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I closed a lot of browser tabs

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Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#141

Post by awiesenhofer »

bodge5000 wrote: post #102
pjmlp wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a to read later folder for that.

Yeh they have this feature built into chrome. I liked it, in fact I liked it so much that I kept using it, and once again it became an unmanagable mess that I would avoid for things that are actually want to read later. Over time, this would become for things I kind of want to read later. At this point, I don't even remember the last time I used it. Tabs work because whenever you are using the browser, they're always…

As someone with 100+ tabs open as well, I'm not sure that all really holds up. I am actually in the process of moving towards bookmarks with my browsing habits and having FFs sidebar alwas open and just there helps a lot with the "always in front of you" aspect - especially considering that chrome only shows you the first X tabs and completely hides the rest while FF needs you to scroll to see them all. Plus folders or keywords in the bookmarks title help a lot with managing different projects or trains of thought.

Pruning is also somewhat faster and simpler because the tabs don't need to reload first (assuming you are using an extension like supsender or auto discard like i do) you just have the favicon and the whole title in your list and can prune fast with just the arrow keys and "delete".

Totally agree with your last paragraph though.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#142

Post by bane »

cookiengineer wrote: post #16

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…

The problem is that browsers have a broken model of memory:

1 - Tabs are current attention.

2 - Bookmarks are long-term memory, but don't store content, only meta-data.

What browsers need is

1 - Current attention

2 - Working memory, where old tabs automatically capture content and slide off into some kind of easy to recall state, but are no longer tabs

3 - Bookmarks, but with content storage, better organization, indexing, and retrieval.

Evolution spent billions of years to arrive at this kind of scheme, we should mimic it.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#143

Post by reportgunner »

agent327 wrote: post #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,…

>Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab.

Shift+Click to open in a new window is the third option.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#144

Post by q3k »

djKianoosh wrote: post #134
dgellow wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written…

how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.

> how does one learn this power and enlightenment?

Right click the tab you're on right now, left click 'close other tabs'. Exhale.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#145

Post by BenoitEssiambre »

cookiengineer wrote: post #16

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…

Bookmarks are downplayed because search is browsers' main source of revenues.

I'd personally accept a bit of ads in the bookmark manager (maybe in a section for suggestions based on bookmarks) in exchange for bookmarks to be better integrated and supported.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#146

Post by bradrn »

One hundred and fifty tabs‽ Pff, that’s nothing. I currently have 400 — after closing ~4000. My problem is that I regularly check HN (and occasionally other sites as well), and I often end up opening ~20 tabs a day from that alone. Of course, I never get around to reading them, and my tabs simply grow and grow.

What eventually worked for me was getting a reference manager (I use Zotero). Every day I try to close a bunch of tabs by going through them and moving them to my reference manager. That way, I still have them listed just in case I want to go back to them later, but they don’t clutter up my browser any more. The most interesting side-effect of this has been that I’ve accumulated resources on a bunch of topics: if I decide one day that I want to learn CSS or graphics programming or electrical engineering or something, I can just go to my reference manager and find a bunch of high-quality resources waiting for me.

(OK, I tell a slight lie: 4000 tabs is too much to categorise one by one, so about half of them ended up just being copied to a text file, one URL to a line. But rest assured, I will eventually add them all to my reference manager, though I suspect it will take automated keyword extraction or something like that.)

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#147

Post by freediver »

vagrantJin wrote: post #140
dredmorbius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're likely thinking of "We Still Don't Get Things Done", posted 11 days ago: https://www.wired.com/story/to-do-apps-failed-productivity-t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010716 And yes, there's a lot there that resonated strongly with me. The cars-under-tarps anecdote is an excellent one. As life goes on, one accumulates an ever-growing list of gates which have closed irrevocably behind one. The German w…

Funny to come across this thread. Just a week ago my best friend had been moaning for two years about tidying his garage. I came with two beers intent on a chill weekend watchinh olympics but I happened to run into his wife as she was parking her car in the garage. We spoke for a minute but I decided we'd rather start working on his garage. My friend came out and we started. A few hours later, tired and hungry, his S…

Now that you mention it, it seems that there is indeed a phenomena worth exploring here.

I may have done many things in life that I perceive to be valuable for our family, but nothing earned me as many 'points' with Mrs. as did the act of just sucking it up and cleaning the entire garage one day.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#148

Post by dredmorbius »

handrous wrote: post #135
cookiengineer wrote: post #16

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…

IMO one of the main problems is that opening a new tab is much faster than finding an existing one.

Firefox Desktop at least lets you know if you've aready got a given URL open.

Chrome does not.

(My "Close tabs" post-it on my desk lamp is dated April 15. 2017.)

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#149

Post by nishparadox »

ninkendo wrote: post #120

My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history. Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user…

This resonates with me. I also learnt the hard way to simply close all the tabs and then re-assess history if I really want to access the tab. On that note: sometimes I also just use OneTab [0] if my tabs are important but are hogging the system's performance.

[0] - https://www.one-tab.com/

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#150

Post by enduku »

dredmorbius wrote: post #38
cookiengineer wrote: post #16

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…

Very much this. I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall,…

Pinboard.in seems okay though
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