Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Browser Tabs

abuqader.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 187 posts

Re: On Browser Tabs

#161

Post by ksec »

I hope Mac Safari Teams gets to read the link and HN's comments, they ignore the power users and try to dump down Mac Safari to iOS.

With Safari 14, Fav icon is now on by default, you would think this is great, except the Tab now shrinks to Icon size once you have a dozen or more. Instead of the old Fav Icon + Text Description in the Tab. i.e How Firefox behaves.

They also got rid of Top Site, and instead it is now an iOS Safari design like Start Page. You can tell by their much narrower design compared to your widescreen Mac.

One way to save memory if you have a few dozens or hundreds of Tabs, is to unload them by quitting Safari and Start again with previous session. This way all the Tabs are unloaded by default, they are there sitting idle. Basically just a list of Tabs. ( This also works on Chrome and Firefox )

But if you somehow finger swipe or accidentally press the Show Tab Overview, Safari will reload every single tab you have in the background just to create a Thumbnails for your Tab. If you have 1600 Tabs like some here, you will quickly run out of memory and start paging hundreds of GBs of data to your SSD. Basically shortening your SSD's life span.

And to those questioning why the large number of Tabs. I mean on one hand HN keeps pushing everything should be SaaS and Web Apps. Project Planning, Email, Social Media.. etc. On the other you have Research Notes, subject I need to research that instantly open a dozen tabs or Amazon / Online Shopping. Or simple daily RSS where I just Command Click all the news item I want to read. You also have sessions you want to read but you dont have the time right now.

All we really need is a Show All Tab Page as a list instead of Thumbnails once Tab number goes over certain number, with a Search Field at the top that hopefully search the Title and some Meta Data. I dont want to kill my 2015 MacBook Pro. It may be the last MacBook Pro with a decent keyboard judging by the way things are going.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#162

Post by Reelin »

rmetzler wrote: post #157
Reelin wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Firefox, the Vimium extension provides basic filtering functionality. No idea how well it would scale to 1600 tabs though.

I also use vimium on Chrome, but I never knew about any functionality for searching tabs. What key is it? Also I'm not sure if it would be helpful for websites like github where I disable vimium to be able to use the website's hotkey functionality.

Shift-T for tabs. Shift-O for history, bookmarks, and domains (ie domain names that you've previously visited a page from IIUC). Like Vim itself, there's probably other useful functionality hidden away that I still haven't found out about yet.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#163

Post by terrywang »

Have been having the same problem but now getting less painful as a quick TL;DR style (many articles start to adopt starting with a TL;DR at the top) read (to get the core ideas) and save useful ones with Diigo (replacing del.icio.us? to achieve read it later) worked well, effectively reduced FOMO.

> NOTE: Session Buddy for Chrome is handy when suffering from power loss (MBP hang, Linux workstation power cord got kicked off, etc.).

Re: On Browser Tabs

#164

Post by jbc1 »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #135
teekert wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite a staggering amount imo... Why not just avoid painstaking and just start fresh? Is this a form of FOMO? Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs. If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?

> search engine for your tabs Yes please! I've recently got interested in Recoll, which might not know what a tab is, but does search web history. > you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs Caching is valuable. URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.

Safer and not a whole lot of work to backup your bookmarks if you're worried about changing or disappearing pages. Probably have a net time saving pretty quickly from regaining access to being able to use tabs as tabs again.

Can self host using

https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox

or pay a service like pinboard.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#165

Post by natannikolic »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #111
parley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Or even better, switch to Tablerone, import your OneTab data and never lose a single tab or session ever again. https://tabler.one/

Re: On Browser Tabs

#166

Post by natannikolic »

apostacy wrote: post #106
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'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 spa…

That's exactly what Tablerone does! https://tabler.one/

Re: On Browser Tabs

#167

Post by natannikolic »

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…

Tablerone lets you export the entire session in multiple file formats: https://tabler.one/

Re: On Browser Tabs

#168

Post by natannikolic »

patcon wrote: post #13
FroshKiller wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried OneTab? It's an add-on that squashes all your open tabs to a list and saves the list to a page. You can reopen tabs, remove them, etc. from the page. It's super good. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/onetab/

Yeah, I rely heavily on one-tab. But for me at least, I've realized it's less about keeping content for later, and acts more akin to the conversational bridge "well, if it's important I'll remember it later" -- It just gives me permission to let the tabs go and move on, with a pretense that I'll maybe come back to them :)

That's a good way of putting it. The problem is remembering it later is very difficult with so much information. I use Tablerone so save and organise pretty much anything I think might come useful at some later point. Then I can find specific sites either by searching by the subject/collection I saved it in or by browsing the timeline... https://tabler.one/

Re: On Browser Tabs

#169

Post by MayeulC »

jariel wrote: post #88
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 don't mean to be rude but I think this is maybe a psychological issue, not a technological one. I'm doubtful that 1600 tabs open in any way reflects some advanced or thoughtful way to work, it's just problematic. 'Junk Hoarders' -> 'Tab Hoarders'. Maybe find a way to truly organize bookmarks and find a good bookmark manager plugin that lets you 'get to your stuff' as you need it.

I am in the same boat, and usually use that as "post-its", reminders of my current trains of thoughts. I can pick-up something, switch to something else, close that thread of tabs, and come back to the previous state. If something urgent comes up, I open a new tab.

Treetabs is useful for that kind of workflow, but very slow. I also use panorama tab groups.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#170

Post by MayeulC »

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 use tabs as a mindmap, and would really like the browser to present it as such.

An interface such as pearltrees would be a pretty good start, with visible links from topic to topic. The ability to collapse a group and all of its children, close a topic, annotate some tabs, full-text search, and maybe have them open again at a later date.

Maybe I'll get around to developing this at some point.

For instance, I am currently looking for accommodation, in addition to the usual stuff. I tend to open a (panorama) tab group for each sector or website, then a tab for each apartment, plus maybe a few more tabs for each to check on the map, pictures, contact forms, etc. I do not do that activity all the time, but need to leave that open to come back to it. I actually created a Firefox profile for this, but I'm using it to reply to this thread, so maybe the real issue is my with my ability to concentrate...

Post reply on HN