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A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

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Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#81

Post by ulbu »

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…

tabs is just not the correct abstraction for focused work.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#82

Post by Smalltalker-80 »

sumtechguy wrote: post #56
Smalltalker-80 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars using computers with severly degradated performance. . When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar) plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand is so much more productive...

That is the way I work. Now my bookmark list is crazy. I have started using 'open all' and then reviewing items in each folder to see if they are worth keeping. 99% of the time. no. Many times they are from years ago and the site doesnt even exist anymore. I have some items in my folders that go back to 1992. I have a bad habit of 'oh that is mildly interesting ctrl-d time'. Usually a few weeks later 'what was I thin…

Ditto on the working set. For the 'crazy' bookmark lists: I now have 220 bookmarks, max 4 levels deep, counting the bookmark bar as level 1. And that's work and private combined. Before I add a tab to the bookmarks, I ask myself: Am I likely to need this again? If the answer is not a full yes, I just close the tab. It can also be found again quickly enough with a simple google search or the browsing history.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#83

Post by Yizahi »

Thankfully Firefox helped me with tab hoarding dependency, by silently losing saves session without any visible crash or issue, just on the normal open. Now I have to treat tabs as if they won't be saved ever again and don't leave anything important open. Thanks Mozilla, great use of your time and money, spending them on useless LLM integration and lining CEOs pockets instead of fixing damn basic functionality.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#84

Post by gowld »

ashleyn wrote: post #17

It boggles my mind that, not only do people do this, but it's common . I've seen managers at work with hundreds of tabs open, with an uncanny ability to know exactly where the thing they need is. I've been using tabbed browsers for 20-something years and I never really have more than 1, 2 at a time. If I need to call something back, I either bookmark it or I open up the history and search for it.

40 years ago Apple figured this out: Spatial file manager.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12476605

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#85

Post by ge96 »

I wrote a Chrome Extension to save tabs to my local DB (till it stopped working with manifest v3) but I found all the tabs I saved I never actually used them again.

I also noticed there is a new split feature now in Chrome, more stuff to hide in tabs hehe

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#86

Post by zerd »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #37
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…

Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding. Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed. Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.

I was about to do exactly what OP did and create a chrome extension when I found karakeep which saved me from doing that. I really like the full archive because sites disappear all the time, and screenshots for a visual overview. Used to use pinboard but didn't like that archive feature was a subscription. It also works with SingleFile to archive logged-in sites.

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#87

Post by netsharc »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #25
Smalltalker-80 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also baffled by the number of (also smart) colleagues with completely cluttered, unreadable tab bars using computers with severly degradated performance. . When a simple, clean bookmark hierarchy (under the tab bar) plus a working set of open tabs for the task at hand is so much more productive...

I think it comes down to differences in how our minds work. Some require neatly organized desks while others thrive on what to others looks like a chaotic, scattered mess of unrelated documents. It's kind of hierarchal vs. spatial, and it's also one of the key differing principles between Windows-style and Mac-style desktop environments.

I have 10 windows open and 8 of them have about 20-30 tabs (two of them have less than 10 each), I don't think my hoarding is thriving. It's more of a scatterbrain saying "Oh I'll get back to that idea", and taking days or weeks to get back to it.

In Vivaldi, vertical tabs mean each tab takes about 40 vertical pixels of height, and about 250 pixels width, so I can skim through the titles of each tab...

Re: A tab hoarder's journey to sanity

#89

Post by cosmic_cheese »

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…

What I find works better than tabs for things like YouTube is “installed” PWAs. In my case under macOS, I use Safari to do this (File > Add to Dock…), which spins out an independent single site browser process that has a dock icon, presence in OS window management functions, etc as well as both windows and tabs. This way I can keep a few YouTube videos open without them getting lost in the shuffle of browser windows and tabs. These windows stay open even if I close my main browser too which is also nice.
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