You have 14 tabs open, don't you | Hacker News Reader

You have 14 tabs open, don't you

2 pointsMatthewBF11 comments

I'm guessing you clicked on this post because I was either right in assuming you have 14+ tabs open or you were surprised at the fact that you didn't have 14 tabs open — because you usually do obviously.

Below I detail my motivations and solution for having way too many tabs open.

I do everything in a web browser. I write, read, design, develop, and peruse the usual sites all in a browser.

I started to get overwhelmed with all of the things I was working on and even just the daily chaos that was using a web browser for everything. I always had way too may tabs open, I lost things regularly, and got distracted constantly. I tried to keep myself organized but I was frequently side tracked by other work.

After reading about productivity strategies and trying other apps to keep myself focused I decided I needed a better solution. General "project management" and productivity apps weren't working, I was still facing the same problems just with another app in my tool case.

So, I started building Partizion. The main methodology that productive people employ (and is the foundation on which Partizion was designed) is that multitasking is 1. impossible and 2. less efficient.

The more you "partition" (see where I got the name from?) your work, and focus on the task at hand, the more efficient and productive you can be. You'll finish tasks faster, you'll stay on track to complete your daily checklist, and you'll be able to pickup where you left off or switch contexts much more easily.

I built this methodology right into Partizion. You can separate your work, create groups of tabs for projects/tasks/daily habits and open them with one click. Partizion is still in its early stages but I have committed to developing Partizion into the tool that should have come standard with every web browser.

If you have some free time, I'd love for you to check it out and let me know your thoughts. I'm open to all feedback + suggestions!

https://www.partizion.io/

Lots of issues here.

(A) Please follow the "Show HN: [name/summary]" convention for promoting your own work. Clickbait is annoying and destroys some goodwill.

(B) Hard "no" on sharing my browsing history with a random third party. From your privacy policy:

> when you create a collection of tabs in Partizion, we store each individual tab's title, url, and status data points like whether or not you'd like the tab to be pinned.

URLs are very sensitive. They can easily be pieced together to become unique identifiers. Sometimes they have tokens in them.

There's no reason to store this stuff in your own databases when you can sync it across the user's Chome installations using the built-in storage API[1].

(C) There are a variety of FOSS[2][3][4] tab managers that are easier to trust than the one you're advertising here. They may not be a 1:1 match, but it's extremely risky to share all your browsing data with a third party.

1. https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/storage

2. https://github.com/stefanXO/Tab-Manager-Plus

3. https://github.com/Mimieam/TabSorter2

4. https://github.com/antonycourtney/tabli

My Apologies, I will follow this convention in the future!

In regards to your browser history, this is not shared nor stored on our servers. You have to specifically opt in to allow access to the History permission, and this is only so you can search your history. Again, nothing stored on the servers.

The information that is stored, like you pointed out in our privacy policy, is mundane and harmless, except of course the URL if that is something you are worried about. Also clearly outlined in the privacy policy is that this information is encrypted, secure, and never shared or sold to third parties.

Furthermore, we are not storing this information just because. Partizion stores your collections of tabs so that you can access them from any device and any browser. This is something that cannot be achieve by using chrome's storage API or syncing.

Hope that clears things up. I didn't want to come off as "advertising". Just thought I'd share my motivations for building this project.

I hope you're not the technical lead for your company. If so, you should hire a security and privacy consultant.

> In regards to your browser history, this is not shared nor stored on our servers. You have to specifically opt in to allow access to the History permission, and this is only so you can search your history. Again, nothing stored on the servers.

If you have my tab info, you have my history. It doesn't matter if you tell me you're deleting it. You could have logs, either intentionally or unintentionally.

> is mundane and harmless, except of course the URL

A URL IS NOT MUNDANE AND HARMLESS. I can't stress that enough. I almost never use all-caps, but this is something that is actually something worth screaming.

It's very easy to turn even a short URL history into a unique identifier for someone. Once you can "fingerprint" them that way, you can find out what they're shopping for, which bank(s) they use, and even private medical information.

> Also clearly outlined in the privacy policy is that this information is encrypted, secure, and never shared or sold to third parties.

Encrypted in transit or at rest? Who has the encryption key? What does "secure" mean to you, and who is certifying that it's secure? Do you have a CTO with a track record of building secure products? Who exactly is running your company, anyway?

As far as never selling to third parties, that means exactly nothing. You could be piping all of our data into Google or any other third party without selling it. If it leaves your servers, it doesn't matter whether it's sold or not -- it's still leaked.

> Furthermore, we are not storing this information just because. Partizion stores your collections of tabs so that you can access them from any device and any browser. This is something that cannot be achieve by using chrome's storage API or syncing.

From literally the first bullet point on the chrome.storage documentation:

> "User data can be automatically synced with Chrome sync"

So again, you seem to lack even a basic understanding of the technical details of this product. If your best explanation for storing extremely sensitive data in your cloud is that you didn't read the Chrome extension docs carefully, or you don't understand Chrome's APIs, then you shouldn't be in this business.

My hot take: You need to close a tab when you're done with it. Not after you've accumulated 40. Nobody can focus on more than one thing at a time anyways. Save yourself the grueling task of "Do I need to keep this tab?" every time before switching to a new tab.

I'm closing my HN tab after leaving this comment. I have work to get done.

That depends on how you work. I switch between multiple projects at work during the day. Not very efficient, but that's just how it is. I do exactly what Partizion does in tmux. I run a separate session for each project. This allows me to quickly jump between projects without mixing things up.

Yes -- 14 or more tabs.

And it drives me nuts that Safari

1. Doesn't place newly-spawned tabs next to the originator; and

2. Won't let me make all tabs the same width.

14?

I got 80-90 tabs each in separate Chrome profiles (personal, work, social).

:O

I close the tab when I am done with it. So, number of tabs in my browser is atmost 10.

You my friend, are a productivity specialist ;)

What do you do when you need to go back to that tab?

My machine doesn't have high specs and it lags when I open high number of tabs. That's the reason I don't open many number of tabs at once.

I bookmark the tab when I need to go back to it later.

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