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

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#211

Post by bayesianbot » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

netsharc wrote: post #63

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".

Vivaldi has a tabs panel that lists all open tabs (as well as recently closed ones) like files in Windows Explorer, you can multi-select them and hit delete, or indeed hit Ctrl-A and delete. Sadly afaik there's no filter to e.g. select all Stack Overflow tabs.

You can a) right-click a stack overflow tab, stack them and then close them all or b) control-ddubleclick one site and Vivaldi will autoselect all from same domain.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#212

Post by herewulf » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

popc0rn wrote: post #84

jwalton wrote: post #11

This is a cool idea. It would be nice to be able to blacklist some tabs though. For example, I wouldn’t want the text of my banks website easily readable by any random process.

You could probably run your bank website in incognito mode and avoid extensions. I do this all the time because I don't completely trust any of my installed extensions. Even if I did, they are auto-updated and their code can change at any time without any notice.

Good idea. You could also access your bank and other sensitive sites with a different profile:

    google-chrome --user-data-dir="/path/to/somewhere/else"

I use this switch and a directory from `mktemp -d` for remote debugging (--remote-debugging-port=1234). The debugging does not disturb my normal browsing and the profile is completely disposable.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#213

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:18 PM UTC

chmod775 wrote: post #184

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...

In an ideal system, that process would be sandboxed of course.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#214

Post by saagarjha » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

ksec wrote: post #131

zeckalpha wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari maintains a list of tabs in a plist. You can’t delete while Safari is running, but at least you can extract the list to back it up.

Yes. I immediately check that after it happened except the plist was empty. Firefox used to have similar problem with their json so after a few bug report with them they fixed it with another json.bak as redundancy. ( The good days of Firefox )

Time Machine has saved me more than once in this case.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#215

Post by skulk » Sat, Jan 02, 2021, 10:51 PM UTC

herewulf wrote: post #203

skulk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use qutebrowser in one-window-per-tab mode and EXWM[1] as my window manager (with ivy for switching buffers). It still needs some more integration but currently is my favorite solution to this problem. [1]: https://github.com/ch11ng/exwm

That's interesting. I've been looking at EXWM recently as I expand my emacs usage (I've been using XMonad for about 10 years). How do you group related tabs together? Or is this somehow not necessary? Have you noticed a significant difference in memory usage? qutebrowser turns into quite the memory hog over time. I have to periodically restart qutebrowser so my hundreds of tabs go into suspended mode. Even suspended…

I don't group related tabs together; I don't have a list of tabs on my screen anywhere and fuzzy finding with ivy-switch-buffer them is sufficient for me.

Unfortunately, I can't answer your other questions because I'm good at closing tabs :p

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#216

Post by iam-TJ » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 12:11 AM UTC

wutbrodo wrote: post #172

iam-TJ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issues with tabs, even with extensions that organise them: * sheer mental challenge of quickly relocating related tabs and the context for why they were kept and relationships between them * inability to easily add WIP notes and commentary * difficulty of sharing tabs and context with others * possibility of losing them if power lost unexpectedly (during extended suspend for example) or accidentally close a single…

This all makes sense, thank you. The friction-free aspect of browser windows is still pretty critical to my workflow, but I'll look into whether it makes sense to grow the habit of "migrating" a task to Zotero when it gets heavy-duty enough.

I first discovered Zotero via the Mozilla add-ons search whilst looking for an extension to help me. Using the Firefox/Chromium connector puts it a context-click away:

Zotero Connector > Save To Zotero > "Web Page with Snapshot" / "Web Page without Snapshot"

So I can both maintain the tab workflow whilst 'tracking' progress with Zotero application itself.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#217

Post by herewulf » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 12:18 AM UTC

runeks wrote: post #178

jmercouris wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer

IMHO an extension for existing browsers seems like a better idea than creating a new browser. Why did you choose the latter approach?

I'm not involved either, but after doing some reading it seems the project aims to create a completely customizable browsing interface for power users that would be impossible with extensions because of the limitations that Firefox/Chrome impose.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#218

Post by iam-TJ » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 12:20 AM UTC

catchmeifyoucan wrote: post #210

iam-TJ wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My issues with tabs, even with extensions that organise them: * sheer mental challenge of quickly relocating related tabs and the context for why they were kept and relationships between them * inability to easily add WIP notes and commentary * difficulty of sharing tabs and context with others * possibility of losing them if power lost unexpectedly (during extended suspend for example) or accidentally close a single…

This describes Amna quite well. I think you'd love it! It's still early, but a lot fo the things you mention, we're working on. https://getamna.com It's designed like a todo list which is a layer out to keep that context

The promo looks slick but there are two blockers for me:

  1.  Not FOSS (Hard requirement *)
  2.  Basic/Free version doesn't claim Firefox connector

* I insist all my businesses use only FOSS for core functionality and we have on-premise capability (no 'cloud'). As well as putting us in control of our own destiny (we have the talent) we can add specific functionality at-will and do contribute that back to projects as well as buying support contracts or making regular donations.

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#219

Post by herewulf » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 12:28 AM UTC

jmercouris wrote: post #157

sub7 wrote: 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.

If you are serious about spending 25k, please contact me, we are working on the Nyxt browser. Email us at hello@atlas.engineer

Thanks for sharing your project. I'm a long time Qutebrowser user (and Vimperator/Pentadactyl, etc. before it) and fascinated by the possibilities of Emacs style extensibility for browsing.

It's a shame that you all haven't gotten more traction on HN despite regularly making submissions for major developments over the years. This thread[1], though outdated, made for some interesting reading.

Best of luck for future development. I'm looking forward to digging into Nyxt very soon!

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20064589

Re: TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem

#220

Post by oliv__ » Sun, Jan 03, 2021, 1:21 AM UTC

I haven't seen this included in the "what you can do with this" section but my first thought was that you could use git in there and save your usage over time.