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On Browser Tabs

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Re: On Browser Tabs

#171

Post by solarkraft »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #112
GuB-42 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ho…

> 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.

Mobile Firefox already has this. Desktop Firefox might have a version of it, but I'm not sure (sometimes I see a loading spinner on a gray background for a while).

I think you're totally on the right track. What I envision is the ability to drag a tree of tabs into a bookmarks folder to get back to it at another time.

Fundamentally tabs, bookmarks and history entries are all just references to URLs (with a bunch of metadata) anyway. It's weird to me that the UX of these hasn't really converged all that much yet.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#172

Post by chris_st »

Reelin wrote: post #156
chris_st wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does Memex resemble what you were wishing for? ( https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/ )

Not really -- What I'd like would be something that doesn't require me to annotate, in advance, what I want to find again. I often think, "I know I read something about this a while back!" and then I try to think which website I'd seen it on. The ones I've read about just watch your whole browsing history and let you search that.

I also couldn't get it to work when I tried a while ago (which I imagine they've fixed).

Re: On Browser Tabs

#173

Post by chris_st »

asdff wrote: post #117
chris_st wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah, that seems like a step in the right direction -- don't think I want all the images, just the text, but I'd guess that's an option.

Wonder if you could hook that in through a local proxy...

Re: On Browser Tabs

#174

Post by techbio »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #127
pseudalopex wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bookmarks discard window layout, scroll bar position, back/forward history, form contents, etc. They don't stay in sync with tabs so you have to delete and recreate them.

I kinda think there should be no distinction between tab and bookmark. Just give me tools to suspend old tabs into bookmarks.

I bookmark all tabs with CTRL-SHIFT-D then arrange the hierarchy manually in bookmark manager. Doesn't automatically do it all, but keeps me involved with my bookmark trees.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#175

Post by buzzwordninja »

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…

Is it just me or is Tree Style Tabs fairly buggy when it comes to focusing tabs after closing one? It seems half random to me.

It's also fragile at browser startup, sometimes the list is empty or the tabs are in a flat list. When I switch to bookmarks and then back, it's fixed.

So, generally very fragile. Which is annoying since the CONCEPT is so essential.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#176

Post by bbbobbb »

dangom wrote: post #130

Interesting that nobody mentioned not using tabs at all. I adapted the chrome.css of my firefox to hide tabs altogether, so I can get more screen real state. That paired with Vimium allows me to hit T to get a list of all open tabs, which I can then incrementally search. If I want to open a link from history, I hit O instead.

How do you deal with websites that hijack your vimium shortcuts (gmail.. or event where it does not work - new tab blank page..)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#177

Post by superkuh »

dublin wrote: post #65
superkuh wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm there with you (1500+ in one browser instance). But I don't consider it a problem. I have tab suspend and full text tab search via add-ons, I group my tabs linearly by topic and date, and the older 1/3 of tabs I know position by heart. Because I use a single process browser+noscript instead of a "modern" JS-engine-centric browser (ie, Chrome/FF) even with 600 tabs of 1500 loaded in my ram usage is still under 3 G…

It's easier to use Chrome for my work browser, so it only has a few dozen tabs open, but my primary home/sidejobs browser is Firefox, currently running at somewhere in the 1600-2000 tab range. Only Firefox can do that without barfing. (And that's on the old Surface Pro 4 i5/8GB - it runs just fine.) I REALLY miss TabMixPlus, though... (a FF extension broken with the purge of XUL from Quantum)

So use a browser that still supports XUL like I do. One example is Pale Moon.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#178

Post by jhardy54 »

rsync wrote: post #133
jhardy54 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> about:tabs would be the easiest thing in the world. Thanka for volunteering! Can you link me to your patch?

rsync.net will pay USD $1000 for this. Consider this an official, public bounty. Expires 2020-12-31. I don't have time to write this patch but I especially don't have time for the lame, tired suggestion that FOSS cannot be critiqued by anyone but the authors. (The bounty is $1500 if you "jhardy54" write, and have accepted, the patch. Consider the extra $500 compensation for this unexpected loss of smug, righteous ind…

Thanks for the bounty. Is this resolved when the patch is written and available for anyone to include in their source tree, or when it's merged into the Firefox tree?

(I want to clarify because I've had a patch open for 4 months that's received no attention from maintainers.)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#179

Post by rsync »

jhardy54 wrote: post #178
rsync wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rsync.net will pay USD $1000 for this. Consider this an official, public bounty. Expires 2020-12-31. I don't have time to write this patch but I especially don't have time for the lame, tired suggestion that FOSS cannot be critiqued by anyone but the authors. (The bounty is $1500 if you "jhardy54" write, and have accepted, the patch. Consider the extra $500 compensation for this unexpected loss of smug, righteous ind…

Thanks for the bounty. Is this resolved when the patch is written and available for anyone to include in their source tree, or when it's merged into the Firefox tree? (I want to clarify because I've had a patch open for 4 months that's received no attention from maintainers.)

The bounty will be awarded (paid) when Joe Average user can download plain old Firefox and use about:tabs, without other downloads or add-ons, etc.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#180

Post by enimodas »

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…

For closing by domain name or keyword, there is the power close extension.
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