A Study of Tabbed Browsing • Hacker News Board

Re: A Study of Tabbed Browsing

#51

Post by dangerface » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 4:05 PM UTC

visarga wrote: post #2

About revisitation: is there a tool that saves the contents of every web page as I browse, and creates a searchable archive? I think there is a much higher probability that webpages I have seen in the past contain relevant information for future searches. It could be used as an offline library, or as an advanced revisitation mechanism.

Years ago I setup a local http proxy that cached everything. I never tried searching it but was able to pull pages and sites that had 404ed from the cache using it as an archive.

Re: A Study of Tabbed Browsing

#52

Post by keypress » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 8:32 PM UTC

I first encountered tabbed browsing on Opera, and the other browsers later copied. I think it was actually cheaper in terms of resources than another window. So tabs are a hack, that caught on because Window managers on many OSs are so poor. And bookmark UI is so bad, that people prefer tabs. But if you use multiple browsers and multiple tabs, you can easily get discombobulated. I say that, but I can probably cope with about 10 tabs in each, if groups of tabs are related.

I like the idea of a freeze tab/site for later. Like when you shop or are filling in forms. But I'd love to see a better bookmark/history UI - and even have that embedded a bit more into the desktop.

Re: A Study of Tabbed Browsing

#53

Post by lexicality » Fri, Dec 08, 2017, 9:19 PM UTC

Vinnl wrote: post #37

lexicality wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people are frustrated with their tab extensions dying and I assume most of them (like me) are now using the ESR release. (Note that Mozilla penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing history)

> penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing history aka they don't support profile data migration between versions. "Penalise" is needlessly polarising.

On the one hand yes, but on the other hand prior to 55 it worked fine.

I feel like they could have saved that up for 57 as part of the cake icing.

Re: A Study of Tabbed Browsing

#54

Post by Vinnl » Sat, Dec 09, 2017, 9:44 AM UTC

lexicality wrote: post #53

Vinnl wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> penalise you for downgrading by deleting random bookmarks and your browsing history aka they don't support profile data migration between versions. "Penalise" is needlessly polarising.

On the one hand yes, but on the other hand prior to 55 it worked fine. I feel like they could have saved that up for 57 as part of the cake icing.

Actually, they never supported backwards migrations: it just happened to work relatively well. They even explicitly noted this in the release notes. And it's easy to imagine that it would cost a lot of effort, especially with the massive amount of changes in 57, to support something that would be used only once by a relatively small number of users.