 days. Keeping tabs open can work around that limitation

Without even bothering to check, this seems like it can't possibly be true. You are surely not saying that the billions of Chrome users worldwide have no browsing history from September or earlier, right?

That's absolutely right, at least in terms of the Chrome browser history. I always found this limitation astounding.

I use the History Trends Unlimited extension to work around this (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/history-trends-unl...)

With 5 years of history the stats page is a bit slow to load but the search feature works great and it can export to CSV

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