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On Browser Tabs

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Re: On Browser Tabs

#111

Post by hombre_fatal »

parley wrote: post #82
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

I recently "closed" 12000+ (not a typo) tabs in one of my Firefox profiles into OneTab. In another profile I have 30+ different windows open for different projects and contexts, and I have more profiles (typically one per WM workspace which are topical). I've tried lots of browser addons/extensions and tools over the years, but none offered proper salvation. I have a design in my head of what kind of tool I'd like, b…

As a warning, I just lost all my OneTab state. Not sure why, never bothered reading the code either. Make sure you do an export every once in a while.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#112

Post by hombre_fatal »

GuB-42 wrote: post #103
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

I'd say that if you need 1000+ tabs, there is a problem. Not with you but with the browser. I mean, how can you not get lost? Do you realize the thing you are looking for is on tab 248 before lookin it up again? At that point these are not tabs anymore they are a directory or a history. I think using tabs for that is totally inadequate. Unfortunately, browsers tend to be lacking in that department. They have a list o…

Props for being one of the few people to realize it's a tooling problem. The "umm why would you have so many tabs?" you always get on HN is a reminder of why most people are so bad at UX. Most people just can't see outside of their usage.

You're onto something here. I have a lot of tabs because it's a history of one thought to another. It's not just a set of tabs, it's a sequence of locations. Keeping them open is how I can remember to go back to them, how I can keep my state in them, and more.

I can envision a much better UX where your tabs become some sort of history entry where they are frozen in time (serialized to disk) and can be rehydrated. And you can easily scrub back to them even once they've been unloaded from memory and frozen. And you can create different sessions for different things, a window/session for today's HNing, one for today's work, one for play, etc. And you can reach back into historical sessions to load their state. And merge another day's session into today's because it had some outstanding tabs you wanted to get back to. And there'd be good ways to visualize this.

I know some things like tab groups and tab sessions exist. I personally use Firefox with tree tabs to get something like this. But there's more UX thought that could be put into it instead of just wondering why someone would want a bunch of tabs.

One of the main reasons I'm reluctant to close my browser and trash my tabs is because the exact sequence of tabs, what's open, the order they are in, the state on each one (like being paginated to page 58 in some in-browser book scan UI) is a snapshot of by brain and digital "desktop" at that moment. You're right, browsers do very little to help.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#113

Post by hombre_fatal »

beagle3 wrote: post #84
unicornporn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find that it slows down FF. How long ago did you try TST?

I re-open it every month or so, and it didn't really change. I can't notice it when I have 10-100 tabs open. It's unbearable when I have 1000 (which happens more often than I would like to admit). It should be noted, though, that my web browsing machine is an early 2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM; It's possible I wouldn't have noticed on a faster machine.

Well, your browser without TST is going to handle 1000 no better, so it's not really about TST.

For example, there are many solutions to auto-suspend old tabs so they unload from memory.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#115

Post by asdff »

amelius wrote: post #32
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

Close you tabs and use your browser's history function to find them back if you really need them.

Sometimes the line items in the history list aren't really informative, and if you can't recall what particular day you might have visited the page you might have some homework in front of you. I wish the entire page was catched in some way so I can search for a keyword or use some regex to make sense of my foggy memory. This is a computer for crying out loud, I should be using regex, not feeling like I'm digging through a filing cabinet of reciepts by hand, which is exactly what the experience is when sites title themselves opaque things like "Add Comment | Hacker News" for the 2000th time in your history log.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#117

Post by asdff »

chris_st wrote: post #95
ajstiles wrote: post #87

I built the "first tabbed browser", NetCaptor, back in 1997. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th... My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem. I primarily use Brave and effectively start fres…

Good point. I've lost track of the number of start-ups that proposed some kind of "Search your browser history" functionality, which, to be honest, I've wished for myself. But I don't know of any that have even made it to released-product stage.

What about something with HTTrack as you browse and grep?

Re: On Browser Tabs

#118

Post by forgotmypw17 »

This is why I set my browser to vertical tabs, which makes much more sense, IMO, especially given today's widescreen trend.

I can fit up to about 50 tabs per window before they scroll, which is usually more than enough, and I can still read their text.

And all I had to do to achieve this was type `:set tabs.position right`...

Re: On Browser Tabs

#119

Post by zyxzevn »

The many open tabs are related to states between:

1. bookmarking,

2. will look at it any minute/day now.

3. need to read/watch further when I got time.

4. page no longer available on site.

5. music to play in the background.

So what a browser mainly needs a a way of bookmarking that also stores some of the state of the page. Like position on page, selection, video/audio-position, saved to local cache.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#120

Post by aaron_m04 »

rsync wrote: post #104
ssivark wrote: post #3

I... have a problem. I recently had ~1600 tabs open in Firefox. With a lot of painstaking effort I cut it down to ~750. Quite some distance to go still. The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser i…

"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…

For Firefox, there is Export Tabs URLs.
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