Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rsync | Hacker News Reader

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"Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past."

Everyone has a story like this - from all of the browsers.

It seems like FF behaves better in this way now, but I still do silly things like rsync my home directory to a backup before every reboot/update. If I ever need these tab backups, I will have to do silly things like dissect them with JSON tools or monkey around with plists, etc.

Why, Why WHY can't we just have tabs:// ?

Plain text list of all URLs. Dead simple. Just pull up tabs:// and cut and paste. Or select all. Or whatever.

Lose-all-tabs bugs will always be with us - and a fix would be so simple ...

I agree that it should be easier to get a simple list, but I want to note that backing up the firefox tab data is one file, and it makes its own backup whenever you update.

Chrome on the other hand will deliberately reject and wipe your profile if you copy it to another computer.

Also "bookmark all tabs" serves roughly the same purpose as a dumb URL list for backup purposes, even if it's awkward to edit.

I do have a story like this for all the browsers, save one: Opera, from back when it had its own rendering engine. It's not that it never crashed, mind you - but, somehow, the tabs would always be back after. Makes me wonder just how much effort wend into the error shutdown code path to make sure everything is saved.

Found an Chrome extension that lets you do this!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabcopy/micdllihgo...

I just tried it out -- you click a button to copy the list of tabs. If you just want the URLs and not the page titles, choose the "Compact" option.

> Why, Why WHY can't we just have tabs:// ?

That's actually a nifty feature idea, but it seems like it could be easily abused with a little client-side JS for the sake of fingerprinting or analytics, unless it's treated similarly to chrome:// urls. You could probably whip up your own small browser extension to provide a simple formatted list of tabs, though.

Have you tried out: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/copy-all-tabs...

> Why, Why WHY can't we just have tabs:// ?

I expect that the vast majority of users would be entirely uninterested in the workflow you describe.

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