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

A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 129 posts

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#71

Post by nancyminusone »

r_lee wrote: post #63

>reads title smells like ADHD "I do this because I have ADHD and I'm a visual thinker. if I don't see something, I forget it exists." yup

Doesn't make sense to me, and I've been diagnosed with the same.

I consider tabs to be inherently volatile and disposable. I rarely have more than 10 open at once. There is no hope of finding anything with more than that many. If you need to save something, doesn't it make more sense to actually save it?

Apart from that, I usually have the browser history open.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#73

Post by knuckleheads »

I hoard tabs as well, and https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-manager-p... has been a game changer. Let's me move them around within windows, which I like a lot. Let's me create windows that have specific purposes. The tree style tabs never sat right with me mentally, couldn't say why, I want each window to have a purpose.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#74

Post by thire »

I understand the need for hoarding tabs but it boggles my mind how people navigate tiny tabs and remember where everything is. In fact, they probably don't since I keep seeing people clicking back and forth a few times before finding the right tab.

I have been using tree style tabs on Firefox for so long, I can't function without it. I can nest tabs together and collapse them, but most importantly, I can read all the tab titles due to the vertical layout.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#75

Post by jesup »

thire wrote: post #74

I understand the need for hoarding tabs but it boggles my mind how people navigate tiny tabs and remember where everything is. In fact, they probably don't since I keep seeing people clicking back and forth a few times before finding the right tab. I have been using tree style tabs on Firefox for so long, I can't function without it. I can nest tabs together and collapse them, but most importantly, I can read all the…

I'm down to 7800 tabs (30 windows) on my main desktop. 4K on my other, 2K on my laptops. High was >11000 tabs. Firefox makes this easy; takes ~30 seconds to open all those windows and load a tab per window (plus ~8 pinned tabs)

"% string" in the awesome bar completes against tabs only. Helps a ton, along with some about:config settings that open new tabs from pinned tabs at the right (end) of the tab list. Also windows for separate contexts (though tab groups may also work here now, and avoid the overhead of opening a window/loading a tab at startup).

And "About Tabs" extension from glandium (who works for mozilla)

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#76

Post by kalaksi »

andrewl-hn wrote: post #4

I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder. At some point you adopt a workflow where every browser activity starts with opening a new tab. Plus, so many websites have broken browser history management that it’s easier to open all links in new tabs, too. I do close tabs on occasion, usually when I see that the device starts to struggle. Closing all tabs hel…

> I routinely have several thousands of tabs opened on my devices, and I never considered myself a hoarder.

You seem serious, but it sounds a bit funny!

I also often open links in new tabs. It's also a bit faster than e.g. going back in history. But I do close tabs after I'm done browsing that site or otherwise don't need it. I'd start to feel lost with a lot of tabs open (say, hundreds), not knowing what is actually relevant, what kind of research is "in progress", how to keep track of them well etc.. I do use multiple browser windows and vertical tabs in Firefox.

> Browsers tend to take open tabs into account when I search for stuff, and it’s nice to be able to enter a few keywords and get redirected to an existing tab.

Similarly, I mostly receive suggestions from my browsing history and use that a lot. I've disabled any suggestions from search engines, since they are usually useless.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#77

Post by snailmailman »

ksec wrote: post #53
cosmic_cheese wrote: post #5

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it. T…

I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it. The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others…

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.

I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#78

Post by Terr_ »

IAmBroom wrote: post #13
Seattle3503 wrote: post #10

Firefox lets you group tabs and unload tabs individually or as groups. Super useful for preventing tab accumulation from becoming a memory issue.

It can also do so automatically, which is a great post-hoc feature.

I feel any fuzzy tab grouping feature [0] is a significant security risk by default. Especially with black-box LLMs.

Consider a phishing site which opens up in a new tab, tricking the browser into color-coding and sliding it over into the middle of the user's existing tabs for the real site: "Huh, my bank says I got logged out and need to re-enter my credentials, well, no problem, I mean this is obviously the same interface I was working with earlier, right?"

Protecting against that attack would require some deterministic security rules, such as refusing to add to any group if the domain isn't already represented there... But at that point, isn't the AI-fuzziness really only useful for deciding when not to group things by domain?

[0] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-use-ai-enhanced-tab...

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#79

Post by alexpotato »

I switched to using Pinboard [0] for all bookmarking and never looked back.

The real unlocks were:

- using the bookmarklet that pops open a small browser window with the page title, suggested tags

- doing the same on my iphone

- have a couple in browser bookmarks that point to the tags for important things

It's so good I even used it to track all of my LinkedIn connections tagged by location, job function etc (inspired by Derek Sivers post on having a database [1])

0 - https://pinboard.in

1 - https://sive.rs/dbt

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#80

Post by pcthrowaway »

snailmailman wrote: post #77
ksec wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it. The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others…

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one. I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type Y…

In Chrome, you can use cmd+shift+a or ctrl+shift+a to do fuzzy search in all your tabs (I believe this uses the URL and the page title)
Post reply on HN