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A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

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Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#121
post #19

I'm so tired of this topic. "Tab hoarding" has been dead and buried for years. It's just "using tabs" now. Many people realized that what they used bookmarks for could be done with the same semantics using only tabs, and they started doing that to reduce the number of browser systems they needed to keep in their head. There was a brief gap between that, and browser vendors optimizing their tab systems to efficiently…

The problem is hardly a resource one (unless you restart the browser) - you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles. Not to speak that Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them

> The problem is hardly a resource one

Did we read the same article? It's a very obvious complaint from the author. It's not actually a problem anymore, but that's entirely my point.

> you can’t see/scroll/wrangle 2000 tabs with the current tab display UI paradigm— you can’t even see their titles

Pretty much all Chromium-based browsers have a button to display a vertical scrollable list of all open tabs (with their favicon, title, domain, and time since last access) with a filter/search bar. Firefox has a slightly less detailed version (but the same general UI pattern) of the same thing, and can be augmented with more functionality through extensions if the user desires. I swear everyone complaining about this stuff hasn't looked at a browser in years.

> Chrome state management is crap and you’ll end up losing them

I've been using and restoring the exact same session for years with no issues. If I close the browser and re-open it normally, my tabs remain. If the browser crashes and restarts, I click the button that says "restore" and it all immediately comes back just fine. Again, the problem you're describing hasn't actually been a problem in many years.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#122
post #63

>reads title smells like ADHD "I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists." yup

Doesn't make sense to me, and I've been diagnosed with the same. I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it? Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.

if you're not like working on much then of course no need for many tabs, but I tend to ctrl click a lot of links / videos etc. so I end up with having 10 tabs in one window 5 in another, 15 one other etc...

and then there's sometimes a graveyard of them but I tend to keep them "just in case" even though I may not ever need those tabs, but I don't remember so I tend to play it safe

I don't use the browser history much, maybe that's your equivalent?

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#123
post #63

>reads title smells like ADHD "I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists." yup

> if I don't see something, I forget it exists. To some extent this seems like a feature, not a bug. I have many tabs open that I find myself resistant to closing but I'm pretty sure if they just got closed and I forgot they existed my life would be no worse.

This is exactly my experience. sometimes it does come handy, but most of the time it really doesn't matter. but that "risk" of potentially closing something that you'll need / want to look at later makes me just create a new window and drag that one in the background for safekeeping

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#124
So this person's solution was to write a series of bespoke apps that allows them to...save bookmarks with tags? Instead of just trying Pinboard or one of the other dozen existing products that do the same thing, or even the built-in Bookmarks which I think support tags in most browsers since many years now?

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

How long has this existed? It didn't exist (or was undiscoverable) when I was last using Chrome / Chromium, though that was ~6+ years ago.

~2-3 years I believe

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it. The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches,…

I tried Sidebery for a while among other vertical tab extensions and found them all too flaky and tacked-on-feeling for my taste. Needing to edit userCSS to hide the redundant tab bar kind of sucked too. Now I don't use vertical tabs unless the browser has them built in as a first-class feature.

For what it's worth, Firefox now has vertical tabs as a first-class feature. (FF does groups but not trees, if you were a Sidebery power user.)

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#128
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.

Tangent, I was searching for 3mm spherical magnets last night and literally every retailer's search is total garbage and delivered any kind of magnet you can imagine while occasionally sprinkling in things that were vaguely related to "3mm spherical magnets" I don't understand how it's useful to anyone, even the companies. I just leave without buying things so why would their searches not just search for the specific…

I haven't ever figured out why search is so hard for so many websites, including some that I've worked on. Even using third parties (like Keyoti) I've had trouble. In one case I solved a lot of issues with Elastic, but it's sort of overkill for 90% of website use cases.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#129

This is why I used ReadItLater and now Instapaper. It's integrated in my ebook reader too.

Subscription Bookmarking apps will never be part of my workflow.

There are self-hosted options too. I can't vouch for any of them but many look competent.
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