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Overcoming Tab Overload

scs.cmu.edu

181–190 of 240 posts

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#181

I just wish there were a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar. Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow. But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my…

With Chrome (at least on Windows), if you use task manager to kill the Chrome process, then run Chrome again, it will ask you if you want to restore the tabs. It will remember all of them, and the point (scroll position) of each tab. Clearly Chrome is keeping this info up-to-date in case it crashes (or someone kills it in task manager). So if its already doing this, they should add in a feature to to it manually, so…

On Mac, it asks to restore tabs, but it simply reloads each tab from scratch, whenever you navigate to that tab.

It absolutely does not remember scroll position, much less any of the remaining state of the page.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I've been relying on this for about a year and have been really impressed. It's the first restore browser session I've ever used that just works. I never get "oops corrupted session, start over!" errors, etc like I used to get with chrome. Everything just fires back up with all the tabs, all the extensions, even all the different browser windows I had before. And it handles ungraceful shutdowns/restarts really w…

What makes it especially nice is that it doesn't reaload all the tabs at restart. Rather it waits until you switch to an old tab before it restores its state. This means you start up much faster and you're not consuming gobs of resources either.

Exactly! Yeah I have dozens of tabs open and never fear restarting the session. Hats off to the dev that implemented it--it's a really well thought out and implemented feature.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#183
post #89
post #15

I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality. When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.

It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between how many tabs you like open and when you started using the web. I used it for a long time before tabs were even a feature, and I find it easy to keep my tab count down. Compared to having to keep things down to "preferably 1, but maybe 3 or 4 if you're in a real pinch", keeping the tab count under 100 is no big deal. (I'm abundantly sure the correlation…

I’ve been using the web since NCSA Mosaic, and regularly have hundreds of tabs open

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d like to try this. What browser do you use? I see that it’s a feature for Vivaldi and I also see a Chrome extension.

I made https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ to solve this, but I don't really maintain it (I just build it for myself on each new Chromium) and it doesn't work on Mac.

That looks awesome. I'm going to try it out. Do extensions work on it?

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#186
post #15

I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality. When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.

For me, tabs are very much a manifestation of what’s going on in my mind at that very instant. Basically a cache. But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One. The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.

> But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.

What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#187
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had hundreds and I use all of them at least once a week

Let’s call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that’s 40 tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour, just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all those different things - you know what they are and you want to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type ‘app.i - enter’. Why would I want it open?

I feel like people are deliberately misreading the scenario we’re talking about in my parent post. The GP wasn’t saying there were one off tabs, but ones used at least once a week. My point is more that to just get through these regular ones you’re in a bit of a doom cycle before you visit anything new.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to Firefox for Tree Style Tabs.

I only stay with Firefox for tree style tabs. I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power users.

All except us who will cling as to not give Google a way to make ad blocking impossible. And for me it is actually not about the ads, it is about tracking power; about should decide what runs or not on my hardware.

I'd recommend more people think like this.

For me it is a small sacrifice for now at least.

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#189

I am one such tab-overloaded computer user. There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.) The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when…

I scrolled all the way to here since I expected way more mentions of Tabs Outliner. It’s kept me stuck on Chrome for so long, but now with the death of The Great Suspender extension my hand has been forced to build my own personal replacement as I want to get off chrome again…

Losing the great suspender means I can’t in concert with Tabs Outliner switch in and out groups of dozens of tabs at a time. Now doing this chews multiple GB of memory and my machine all but locks up for minutes at a time if I forget that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve run into macOS’s “out of memory killer” window pop up on several occasions now entirely from chrome alone.

I am a heavy user of tabs and I’d be trying all the mentioned ones in this page, but I have to express to anyone who has not tried it, if you are building a tab management tool and have not looked at Tabs Outliner in chrome, you need to, it represents the high water mark of tab hoarder & power user features. I’ve got 17 thousand tabs saved in hundreds of windows and groups on just one of my machines!

I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)

Re: Overcoming Tab Overload

#190
post #169

I was a VERY late convert to tabs, and I only use them for browsers now (and not all the time, either). I always felt that the OS X command-tilde functionality, for switching between windows the same way you switch through applications using command-tab, was superior. You're always switching between the most recently used windows, chronologically. You can even remember when something was several keystrokes back, and…

New Firefox installs have Ctrl+tab run chronologically, and you can this behaviour for existing installs as well if you want.
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