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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

One of the Test Pilot attempts in this area was Snooze Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/snoozetabs/

The engagement on that experiment wasn't very high, but I later went and read some of the user research and felt like there was some unmet potential: the concept was understandable, the functionality matched at least some real use cases, but it still didn't work, people didn't use it.

Obviously Pocket is intended for this purpose as well. It's personally what I use for this purpose, though there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab. If you make it easier to save the tab, there will always still be a point when you aren't sure if you want to save it or not...

As far as I'm aware Mozilla hasn't done deep-dive research into tabs. Not all of our research is public, but we do post a public index of the research: https://firefoxur.github.io/

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I would _love_ if firefox handled lots of background tabs better, my biggest complaint is how the browser UI lags with lots of background tabs open. This seems like its a scheduling issue, operations in background tabs should be lower priority than foreground tabs and should be pre-emptable so the user interface never lags. I'd be ok with manually pinning tabs I needed to run javascript in the background.

This is on a high spec dual 8 core xeon workstation with 164gb of ram and a radeon rx480 running latest kubuntu. Less than 100 tabs open, most of them basic references. If there was a bit of hardware I could buy that would fix browser lag I would.

I use uBlock with fairly aggressive settings (so lots of scripts probably don't run), but Firefox handles 100+ tabs on a fairly average Thinkpad fine for me. Worth checking if it's running in multi-process mode as it should.

Back then I had regularly around 150 open tabs in my old Opera on a notebook with 4GB RAM without any problem. But those were the times without big js-heavy webapps/sites like these days...

Hah! A hardware browser accelerator as when you buy a hardware audio dsp. That'd be fun.

I was thinking more ram, faster ssd or better gpu... but a browser accelerator that worked would be pretty cool :)

> Less than 100 tabs

Find a way to organise your stuff better? Whip up a page of links and use that? Dirs of shortcuts or something?

Having 50+ tabs open can't be an efficient way to manage your references.

Tabs will likely be grouped by task as they are opened either around the same time or often as as a new tab from one of those windows. Another key advantage of open tabs is they save the state of the page you were on when compared to bookmarks.

There's obviously benefits to a more robust way to manage your work state. I'd view it in a similar vein as the advantages of a tidy desk: Some people lack the discipline to keep that state and can somewhat compensate for some of the disadvantages i.e. by application of spatial memory and the advantage of having everything to hand.

If people are going to do things the wrong way regardless providing them tools to improve their situation can still make sense.

Its not unreasonable, people frequently talk about hundreds or even thousands of tabs open here on HN.

I have 8 virtual desktops with different projects open, R studio and Jupyter notebook windows plus reference reading material. The work I do typically involves long running tasks and checking back on projects or doing some add on analysis. It takes way too long to get everything aligned right and started up on different monitors so this machine is always on.

I'd expect web browsers to be able to handle this without ui lag if the hardware is good enough. At this rate, I might run firefox in separate docker containers per virtual desktop just to keep it smooth. Would benefit security too...

As to the tab management, older version of Opera had tab stacking, which I've found pretty good for tab management. You could stack tabs into themselves to create a cluster of tabs that could then be rolled, so that just one of the tabs was visible, and later unrolled for using those tabs. I think Vivaldi copied the feature as well.

> there's always a kind of in-between state where you aren't quite sure what you want to do with a tab.

It feels like that's the state I'm in with regard to most tabs. It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

One user research task is often to give names to ideas that we don't otherwise know how to describe. Like in bookmark research they distinguish between bookmarks that represent something you saved, vs. bookmarks that represent some navigational shortcut you are creating for yourself.

For tabs, I can imagine different ways of thinking about them:

1. An activity you have to complete. Or start. 2. A piece of information you think you may need to be aware of. 3. Something that interests you, but you are leaving for when you are in some particular state of mind (e.g., ready to read something long and involved). 4. Something shared with you, that you feel obliged to respond to. 5. One of a set of things that represents some pending task. 6. Something information you may need to revisit. Or you may have finished it, but it's yet to be "garbage collected". MDN pages usually fall in this category for me – I'll quickly come back a couple times to the page, but I only know I'm "finished" because I don't come back. So it sits there.

And for each of these there's the state of "maybe". Maybe I'll need this. Maybe I'll need to be aware of this. Maybe I should reply to my friend about this.

I use tree style tabs with auto tab discard and use suspended tabs as ephemeral bookmarks. Since Firefox opens all of my previously open tabs whenever I restart the browser they can survive reboots. If a tab sticks around long enough and I don't end up reading it I'll throw it away. I've always felt like browsers were missing something in between a tab and bookmark; kind of like a scratch pad for internet rabbit holes.

Most of the time, my tabs are holding information that I'm using to complete a task. Once I complete the task I close any tabs related to it. Sometimes I leave a URI in my code as a reference to find the ideas again.

In this case the tabs act as both a reference, and a "task" waiting to be finished. If I finish the task I can close the tabs. Gives me the incentive to finish what I'm working on.

Also thank you for Python's Virtualenv, paste, and webtest. I know your not much into the Python scene anymore but your contributes still effect my day-to-day activities.

>more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

It's not paradoxical at all - bookmarks are long-term persistent storage, tabs are short-term volatile storage. Data stored on disk isn't less important than data stored in RAM, but any given datum stored in RAM is a lot more likely to be accessed in the near future.

Same reason my physical desk is full of papers. That's exactly what all my open tabs are, all the various papers and pamphlets etc sitting on my desk.

Doesn't mean I really will look at any of them any time soon though, it's not exactly a _succesful_ information organization method in either case. Which means, yeah, it might be ripe for some clever UX. It's not at all clear what this should be.

> It also feels like these tabs are more important than those I've already bookmarked, which seems paradoxical.

Maybe they're not more important but they're more urgent? Since they're ephemeral whereas your bookmarks are still going to be there when you reboot.

Well, my tabs are also still going to be there when I reboot; For any modern browser that currently works and I'd consider "just losing" the tabs as a serious bug.

Yeah, but we still think of them as ephemeral. I mean if a colleague lost work from open tabs I'd put a larger portion of the blame on them than if their hard drive dies and they lose bookmarks.

I built an extension for chrome called Lovely Tabs about 10 years ago that allowed snoozing (amongst other fun features). What I found was that while very convenient, I over-relied on it and just continued to resnooze over and over again. It built up to the point where it was unusuable.

The real issue is that (many) people are bad at managing state, particularly for things they want to theoretically read later but never will. Giving them an unlimited snooze mechanism is not the answer. Either it must have constrains to force clean up, or another “solution” should be attempted instead.

Was the snooze time exponential? If it would e.g. double every time it might just work

I fear that one big advantage, that tabs kept in working memory, including pages in the back history, makes it very fast, just can't be helped beyond a certain mass of tabs. Tab suspension sure would help with crashes at the limits of memory, but with a small, full SSD only, it's limited too.

For a large amount of tabs, it is more important to have them visible and easily accessible than to have them loaded in memory. It's ok to keep only recent tabs in memory and reload older tabs, but it's good to have both shown in the same way and avoid "out of sight, out of mind".

Except if I have changed the site through interaction, or entering text in formfield. I imagine that's difficult to save. The browser can't even tell the difference between unwanted loads like ads. This way a save file could grow quite fast.

Snoozetabs and tab need to make a baby so i can snooze a group.

You could do this with tab snooze and OneTab. OneTab compresses all open tabs into a list of HTML links, and you can then pull those into a tab of just one OneTab group, and snooze that. Maybe 3-4 clicks.

I love Snooze Tabs!

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