Live data from Hacker News

I closed a lot of browser tabs

rjbs.manxome.org

61–70 of 263 posts

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list. They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switc…

Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.

tree style tabs or something like that probably

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#62
There's a couple guys at work who are the hundred-tabs type and when I pair with them I notice their dev environment is much slower to build and run. I think it considerably reduces their output. Imagine another 15 seconds on your development loop that you do dozens of times a day.

In fact it probably reinforces the problem because I know when I have long rebuild times, I open a tab to read the news!

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they? It's local, thus, not saleable information.

Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment. It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed. The remaining possibility would be a gen…

Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users.

Does anyone know how to build a modular plugin sub-system?

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#64
Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed, and you may not remember where you left of.

So why can't I have the front page on the left of the window, and anything I click on on the right (replacing whatever is already there)? The front page would remain in place, so I'm not losing my context. I can click on something, quickly determine if it is worth reading in depth, and go on to the next thing if it's not. I would never have a thousand tabs open; just the one would be enough.

Why isn't this a thing in browsers? It would make so many websites so much easier to deal with...

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#65
post #40

Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember. Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parame…

I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application called Cleave. https://cleave.app Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level. I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with lim…

How does this compare to virtual desktops? Isn't this their main use?

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#66

Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed,…

On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well.

That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#67
I had a co-worker that would have over 300 tabs open. Except, unlike some, in a single window, so the tabs barely had enough room to click on. Yet he could still find the tab he wanted, I think it was down to spatial awareness of what was where. It still boggles my mind.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#68

Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed,…

On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well. That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiti…

No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#69
post #58

Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken? I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember. Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parame…

No, I see it as refusal to learn how to use bookmarks. I fail to see how what is so hard regarding organizing information in folders per subject, when in doubt choose the more generic one. Firefox also allows me to easily search for bookmarks, and has a quite nice bookmark manager. Using bookmarks since 1995 across different kinds of browsers, always migrating them along.

Agreed. Reminds me of how people complain that RSS is somehow too hard to use, and being on Twitter is now the only way to stay informed.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#70
I don't get why people litter their browser with tabs. I pretty sure I never used more than 30 at the same time. I just close them if I don't need them anymore. At the latest when I can't read the titles anymore the garbage collection runs. If I might still need it I just bookmark the page. (It helps to sort your bookmarks and have proper syncing)
Post reply on HN