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A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

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Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#101

Post by sfRattan »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades...

I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).

A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?

Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).

I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.

Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#102

Post by cosmic_cheese »

sfRattan wrote: post #101
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades... I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups--- but I don't really have any problem…

For me, what works for filesystems does not work for bookmarks. I'd have to give some thought about why that's the case.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#104

Post by recursivecaveat »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #80
snailmailman wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one. I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type Y…

In Chrome, you can use cmd+shift+a or ctrl+shift+a to do fuzzy search in all your tabs (I believe this uses the URL and the page title)

For anyone else using firefox: Alt+D to select address bar (or F6 or Ctrl/Cmd+L), then start your search with '%' to search your tabs.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#105

Post by Tanoc »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're likely to just start throwing things into Other Bookmarks, which clutters it. Being able to sort by type, root URL, alphabetical order, and date saved would be so great.

The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#108

Post by em-bee »

Tanoc wrote: post #105
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're…

it used to be that even an unloaded tab would load a cached version. they removed that feature. i loved it. i wish each tab would save at least one cached version not only in case the internet goes out, but also in case the page changes. it does matter for reading hackernews for example, because it helps me keep track of what i have not read yet.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#109

Post by kasabali »

Yizahi wrote: post #83

Thankfully Firefox helped me with tab hoarding dependency, by silently losing saves session without any visible crash or issue, just on the normal open. Now I have to treat tabs as if they won't be saved ever again and don't leave anything important open. Thanks Mozilla, great use of your time and money, spending them on useless LLM integration and lining CEOs pockets instead of fixing damn basic functionality.

So much this. Thankfully it hasn't lost tabs for me for a very long time, but I find it ridiculous that Firefox's session persistence is basically "yeah let's deserialize it into a single line of JSON and write it to disk every 15 seconds".

On top of that, what was their solution when it became apparent it was slowly killing your SSD by blowing up write amplification through the roof [1]? Zipping the JSON. Yeah. Seriously.

I mean sure, this storage format might've been a nice first implementation as a PoC, but you'd think they'd redo this at some point and store the session in an Sqlite DB file or something, I mean it's not like they haven't been using it already for history and bookmarks.

1. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here...

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#110

Post by lzmp »

twentyfiveoh1 wrote: post #28
ixxie wrote: post #21

I've recently migrated to Zen [0] and its a breath of fresh air. I agree with comments arguing bad bookmark UX is part of the problem. Zen's approach is a vertical tab sidebar with workspaces and folders. Crucially, it distinguishes pinned and ephemeral tabs. The approach is much more natural to me than either bookmarks and tradition tabs. [0] https://zen-browser.app/

Love Zen. I am not sure it fixed my tab problem, but it improved tab management and overall efficiency. Omnivore helped a bunch before they shut down. I need to see if any good apps exist that are similar.

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