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On Browser Tabs

abuqader.substack.com

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31–40 of 187 posts

Re: On Browser Tabs

#31

Post by rezeroed »

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…

Have a look at Opera's workspaces. Unfortunately there's a limit of five, but if i could have one of those for each topic I would be happy. My tab problem is considerably worse than yours.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#32

Post by amelius »

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.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#33

Post by bennyp101 »

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 had a quick look (because actually, having tabs load for a specific project would be quite helpful) and it looks like that might offer some of what you want?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

https://github.com/drive4ik/simple-tab-groups

Re: On Browser Tabs

#34

Post by beaker52 »

I've noticed that as I've gotten older my tab behaviour has changed. When I was younger, I used to operate an extension that'd kill tabs I hadn't accessed in the last hour. Chrome doesn't really give you the same control over tabs. I've tried firefox but it's noticeably slower in comparison.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#35

Post by coldtea »

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…

>The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs.

You know that you can bookmark and re-visit pages right?

Re: On Browser Tabs

#36

Post by quercusa »

LandR wrote: post #12
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…

Tree Style Tabs? And then you can organise them somewhat into groups ? I use tree style tabs with some custom theming to make it take up only enough room on the left to show the site favicon. It then opens up when I mouse-over.

I find Tree Style Tab even more useful than the old Tab Mix Plus extension. Anything I open from HN will be a child of the HN tree, which can be opened or closed as a group.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#37

Post by dilpreet_singh »

I really appreciate the author's take on the issue.

Internet is such an integral part of our lives, and so many people's computer usage is all about just using a browser. Which is why it's interesting that even after about 25 years of the first browser, we have almost the same interface to accessing the INTERNET. And it definitely can be made better!

We should think about solving this problem

Re: On Browser Tabs

#38

Post by growt »

sevencolors wrote: post #24

I never understood how folks end up with 20+ (100+ !?) tabs just hanging around ALL the time. For me it's so much visual noise. I can see it happening when you're in the midst of research or troubleshooting. But when I'm done or have solved my issue I'll note in my PR where i found solutions or add the useful pages to my bookmark service (raindrop). Then close all the tabs!

I'm one of those "tab-addicts". The problem is that I use Tabs for everything: reading list, history, bookmarks. Right now I have 8 pinned tabs for email, calendar, messengers and such things. Then I have a couple of interesting news articles etc. that I left open to read later. I also left open some of my work/research flows (so 3-5 tabs each that belong to the same project topic) that I didn't really finish or was just to lazy to close.

Re: On Browser Tabs

#39

Post by ssivark »

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…

In response to some of the suggestions:

1. Tab groups: I have been an extensive user of tab groups in the past (when it was native in Firefox); it’s very helpful if your tabs cleave nicely into less than a dozen or so projects/themes, and you have no more than a few hundred tabs.

2. Tree style tabs: The extensions I’ve tried tend to be very slow and non-ergonomic for my use case.

3. The % trick: Didn’t know this; thanks!

4. Bookmarks: Yes, but browser bookmarks tend to be where information goes to die. It’s also very hard to organize in a useful way, or attach notes to it. How about some of the ideas in my parent comment, as a spiritual extension of bookmarks?

5. Amna: Sibling comment by @catchmeifyoucan. This is the first I’m hearing of Amna; seems quite interesting at first glance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781

6. One-tab: Interesting, wasn’t aware!

(I’ll keep updating this comment instead of branching off my responses; hopefully useful at least as a distilled collection of suggestions)

Re: On Browser Tabs

#40

Post by cthain »

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…

Get a 'tab group' add on, Simple Tab Groups for Firefox. There is something similar for Chrome but I don't know off the top of my head.

I have a different group for any 'context' I often return to (or even a dump of 'researching random thing I may one day come back to'). Then I have one window open and I switch between contexts as needed and pick up from where I left off.

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