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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

#121
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…

The problem is that too many dump GNOME and KDE for their twm flavour window manager and then it is no wonder that these ideas get lost among GNU/Linux users.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#122

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".

I keep a few tabs open, and close the browser regularly.

A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.

However as time has gone on, I've been surprised to find I may have the rare behavior and it is common for people to work this way.

So.. maybe this is a way he can backup his "filesystem" and not suffer a nervous breakdown when his machine reboots or some othe browser failure where he loses his world.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#123
post #78
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you just want to close all tabs then in Firefox right click a tab and select "Close Other Tabs". Also, you can control-click on tabs to apply commands the the whole set, such as closing them, sending them to your phone, etc.

In Firefox, you can click at tab bar and select "Select all tabs", then bookmark them all, then close them all. Also, "Auto discard tab" plugin does a good job by keeping unused tabs closed, to save resources.

I'm not sure an addon is necessary for that. Firefox automatically unloads any tab that hasn't been used in a while.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#124
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?

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 a…

It helps if you use tags more than folders for bookmarks, that way you can have a page marked as "dogs, computers", another as "dogs, pizza" and then filter to dogs to see both. It also helps (in firefox) if you know the special symbols you can put in the address bar for filtering. * for normal bookmarks, I think + for tags, and % works for open tabs. Follow them with a space and your keyword.

I've been using qutebrowser mainly for a couple months now, and I find the way bookmarks and quickmarks fit into the standard open or open in new tab dialogue feels very powerful. I often am just hitting O to open in new tab, typing a few characters, and picking a result from bookmarks or history. Searching and going to a URL happens there too. I try to use either descriptive names like "guix-bug-issue" for quickmarks so they show up when I type any of those bits (bug and issue intentionally redundant so if I think to search either, it comes up), or I use very shorts strings like "lfm" for my last.fm profile. In the case of these shorter ones, you get the added advantage of being able to go there without looking. If you type an exact quickmark name in the box and hit enter, it goes straight there, you don't have to wait and look over the suggestions in the box.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#125
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…

I think the first OS with this functionality to be IRIX 6.3 in early 1996. It integrated Netscape Navigator to the 4DWM file manager, and allowed you to browse both HTTP and FTP, and also audio CDs and even audio DATs if you had a DDS drive!

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#126

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".

I have the same problem. I'm currently testing out the new tabmanager.io extension that seems to have a lot of potential.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#129
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here, currently sitting at 300 tabs ( Lost about 800 a few weeks ago from Safari crash again ). I just wish the Show All tabs on Safari put up a list of tabs so I could quickly navigate through them ( and selectively close them ). Right now Show All Tabs Reloads all the tabs. That is the same on macOS and iOS. Your phone gets quite warm doing it.

Show All Tabs on iOS definitely does not reload tabs. I know on macOS it used to force all tabs to load but I had the impression lately that it wasn’t doing that anymore (though I rarely use this feature).

iOS reloads them ( or partially load them ) as you scroll through it to get a screenshot. I tried it just now. Or they somehow saved a Screenshot of it. ( But then there is no reason why macOS safari isn't doing the same. )

macOS does the same except without the scrolling.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#130

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.

So one thing really cool about KIO is that any KDE application can understand KIO URIs. You can paste any KIO URI into any application's file open dialog box and it'll retrieve it. So for example, you could open any KDE media player, paste in an audiocd:// URI, and it'll play the specified track from your CD. And it also meant that any application could open remote files without having to manually download them first…

How does it work internally for non-KDE apps? GNOME's equivalent, GVFS, uses real FUSE paths at /run/user/1000/gvfs. Does KIO do the same thing, or copy them to a temporary directory before sending the path to the application?
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