On Browser Tabs

Something I learned with tabbed browsing is that its important to clear the working "memory". One of my most used shortcuts is "close other tabs", and "close tabs to the right". Keeping tabs open should be like allocating to the stack and frequently cleared when the task is done. I might open 5 tabs from one link but when I have what I need I'll move the only the ones I need to the left and close the ones to the right. I find clearing tabs very refreshing - when in doubt: nuke it.

The introduction of tabs was fantastic, and I'm very glad you brought it to us. It bundles windows together, I would rather pick up my firefox bucket and look for a web page there than to look through a dumpster of software windows. But it took me a very long time before I figured out how to not let it get out of hand.

If people are afraid of losing tabs, they just aren't trusting their own memory/curiosity enough. When something is important, your mind tends to remember it, and if it wasn't, then its okay to have lost it. If something was that crucial, you can just Google it again, and if you cant find it on Google you still have your browser history.

"Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew ..."

I came here to complain that, actually, you can't.

Or rather, it's surprisingly complicated to export a simple list of current tab URLs to a plain old text file.

You need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.

Why can't we just have:

about:tabs

... which is nothing but a one URL per line, text listing of all of our currently open tabs ? How simple and nice and useful would that be ?

Go searching for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing.

I'm sorry to hear that Nobody should have to wade through 1500+ tabs.

It's frustrating to hear anyone struggle with that in this day and age. I've been there myself. But there are technical solutions.

I haven't had to deal with tab anxiety in years.

My browser stack is Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Multiple Tab Handler, and Tab Group Plus.

I regularly wrangle clusters of tabs.

If I have a tree of tabs that is spawned from an HN story or something, I can drag it into a new window, and then export it to a tgmg file from Tab Group Manager, put the tab collection file in my repository, and put a reference to it in my knowledge base. I might also embed it in an rtfd file.

If I don't need that kind of structure, I can just use shift or ctrl to bulk select the tabs I want, and paste the urls into my knowledge base. And effortlessly restore the list of urls to a new session when I want.

I'm able to re-create not just specific urls, but the context that I browsed them in.

If it is months or years later, it is really helpful to have a tree or list of urls, and maybe some notes. That makes it so much easier re-inhabit my state of mind during that research session.

I doubted whether it would be worth perusing, but I'm really glad I did. I love being able to recall research threads I started years earlier.

Unfortunately, it takes some effort to get set up to digest lots of tabs. I wish that this was recognized as more of a problem. It is so idiosyncratic that we are using open browser tabs as a temporary database to store lists of urls. Browsers should combine history, tab management, and bookmarks. It makes no sense anymore for those features to be separate from each other.

> I mean, how can you not get lost?

Firefox has a built-in search engine for tab titles and URLs in its omnibar, which helps.

FYI, you can do a lot of this stuff with AppleScript on the Mac. E.g., my workflow is to collect tabs on a topic, then I run a script that copies those tabs as a Markdown list. I paste that list into my notes for a project. Then, when I come back to that project, I can just select the list of Markdown links, and run another script to open them as tabs again.