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Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

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Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#61

Post by user3939382 »

bayindirh wrote: post #10
corbezzoli wrote: post #6

I’ll never understand people who hoard tabs. Every time I’m done with something, I can close all the tabs in a few seconds. A single search can generate 15 tabs, and then after the solution is found I close them all. Anything I can’t handle now is pinned or added to Read Later, depending on the urgency. Same goes with the files on my desktop (which is also the download folder). Select all, delete. Multiple times a da…

The tabs pile up, not because I hoard them, but because the task has not been finished yet. I start researching a thing, or troubleshoot a problem, and I dig for some time. This digging generally routes me to places of internet not found or shown by my search engine of choice, hence if I close that set of tabs, I'll lose another half day to find them. However, I can't touch that set of tabs, because a small or anothe…

In Firefox anyway there’s a feature to “bookmark all open tabs” which I use for this scenario. It creates a bookmark folder with everything you have open.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#63

Post by isodev »

At first, I was disappointed that it doesn’t support Safari but then I realized Safari does this even better with tab groups.

Still, it would have been nice to be able to sync them with other browsers (e.g. from Safari to Firefox). I guess “cross-browser” means “the author’s favourite browsers”.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#64

Post by corbezzoli »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #58
cj wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s hard to understand the “I have a hundred tabs open” usage pattern because the same people constantly complain that they have too many tabs open. It’s logical to not understand other people’s workflows when they themselves complain about their own workflow frequently and vocally (not on HN, but where I work it’s a frequent comment whenever anyone is getting ready to screenshare something)

I have ~350 tabs open across 12 thematically titled FF windows. I am not complaining about the # of open tabs - my complaint is that stock browsers suck and that I have to install a bunch of extensions from random sources to get to workflow happiness. If you have more than 12 tabs open concurrently, vertical tabs are a hard requirement. There isn't even a workable vertical tabs solution for Chrome or Safari. Ironical…

> I have ~350 tabs open … stock browsers suck

I can’t but think of https://xkcd.com/1172

Products are designed with a certain workflow in mind. Back when people would open a website at a time, nobody needed tabs. Now everyone uses tabs, but relatively no one needs to organize their tabs. It’s acceptable that browser don’t make their UI extra complex for a vocal minority.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#65

Post by davejk »

wintermutestwin wrote: post #60
mrtksn wrote: post #8

Safari is doing this great with profiles and tab groups. The profiles help you have multiple workspaces where different sessions are start so you don’t have to sign out and sign in for different accounts all the time. And every profile has a tab group which is a collection of tabs. All that synced across all of your iDevices. However tab groups have a bug that hasn’t been fixed since almost 2 years now: https://apple…

Safari is useless for any workflow that requires >12 tabs because it lacks a vertical tabs solution.

It has vertical tabs in the sidebar on desktop, and a (searchable) grid view on both desktop and iOS.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#67

Post by wintermutestwin »

corbezzoli wrote: post #64
wintermutestwin wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have ~350 tabs open across 12 thematically titled FF windows. I am not complaining about the # of open tabs - my complaint is that stock browsers suck and that I have to install a bunch of extensions from random sources to get to workflow happiness. If you have more than 12 tabs open concurrently, vertical tabs are a hard requirement. There isn't even a workable vertical tabs solution for Chrome or Safari. Ironical…

> I have ~350 tabs open … stock browsers suck I can’t but think of https://xkcd.com/1172 Products are designed with a certain workflow in mind. Back when people would open a website at a time, nobody needed tabs. Now everyone uses tabs, but relatively no one needs to organize their tabs. It’s acceptable that browser don’t make their UI extra complex for a vocal minority.

I have no data, but I'd hazard a guess that more people regularly have >12 tabs open than those who don't.

I can't remember a time where I didn't open every link in a new window in the days prior to tabs. Back button navigation is chaos.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#68

Post by gpchelkin »

khimaros wrote: post #56
gpchelkin wrote: post #32

I am using a similar extension Session Sync, but it exists only for Firefox and has an ability to sync sessions. It just saves sessions as bookmark folders, and sync is done natively by Firefox Account Sync. Despite the last update was in 2019, it still works pretty well. As I can see from changelog, sessionic also supports sync [3]. It would be nice if it is added to description/readme. [1] https://github.com/ReDEne…

if you are referring to this change, i don't think it is related to synching between browsers: "Sync autosaved sessions with all views in real-time"

Oh, thanks, my bad, I got it wrong. I also checked using two devices that it doesn't actually sync anything via Firefox Accounts.

By the way, Tab Session Manager [1] (another contender) can sync via Google Drive across different browsers (Firefox/Chrome).

[1] https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#69

Post by breadchris »

I really like the idea of mining your own browsing history for insight. I think that the value of our browsing history is completely lost to us because the lack of tooling to make saving and searching more accessible.

It's still WIP but I've been building a browser extension for this on GitHub here: https://github.com/lunabrain-ai/lunabrain

My goal is to be able to use the Internet as normal, but have the extension automatically index and rank content I find important. For example, if I spend 5 minutes on a page that I went to after Hackernews, odds are I found that important so it should be considered in my history differently than other things.

The network effect of this data is pretty interesting too. It would be really cool to see what my friends, or other high trust, high signal, groups i am in find interesting. Being on a page where my mentor has stared, annotated, shared this before will probably give me pause and make me consider this page more deeply.

I'm curious if anybody else has any notes to share.

Re: Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions

#70

Post by wintermutestwin »

davejk wrote: post #65
wintermutestwin wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is useless for any workflow that requires >12 tabs because it lacks a vertical tabs solution.

It has vertical tabs in the sidebar on desktop, and a (searchable) grid view on both desktop and iOS.

You are right - but I don't count their implementation because it is incredibly lacking in basic functionality. Notice how the vertical "tabs" don't have a close X and the annoying padding that cuts off the tab name to replace it with "... "

Also, every time I open Safari, I have to manually click the ... and "Show tabs on sidebar" - for each tab group!

This is a total half assed implementation - I seriously doubt there are many who will use it in its current form.

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