I never thought I‘d belong to the group of people who never close tabs. Had read David Allen some twenty years ago and subscribed to his „inbox zero“ mantra. Until I realized I don’t have the time to clean up. I keep doing stuff, and when the chaos surpasses thresholds, I reset that system (close all tabs, restart, start with a clean slate). But this sounds interesting. Will give it a try.
Firefox tab groups are here
71–80 of 455 posts
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#72I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…
Any task that can't be accomplished in one sitting is left to return to later (Note: If this isn't a given - for example, "I simply don't do things I don't have time for" - then you may not have enough in common with the people you're asking about to be able to relate).
Step two: You just need a little discipline to audit your tasks and admit when something has fallen off the top layer of your priority list and take the couple minutes to archive it into a folder of bookmarks or text file or other format of your choice.
And then you need the discipline to occasionally take the time to audit your archives for things that have fallen even lower and delete them (or archive them more deeply...).
For many, it's difficult to justify spending time you already clearly don't have enough of doing such audits. Same psychology behind procrastination. Hence a self-perpetuating problem.
Logically if your task income is greater than your available time, this pattern occurs.
Task income increases both with curiosity/goals and obligation, and most people have an abundance of those. Time is necessarily scarce. So, logically, many people have a lot of tabs.
Note that learning or researching is one of the most common tasks, is an active task, and usually requires multiple concurrent tabs. I.e. it's not simply one article you want to read later.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#73I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…
I don't think I ever need even ten, but I inevitably end up with 30+ spread across two browsers because I just don't close. Then I close all in CTRL+W rage* and rely on history + memory to find anything I'd like to return to.
*Thanks for your post. It reminded me to go into firefox and unset "Open previous windows and tabs," which I accidentally turned on and has ruined my ability to rage X out of firefox everytime I have too many tabs.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#74Where can I download it? I don't see a link in the blog.
There's a link at the bottom for me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ Assuming you want to download firefox. It seems to be integrated into the browser, there's no add-on or so for this that you would need to download separately.
Weird, I had to go into about:config, search for "browser.tabs.groups.enabled" (which was set to false) and enable it there.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#75I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…
I'm not consistent about going back and closing tabs. By the time I've browsed on a couple topics, I have enough tabs open I can't see the titles any more, and it's downhill from there. Some of them, I think "this is good, I'll come back to this when I get a chance" so I don't want to mass-close them. Eventually I'm opening new tabs of tabs I already have open, because it's faster than finding the original. Every now…
Good lord! If you mass bookmark, aren't you just turning your bookmarks into your history? In that case why not just use browser history instead?
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#76I never have more than like 10 tabs open at a time, so likely wont be helpful to me, but I find this super interesting! Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for? It seems to be super common to have tons and tons open. Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Afraid to close the page because they wont find it in their history or bookmarks? Is this more an issue wit…
Yeah, I'm using them as soft bookmarks. Turn them into hard bookmarks every month or so, not to actively look at them, but the firefox address bar searches in bookmarks as well and offers them up first when typing, so I have a repository of things I've declared interesting / cool / good before that I can refer back to when typing keywords into the address bar. Messy, but it works! I must have a couple tens of thousands of bookmarks by now...
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#77Seems like it still won’t replace Sidebery for me as this provides only a single grouping layer.
To replace Sidebery Firefox would need to clone like half of Arc Browser.
Arc is dead, long live Arc. Best we can hope for while The Browser Company is toying with their investor-bait "AI browser" is for other browsers and extensions to copy the good parts of it.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…
Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?
The tabs don't get loaded until I revisit them after restarting firefox.
So 90%+ of the tabs are just bookmarks really.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#79I found that tab groups themselves are not synced. So, grouped tabs from one machine will appear as random set of tabs on another machine.
Re: Firefox tab groups are here
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have almost 2000 tabs open. I use sideberry for tab management. > Are people using tabs as a soft bookmark of basically anything interesting? Yep, that's as good a description as any. I have a lot of tabs that I'm not "finished with" in any finite amount of time. Case in point: currently shopping for a steam generator for a steam shower. I have about 30-40 tabs open to different models, stores, reviews, data pages…
Damn, 2k tabs, I’m not familiar with sideberry but with 2k of them are they even right to be called native ‘tabs’ or do they function more like bookmarks? > computational costs are close to zero Is that true for normal Firefox tabs (I usually use chrome/safari) ? Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory, keep any background tasks running etc. If some tab starts playing audio how do you even find it?
>Wouldn’t each one still use up some memory
Firefox unloads tabs that haven't recently been used, or as memory approaches system limits. You can also manually unload your least-recently-used loaded tab.