TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem • Hacker News Board

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#181

Post by nicklaf » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 11:35 AM UTC

m463 wrote: post #122

cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #3

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 s…

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

For those in the comments who are like myself (and parent's friend) and have hundreds or even thousands of tabs open, I highly recommend the Panorama Tab Groups extension for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...

This extension adds back in the functionality that was removed from Firefox half a decade ago. It gives you a visual, 2D-map of arbitrary groups of tabs in a tile layout you can view with "Ctrl-Shift-F". Combined with the backup feature (just in case it crashes or gets corrupted, although this has yet to happen to me) and Firefox's built-in tab session saving option, so long as you have enough memory (I bought 40 gigs of RAM for this laptop after terrible memories of running Firefox on a Chromebook with 4GB of soldered RAM), you can basically browse as though you'll never have to close a tab again, AND also be able to stay organized.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#182

Post by anthk » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #180

silon42 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

perhaps they shouldn't be tied to a specific WM or even a DE.

Perhaps GNU/Linux should decide what it wants to be, besides yet another UNIX kernel clone. That is how Android and ChromeOS happen, or FOSS developers end up buying a BSD based proprietary desktop OS, or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments.

That's not a GNU/Linux issue, BSD's have KDE too.

Also, back in the day you could compile and run KDE perfectly on Solaris and Irix.

>or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments.

I/O is still crappy and limited.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#183

Post by easton » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 1:54 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #182

pjmlp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps GNU/Linux should decide what it wants to be, besides yet another UNIX kernel clone. That is how Android and ChromeOS happen, or FOSS developers end up buying a BSD based proprietary desktop OS, or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments.

That's not a GNU/Linux issue, BSD's have KDE too. Also, back in the day you could compile and run KDE perfectly on Solaris and Irix. >or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments. I/O is still crappy and limited.

Heck, KDE is even available on Windows (now just the applications, but at one point you could run Plasma to a certain degree IIRC).

https://community.kde.org/Windows

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#184

Post by chmod775 » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:14 PM UTC

Just a heads up that this is a potential security vulnerability because it essentially allows sites to put arbitrary files into your file system.

This might cause certain software to automatically read them (for instance to generate previews) and allow an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities in that software.

Think of an unsandboxed process generating a preview for a PDF file...

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#185

Post by javajosh » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #171

javajosh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, thanks so much for introducing me to the term "akrasia" because it works perfectly to describe a phenomena that happens to me as well. And my solution is similar, if admittedly much lower tech (I comment/uncomment lines of my etc/hosts file to switch modes). But it was the rest of your post, describing the way in which you're environment has morphed with you over the years, and how you've been able to really dia…

> I have to admit I feel some envy that you've been able to maintain a single coherent thread of evolution for so long What I find most interesting is how fundamentally it's changed over time while maintaining continuity over those years. In college, I had a tricked-out compiz setup with wobbly windows and a skydome and a wallpaper set via script and a bunch of other cool frills, a far cry from the spartan, productiv…

>Nothing too interesting here

Have you noticed your organizational approach change over time? I suppose this depends a lot on what you do with your computer, once its all setup!

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#186

Post by MisterTea » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:32 PM UTC

Interesting use of a file server.

On plan 9 we use a file server called webfs[1] which serves web pages as a series of directories containing files of parsed html and so on. It's basically a tabbed browser back end. A front end such as mothra or netsurf[2] can then use webfs to abstract the html protocol and replaces post/get with read()/write(). And it can be served over a network so you could run a webfs "server" and let multiple clients on multiple machines surf the web through a single webfs server. Bonus is you can also do webstuff from shell scripts so the back end is used by shell programs like hget which is the plan 9 equivalent to wget :-)

1. http://man.postnix.pw/9front/4/webfs

2. https://github.com/netsurf-plan9

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#187

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

anthk wrote: post #182

pjmlp wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps GNU/Linux should decide what it wants to be, besides yet another UNIX kernel clone. That is how Android and ChromeOS happen, or FOSS developers end up buying a BSD based proprietary desktop OS, or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments.

That's not a GNU/Linux issue, BSD's have KDE too. Also, back in the day you could compile and run KDE perfectly on Solaris and Irix. >or even Windows based systems, to develop software for GNU/Linux based cloud environments. I/O is still crappy and limited.

Ideas like /proc and ToolTalk come from Solaris, no need for KDE to get inspired.

Irix had similar ideas as well.

That is the thing, these UNIX workstations had a whole stack experience, not what Linux or BSD ever were or are.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#188

Post by caoilte » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:03 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #121

sho_hn wrote: 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.

KDE 4.0 dumped me.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#189

Post by tveyben » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 3:07 PM UTC

tveyben wrote: post #71

blackrock wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I open a new window to research a specific topic. Then I open up all the links on sub tabs. This encloses all my research for this subject in one window. Often times I have upwards of 10+ windows opened. Since some of the work spans over several days or weeks. I also take screenshots of relevant information. Which gets automatically labeled by date and time into a screenshot folder, and sub-sorted into months.

This is where I miss to be able to name each group-of-tabs (the window) with a name so I can manage (eg when alt-tab’ing) quickly. So window ‘topic-1’ have 10 tabs relating to ‘topic-1’ and the property ‘topic-1’ is visible in my WM. Is this possible (I have not -yet - searched ‘enough’ for this functionality...)?

I am very happy to have shared my thoughts here (and received good feedback and suggestions!), but the best is that it finally made me look into this need - and I am not the first (big surprise :-)

It turns out that just very recently exactly what I need was made possible in Chrome (currently only "experimental") just set this flag [1]. I especially like that it's possible without the need of third party SW.

This page [2] is what alerted my attention to the solution.

NB.: It does make me wonder why this feature have not existed until now as it seems so obvious, I mean ever since the introduction of the TABbed interface in browsers (which started pre 2000 IIRC) the (over-) usage pattern of tabs existed.

Anyway - even if I have missed something pre-existing I am now extremely happy to be able to name my TABS in Chrome!

[1] chrome://flags/#window-naming

[2] https://winaero.com/how-to-name-a-window-in-google-chrome/

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#190

Post by phatfish » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

chenxiaolong wrote: post #173

ognarb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disclainer: KDE developer Yeah, KIO is an awesome piece of software. Yesterday, a fuse interface was released[1] so that non-KDE software in Plasma also get most of the benefits of KIO. And speaking of browser tabs, Plasma Browser integration allows to switch to an open tabs from Krunner directly and it works with Firefox, Chrome and Microsoft Edge. [1]: https://feverfew.home.blog/2020/12/31/kio-fuse-5-0-0-release...

I had no idea kio-fuse was being worked on. This is awesome! gvfs (and its FUSE implementation) was my favorite feature of GNOME and was the reason I primarily used Nautilus on KDE on my work VM.

Yes, finally in 2020 Dolphin can open a file from an SMB shared folder without making a local copy, which basically made KDE unusable in any environment that involved editing files on a Windows share.

Took a while but it does work, bar a few minor issues. I have problems with certain applications not understanding Dolphin has already authenticated to a share. For example VLC will only open a file if the URI to the share contains the user name required to authenticate (smb://user@fileserver/Video).