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I closed a lot of browser tabs

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Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#191

Post by fouric »

tconfrey wrote: post #160
dredmorbius wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very much this. I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago: https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/5x2sfx/pocket_... A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall,…

Check out BrainTool ( https://braintool.org ) it's a browser extension that allows you to trivially add pages to a custom hierarchal 'Topic tree' along with notes on why you're saving the page, and then to control opening and closing tabs by topic. Everything is saved to an org-mode syntax text file. So of your requirements it's persistent, local, tagged and entirely-offline-usable. Incremental search is in the works…

To save others the click: it doesn't work with Firefox.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#193

Post by fouric »

skoocda wrote: post #161
ninkendo wrote: post #120

My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history. Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user…

Note for the would-be-users of this approach: Chrome does not save your history infinitely, it only saves the last 90 days. I use an extension called Tabs Outliner to get around this problem. Firefox, on the other hand, will save history until your storage runs out!

Wait, that explains why my Chrome history (at work, which doesn't allow Firefox) keeps disappearing! What an anti-feature.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#195

Post by rasguanabana »

_Algernon_ wrote: post #33
alpaca128 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list. They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switc…

Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.

I just open more browser windows.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#196

Post by megamindbrian2 »

vagrantJin wrote: post #140
dredmorbius wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're likely thinking of "We Still Don't Get Things Done", posted 11 days ago: https://www.wired.com/story/to-do-apps-failed-productivity-t... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28010716 And yes, there's a lot there that resonated strongly with me. The cars-under-tarps anecdote is an excellent one. As life goes on, one accumulates an ever-growing list of gates which have closed irrevocably behind one. The German w…

Funny to come across this thread. Just a week ago my best friend had been moaning for two years about tidying his garage. I came with two beers intent on a chill weekend watchinh olympics but I happened to run into his wife as she was parking her car in the garage. We spoke for a minute but I decided we'd rather start working on his garage. My friend came out and we started. A few hours later, tired and hungry, his S…

Last week I did something I was planning for 10 years. Yesterday, I did something I was planning for 1.5 years. Don't underestimate yourselves. Even a car under a tarp have enormous value to the right collector who's been missing a piece of frame that cracked on his car under a tarp and both of them have value as a yard decoration in the background scene of a space movie where the spaceship is flying away from a farm with old cars laying around for 50 years.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#197

Post by Scarbutt »

rsync wrote: post #165

Why can't we just have: about:tabs ... which would be a plain text listing of all the URLs of all the tabs you have open ? You could just copy and paste it to a file or whatever. No fancy bookmarking scheme needed. Instead, we 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. Go search for "how can I export tabs"…

Chrome has this now, not exactly about:tabs but a button to list all open tabs.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#198

Post by fouric »

djKianoosh wrote: post #134
dgellow wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written…

how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.

I'm still in the process of letting go of my attachment to tabs, but I can share with you some things that have worked for me:

- I've realized that, even though I have a lot of interesting tabs/bookmarks, most of them won't tangibly improve my life immediately. - I've created a special tag in Firefox that I use to mark bookmarks that I want to specifically come back to read later, called "to-read" - this helps my brain rest easy because it knows that it's saved somewhere. - Attachment to tabs is an emotional problem - the Fear Of Missing Out. I'm learning to treat this FOMO the same as my social FOMO - "Will I miss this tab after it's bookmarked and closed?" is somewhat similar to "Do I need to go to every single social event?" - no. - I sort my bookmarks into a deep hierarchy of folders and review them occasionally - this tells my brain that I will eventually come back to a bookmarked site, which makes it much easier to close the tab.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#199

Post by samatman »

I long for a browser optimized for research. Tab management would be an essential part of what I have in mind.

It would offer a management view, where each window is a column with a list of all open tabs. I can select the tabs I want, move them around, group them into a new window, and (this is the key) save them.

This would prompt me for a title, and would produce an ordinary Markdown text file with the title as an h1 header, each tab title as an h2 header, and the body of each section as just the repeated title with the link as the anchor.

I should be able to add any text I want, including more links in the appropriate format. And I can re-launch the tabs: the browser goes through the h2 headers and launches the first link it sees.

If I reorganize the tabs, the sections move around, and adding more tabs makes more sections, while leaving any textual metadata I have provided alone.

I could email one of these to someone, and they could open it as well.

It would ship with an in-browser Markdown text editor, such that the ordinary user would never have to leave the browser. But of course, being Just Plain Text, it would also be possible to edit it in one's editor of choice.

This would, and I exaggerate only slightly, change my life.

Re: I closed a lot of browser tabs

#200

Post by eplanit »

"I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of "holy cow, man, look at your browser!"

You might consider that maybe they're very politely saying "Man, that's insane". Would you leave 150 books open on one table, or maybe use bookmarks instead? I guess the table might work, but it seems like lots of clutter. Everyone's mileage varies.

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