Overcoming Tab Overload
scs.cmu.edu
scs.cmu.edu
Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow.
But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20 different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24 hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while others have been collapsed, or my position in a video, etc etc etc.
And all of that gets lost if I close a tab or even restart my browser to upgrade.
I just want to serialize the current DOM/source files and JavaScript/window state to unserialize it later. Sure, network connections will break but websites can usually handle that.
Because while the organization/usage of tabs/bookmarks is one thing, a HUGE roadblock to closing tabs is losing state.
I'm sure it wouldn't be even close to trivial for browsers to build, but it still would just be so helpful.
This is next on the todo list for the browser I'm writing. I have a lot of ideas for it but I want to get some basic javascript working first.
I sometimes need to restart my computer but don't want to lose all my Firefox windows and tabs, so I would force kill Firefox and have it restore the 'crashed' session after rebooting. That did work very well, but this is a much cleaner solution.
File > Exit (ctrl-shift-q)
More specifically freeze-dry, code for page state saving: https://github.com/WebMemex/freeze-dry
Amna can do this (kind of). If you don't explicitly "close" a a browser window within Amna, it will just minimize the window. So it preserves the state (e.g scroll), while still giving you freedom to work on something else with a clean slate. It's not perfect, since the tabs aren't really closed, they'd be just out of sight. But it's a start in that direction. On the flip-side, in case your computer shuts down or whatever, the tabs are saved still.
One challenge I've run into state preservation is auth, a lot of websites actually log you out (e.g. AWS Console, Sendgrid), even if you have them open in the background.
Can you do something similar?
That’s where I want to get to. For now you can import Google or Microsoft Tasks.
I’ve been working on a integrations library for all of these services:
Clearly Chrome is keeping this info up-to-date in case it crashes (or someone kills it in task manager). So if its already doing this, they should add in a feature to to it manually, so I don't need to kill the task.
This does not appear to be available in your full history, though
It absolutely does not remember scroll position, much less any of the remaining state of the page.
Or when you just visit a link and then press the back-button.
I remember 20 years ago you would press the back-button and your previous page was IMMEDIATELY restored, no network request involved.
It feels like today the browser cache isn't used at all. This is especially disappointing with the new Firefox Mobil where they removed offline-mode among other features.
As a web developer I see having control over this rather than the web browser as a good thing.
As much as ensuring current data is sometimes relevant, having a tab show up empty, with a 404 (linkrot), or with some redirect to utterly unrelated content is ... not serenity-inducing.
Mozilla's operating premise is that the browser serves users, not publishers. That promise rings somewhat hollow these days, though I enthusiastically applaud the concept.
> Future improvements: the tab serializer
> The tab serializer is a future piece of work we think may lead to significant improvements on our current approach to tab discarding. It takes the contents of a Chrome tab and serializes its current state into a binary blob. This binary blob can later be deserialized into a tab.
> The serializer would serialize almost everything Chrome, Blink and V8 need to properly preserve a tab (something Chrome extensions tackling this problem historically haven't been able to easily achieve). Serialization would include the usual suspects: the DOM (with a lot of WebGL and Canvas included), CSS and the state of the V8 JavaScript VM.
> If you use Android or ChromeOS, you may know that (similar to the tab discarding experiment covered in this post) we kill background tabs aggressively in order to ensure memory usage is low. The issue with the way we tackle this was that your tab would lose all of its state.
> When you showed interest in the tab again, we would have to reload it and all your interaction with it would be lost. The tab serializer just approaches this problem in a way that gets you back to almost exactly what you were without requiring going back to the network.
> We look forward to sharing more information about this work at a later date.
6 years later, we have... wait for iiiiiit... something called "freeze-dried tabs": https://www.xda-developers.com/google-chrome-89-freeze-dried...
It basically presents a pseudo-image of the current tab while the actual tab is loading in the background. The pseudo-picture contains text and image drawing commands so it can be zoomed in and out, and it's a snapshot of the entire webpage (probably subject to limitations I'm yet to identify). It's not interactive though beyond having a concept of "hit targets" for anchor elements, and AFAIK Android's only using it to speed up perceived browser startup at the moment (so not for tab switching).
To me, the fact that this silly feature has shipped on Android ("THE" platform), and for the most part very imperfectly filled the vacuum that would have been a canonically perfect match for tab serialization, is fairly concrete signal that tab serialization will never be implemented. D:
I can admittedly sorta appreciate that WebGL and DRM state would probably be tricky to perfectly save - the text says "a lot of", suggesting that the feature would sometimes fail and produce an inconsistent experience. Hmph. That would be better than nothing. And it's not like Google couldn't go look at how Firefox does it for ideas....
Sometimes I just wish a bunch of rich millionaires with no idea what to do with their money would make a giant big deal about _paying Google_ to implement specific obscure features into Chrome - like this one :D. It would cause all sorts of hilarious chaos in terms of processing the payment, which would itself make for excessively amusing headlines about feature prioritization and such.
Audio/video autoplay, adblock, tabs navigation and retrieval, user state generally, and more.
I still use Chrome on Android in two cases:
1. On an old device in which Firefox/Fennec performance is abysmal. (On a newer device, there's no contest, and Fennec wins out for general browsing.)
2. For print-to-PDF on the newer device (Fennec seems to have lost this functionality, along with a number of other highly useful features).
Otherwise, I avoid it like the plague. As well as Android in general.
Fennec is the least objectionable, generally. EinkBro is quite well-suited to e-ink devices.
(I can understand all the reasons why it happened, and who finds it attractive among users, but still, it's a horrible environment.)
I found it's good for organizing tabs and creating different sessions for different tasks. It works on most pages pretty well but every once and a while I still have to go into a standard chrome browser to make sure I'm still seeing the same page as other folks. Still pretty great overall. I save multiple different session types easily and don't have to worry about losing where I'm at.
Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs open (but asleep!) and just pick the tree im interested in. Dont need to save bookmarks or save articles for later - they are all there always.
And: this might be hard to believe but it was much better before - extension wise.
I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power users.
I'd recommend more people think like this.
For me it is a small sacrifice for now at least.
I’m interested in trying.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option.
Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.
imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2.
tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.
Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.)
I'd like to be able to:
- Search tabs (by metadata).
- Search tabs (by content).
- Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks.
- A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.)
- Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select.
- Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.)
I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.
I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any other browser, that's basically unmanageable.
For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y beckons. There is usually not enough time.
I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things. I would really like to learn from highly productive "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one.
So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot if the page is removed. I would really like them to be integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the ability to capture and show a collection of web page content decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major part of my working life in closed commercial software.
I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox, unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree Style Tabs extension.
It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n²) somewhere, but it reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but kept the tabs, everything became fast.
Sidebery. After trying out other extensions I settled on Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways, and works reasonably well with containers.
(There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my windows there are empty panels as a result.)
That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something.
Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc.
Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been burned before by my browser "forgetting" my tabs before on restart, as well as browser sync bugs, so I don't put a ton of faith in the longevity of tabs.
Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
Tabs are formed automatically, closed easily, and organized by the order you opened them in.
Bookmarks require going through a multi-step dialog, removing them requires another dialog, and they're organized by manually creating a nested folder hierarchy.
I think most excessive tab use is down to bookmarks not having the best UX.
First, if you "open the whole folder", you have to wait for a few hundred tabs to open for a large project, a few tens for a small project. That's very slow and uses a lot of memory. They don't open quickly in the asleep state the same was as tab sessions do.
Then there is the maintenance of the folder. If you bookmark all tabs in a window to a folder, later you'll open the whole folder, do a bit of work, reading, whatever, then save to a new folder because the set of active items isn't the same as it was when you started. Now you have to delete the old folder, otherwise you'll end up with a different miserable problem: Huge numbers of folders of bookmarks, all slightly different.
You'll probably need to do this a few hundred times over the life of a big project, if you context switch like I do in and out of different projects. That's a lot of folder activity.
Sure you can date them, but do you remember why you didn't delete a folder, was it because you wanted to keep that one or just forgot?
You can't realistically update the bookmark folder incrementally as you go, because there is no visual indicator showing which of the currently active tabs in the window has a matching bookmark (or which bookmarks in the folder are now excess), and it's too onerous and difficult to bookmark each time you open a tab in that window and delete a bookmark each time you close a tab.
Then, there's context. It's a little thing, but remembering the scroll position is a useful cue for later, in a large article, though if some section or comment has a permalink I tend to click that before leaving the tab. Ideally I'd want to be able to annotate pages as well, to quickly note why I've kept that article, documentation, comment or whatever open, but we take what little we can get from the tools we have. (It's possible to select text regions in each tab, at least in Firefox, but I've never actually checked if those selections stay selected across a browser restart. Anyway, they disappear uncomfortably too easy to rely on.)
> Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
For perspective, I wouldn't say I do 100 mini projects in a year, it's fewer than that, but a number of them span multiple years.
I don't have 100 windows, I have currently 22, but it's temporary and will reduce. I consolidated some related things recently. Three windows are for my current work project, for which there are about 300 tabs. This is because there's an active working area window (GitHub etc), a collected-things-from-work-and-researched-items-for-work window, and another for activities on a different monitor like watching videos and shared notes.
With some tab management extensions you can make foldable groups - this is what people talk about with Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery (which I'm using now) and other hierarchical tab management extensions. This means you don't need 100 windows for 100 projects; you can effectively archive projects.
To even find Windows used to be very difficult until I started using an extension that lets me give names to Windows. Ironically the window-naming extension I use is Tab Count in Window Title, because I tried several others and they showed up as using more browser resources, so this is the one I use. Having the tab count is quite helpful anyway :-) (Because if I forgot to give a window a title, it still tends to have a a recognisable tab count and current page.) Now they all have names in the "Window" menu, and when moving around in the window manager. I find this useful for "Move to window" (by name) as well, which I use to move a tab that was opened in the wrong place or something ephemeral I decided to keep, to the appropriate window where I can go through and organise them a bit more later.
There's also a geographical aspect. Those browser windows are overlapping but not at quite the same place on the desktop, and they are different sizes. The locations work ok with my memory for recently used windows. MacOS's four-finger-swipe-down is good, and I position windows somewhat consciously to be helpful for this. Some of them are deliberately shaped as narrow rectangles, as a reminder they have queued items I need to organise (and then probably close that window).
There are a lot of improvements possible to this setup. I don't feel I've found what would be ideal for me. I have a fairly clear idea of what I'd like, but don't know any tool that comes close, and I don't have the spare time to write one. But bookmarks of URLs in linear lists or with basic folders, flat history lists that don't distinguish things I want to keep versus things I don't, are not it. I tried the history thing, it was very time consuming to recover the information I needed from it.
Anyway, i was exploring options and i was glad to find your experience. I think i am ultimately looking for something similar to what you want and maybe will email you at some point to ask about this if i do indeed get a little deeper into it if you don't mind.
The most useful extensions I've found to manage this complexity are https://github.com/tpamula/webextension-window-titler and https://github.com/l10nelw/winger.
This is the script I made to bring up the firefox window I desire from the custom name I gave it using window-titler:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# switches to the firefox window that starts with the provided word between brackets
NAME=$1
WIN=$(wmctrl -l | grep Firefox | grep "\[${NAME}")
if [[ -z $WIN ]]; then
echo "no window found"
exit
fi
NUM_WINS=$(echo "$WIN" | wc -l)
if [[ $NUM_WINS -ne "1" ]]; then
echo -e "$NUM_WINS windows found, please be more specific:\n"
for w in "$WIN"; do
echo "$w" | cut -d' ' -f4-
done
exit
fi
WIN_NAME=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f4-)
WIN_ID=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f1)
echo opening: $WIN_NAME
wmctrl -iR $WIN_ID
This is a less than perfect system, but it's good enough for me for now.
And what are these kinds of projects that you are the only one to tackle?
I should have said, "I asked people who like to tell me I'm doing it wrong what they do...".
There's a small subset of people I found telling me I'm wrong/insane, there's something wrong with me, I'm untidy, that I should do something else and I have a hoarding problem, etc...
Among that subset, I found they consistently had no better solutions to offer when asked, and this is because they just didn't feel the need to tackle problems involving a lot of reading material that needs to be retained, referenced from and used as an increasingly authoritative knowledge base over time in order to complete technical projects using that knowledge.
It is that lack of better solutions from armchair critics which has led me to believe I'm not necessarily "doing it wrong", even though I know perfectly well that it has problems, and what kinds of systems I would prefer to use if I could find or build them.
One of those people was quite helpful though, and rightly pointed me to knowledge-base software (that they themselves weren't using mind), but somehow seemed to think I have a lot more spare time than I do to maintain the contents, and thought I was bluffing about that. I do actually take a lot of notes already, have been doing so for many years, and I know how long it takes me. When to take notes, and when to leave things in tabs (perhaps to take notes on later), is about prioritising long-term task flows.
I'm sure there are people who have much better solutions than I've found so far, and perhaps they could show me someday. (Though, it's not likely to convince me if it involves closed-source software and locked away information, or too much time-consuming clipping process before you're allowed to move on to some other big task, as those do come up.)
But I haven't met those people yet. Only critics who don't have better solutions, and think large numbers of tabs is a sign of mental laziness or something. Whatever I am, it's not lazy. Perhaps I should go to a tab-hoarders' conference and we can devise better tools there :-)
When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.
The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.
That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt.
Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation.
Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.
What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.
Bookmarks for frequently visited recurring links.
Bookmarks that I visit multiple times a day (Calendar, Email, etc) get pinned.
Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm at 20.
I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for instance when opening new tabs from other apps).
I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them, so I tend not to fight it.
How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well, but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this site.
And multiple day tasks, I still can’t imagine why you need all the tabs. For me, I get in, get what I need and get out again.
They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.
Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come back.
In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've spent more time in head-down coding.
5 tabs an hour, hah.
Generally 300+ tabs in firefox. Mostly in chunks corresponding to home or work projects that take months or longer to finish.
I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full bookmark but not finished with.
I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.
#pageActionButton {
display: none !important;
}
.urlbar-history-dropmarker, .urlbar-history-dropmarker:hover {
display: none !important;
}
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }
(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)
With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and it'll get cleaned up in due course.
While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.
All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.
...No way. That's my TIL for the day. Am I the only one who didn't know about this!?
The problem is when I have stuff that sits around for longer like the Fast AI course I'm doing. That window is taunting and mocking me.
Edit: Looks like I have this in a tab because I meant to finish reading it. 7 months. I have a problem.
Someone should develop an actually good Alfred like tab finder for Firefox and I’m golden.
Anything unpinned is temporary, and I only pin a few tabs. I also heavily bookmark and quickmark (qutebrowser) things and can usually get back to them easily.
I don't remember what changed my behavior, but I had incidents in the past with running out of RAM and swap and my whole PC hanging despite having 16GB of RAM, so I probably just scared myself straight.
Things feel cleaner when I have fewer tabs, which I think contributes to my mood being better. If I'm ever partway through a deep-dive or project that involves a lot of open tabs, I find I feel stressed. Sometimes I even decide enough is enough and close them all, feeling near-instant relief.
Emacs has sooo many different tools to organize and operate on buffers, so different types of users can compose a workflow that works for them, including plain old tabs if they really want. And of course, extensibility, the most important feature imo
And you can do this now of course, with w3m or other plaintext browsers, but it's just not that comfy for most webpages these days. And there's emacs-webkit, but it's still a bit of a pita to install.
I still use qutebrowser for most things, and with i3/sway plus the save-session function, i can get hierarchy and persistence, and that seems sufficient for now...
I think that with the right desktop environment we could completely get rid of most tabs. Windows and ie were terrible with opening new windows which made tabs a necessity, but really they should be used for grouping related pages.
I never really got to grips with having different sets of tabs within the same window -- that's the kind of thing I use multiple windows for. But I still have the extension installed because it's the easiest way to show several hundred tabs in a way which means I can avoid loading the content just to close tabs.
The closest thing that works for me is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro... but I'm not thrilled with the user experience.
I think my findings with users are consistent with the researchers. Improved focus, and feeling less overwhelmed, and the larger context management aspect of things goes away when you browse with tasks offloaded from your head.
Amna works by managing your Chrome Windows. Instead of organizing tabs after you've done your work, you start with the task first, and click on it. That way you can "scope" a browser to a specific goal, and toss it when you're done. It saves your tabs as your work.
It's still a WIP (the website and product are kinda out of sync), you can still try it out and pass along feedback :)
> He means we need something richer, that we should be collecting information by “task” or another word he brings up again and again, “context.”
Yes, context makes sense. But it needs to be context over time. Context that evolves and can be searched and revisited. You should be able to pull up the context of last month, or the 2nd week of May of last year.
> “If you think about it, Google does a good job giving us thousands of search results,” says Kittur. “But that entire process after search results is being done pretty much entirely in our heads.
Precisely. Fixing tabs is not about the browser at all. It's a problem with search. Search begins and ends at Google. What we really need is a search that starts global and integrates personally. Think of tabs as a sort of cache of what you have brought in from the broader internet. This "cache" should have a simple search interface (think Slack's search, vim Ctrl+P, fzf, Command+Space/Spotlight, etc.) but also have the ability to pull up some sort of window that you can navigate context by other means. Such as date, device, location, etc. "Show me what I was looking at on my phone when I was at Starbucks last Wednesday" kind of thing.
Tabs are the fear of losing context. Make context durable, transparent, holistic (i.e. you can zoom to either the trees or the forest), and global (sync across all devices) then you will have largely solved tabs.
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-...
I am currently working on a new and fun approach to managing this kind of cognitive spaces, hopefully to be published this month.
At the end of the day the stack is closed out or put into bookmarks for later looking at. I then have a set of folders of 'look at later'. If later is greater than some time period I just delete the whole folder. Once a month I look at the overflow. Most of the time it is more of a 'why did I care about this' and just blow it away. It is a variation of the empty mail box. Inbox needs to be done. Then the 'done' folder. There is no real stack or tree. That way lies madness (I have tried).
I try to keep my tabs in context of whatever I am doing. I max out about 10-20 (6 at the moment). Past anything like that and most of them are useless.
Bookmarks are for 'I know I will need this in the future' everything else I can search for again.
Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.
The problem is its current implementation completely kills your SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview gesture and icons.
I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state, just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work.
I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself).
But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast while using a huge amount of memory that slows down everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and being the reason other things I use for work were getting slow.
I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.
I have the exact problem with pinch to zoom. I had to disable it to stop Tab Overview from loading, once ran out of memory it will start paging everything to SSD, which is why I said it is basically kill the SSD.
I still dont know why the Tab Overview wouldn't automatically become a list view once it is over certain number of tabs.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/lxfU9.png
Is this what you are describing?
It's insanely frustrating to try to switch between two arbitrary tabs in a browser, you have to use the mouse, and keep track of which tab you want to use. I was just running into this problem earlier today, switching between a doc I was reading and a tab I was working in.
Of course, having separate windows for everything leads to more visual clutter, and hurts discoverability a little bit.
I much prefer Firefox's awesome bar navigation when jumping around. % app will show all tabs with a title or URL containing app, * yo does the same for bookmarks containing yo, and ^ for history.
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-keyboard-sh...
Edit: unfortunately, the % shortcut does not work with containers.
It used to do this and now seems like there's no way to get this behavior back
Here is the one reference to `toolkit.tabbox.switchByScrolling`: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content... You can see here that the second param to advanceSelectedTab is false
This param controls wrapping according to the definition: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content...
To confirm, we can see that the shift+tab/shift+ctrl+tab (which wraps) definition passes that param as true: https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source/toolkit/content...
Maybe you can file a bug to add another bool pref instead of hardcoding false?
I often ended up with 80 open tabs and switching was no issue. It was such a great feeling being able to close all the tabs after the work was done.
With Chrome now I constantly need to drag tabs out in order to create a new window to start a new collection of tabs, so that I normally have about 6 browser windows open, then, when looking for a group of tabs, I first need to find the window. It's the same with Firefox since they moved away from allowing custom XUL code.
Here's an example I just found on Google https://thasulinux.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tab_mix_plus....
Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and loading open applications, their windows (and their positions), tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.
I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment, etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all resources.
I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific topic, but the topic is not in the Title of the page and it can get lost in the clutter.
Or maybe more useful, a search service that just crawled the pages in your Chrome history, rather than the entire web.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-...
Reminds me of Workona, which also seemed appealing but didn’t find its way into my workflow.
Just like Inbox 0, I aim for Tab 0. Serenity is the reward for this small disciplined effort.
Close them. They're not going anywhere. You can always find the links back tomorrow. An entire multi-million industry wants you to find them back as easily as possible.
You might even find better ones when you start fresh.
It's just your loss aversion instincts kicking in[1]. It's how your brain is wired. But we live in the golden age of information retrieval. You don't need to hoard tabs. Your brain just doesn't know.
Trust me, if you can. Close them.
It will be ok.
Right clicking my leftmost tab and hitting "Close tabs to the right" is so freeing once you get used to it.
That aside, how do you do the [1] type of linking? Manually? I checked the docs and in classic hacker style they didn't avail me.
[1]: https://example.com/
at the end of your comment.
On the other hand, that article from a year ago is most probably outdated by now.
I have restricted myself from browsing internet on mobile phone, so I only view them from my personal computer
I always keep a note on what I browse, regardless of how important or useless it is (except entertainment stuff to some extent)
I am using this note taking method to all my work as well, for example, searching online about security aspect of several CI/CD pipeline tools that my company use
The notes that I create are all mostly markdown files, with names to their own, so I can grep or find whenever I want, and encrypt and archive the whole folder as I want to back them up
By note taking down the links that I have viewed, sometimes with some wordings for explanation, I can keep track most of them, not all, becacuse sometimes I use namings that I couldn't recall and that's totally fine, I can still grep/find as I want anyway
I would just put down some file names so you guys can get a better idea
1. 3d-printing.md
2. asm.md
3. algorithms.md
4. browser.md
5. cybersecurity.md
6. hacking.md
7. graphics.md
8. gamedev0.md
9. reverse-engineering.md
10. storage-hard-drive.md
11. vpn-proxy.md
12. video-hardware-acceleration.md
13. game-engine.md
14. freelance-startups-business-side-hustle.md
15. fuchsia.md
16. electrical-and-computer-engineering.md
17. electronics.md
and a lot more like
300. linux/doc/linux-kernel.md
301. android/doc/android-apps.md
302. macos/doc/macos.md
303. windows/doc/windows-install.md
Edit: if you are wondering why do this at all when everything is just one google search away, well, i guess that's the whole point
I was a hardcore hoarder, with 300+ tabs all the time, until I realized I was the source of the issue. Now I open as many tabs as I need during the day, then just know I will close everything at the end of the day and start a fresh session. It’s very relaxing. If I really need something I wrote it down in my notes somewhere but that’s really not often.
If I don't have time to stash it away, whom am I kidding? I'm not going to come back to it in a near future anyway. I already have a couple of things that remind me of how guilty I am by not coming back to them, why add more?
The system that finally worked for me is to bind "Close all Tabs to Left" to Ctrl + Left, likewise for right, and Close All Except Open Tab to Ctrl + Up.
I found this enables painless instant culls, I just save URLs everything I want to survive a total cull (it's hardly ever more than 2 URLs, most tabs are junk which I suppose is the main problem).
Ctrl + W for Close Current Tab and Ctrl + Shift + T for Reopen Closed Tab are also pretty useful (require no bind).
In the beginning of the pandemic I tried to reduce social media exposure, to maintain some degree of mental health and reduce distractions.
The way I did it was first to remove all the apps from my phone. This had the added benefit of improving the battery life. This meant that if I wanted to go on fb or Twitter, then I had to use the browser versions which are generally slower, not so optimized for phone usage, and overall the UX is much worse.
Even this though was not enough. Firefox would gladly save my session and despite the subpar UX, I still found myself going back to it more often than I would like.
The solution to this was simple:
Incognito.
Coupled together with a 2FA and disabling the password manager autocomplete by removing the URL from the relevant entries, it made such a huge difference.
Then I started using incognito for more things, like HN, where I would open 6-7 tabs "to read them later" and I never did, so they kept piling up.
For me this works great, especially on the phone. If I really want to read something I read it there and then. If for whatever reason I don't, and android decides to terminate my Firefox then so be it. If I really want to I can search for it again, but then I ask myself whether it is worth it.
If the browser prompted me to "archive" a tab after a few days and select a category, I'd probably use the functionality.
Turns out that I don't actually care about the vast majority of tabs that I leave open—but can't seem to close!—and the extension makes it easy to re-open any automatically closed ones that I did happen to care about. The result is logging on each day to much less tab clutter than I left the night before.
0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-automatically-close-t...
Maybe it's overly dramatic of me to compare it to hoarding, it does legitimately increase productivity. But it also tends to spiral out of control now and then (for me).
I've eliminated those tabs and now have tabs related to what I'm currently doing only. There could still be dozens, but importantly they do get closed.
To prevent the static tabs, I do 2 things:
1) Map tabs I monitor (email, chat etc) to a streamdeck, pressing a physical button every time I want to check
2) Save those static "TODO" tabs to a task manager[1] and treat them as tasks.
[1]: My own task manager: https://github.com/naggie/dstask/ -- saving the URL in note means I can open the tab in a browser again in a command (open)
What is this? I for one am proud of my (minimum) 4 dozen open tabs on average.
But on a more serious note, as a SE I rejoice when I see a "<5 minutes read" article. If it's more than that I just leave it open (if it seems interesting enough). Usually I go back to my backlog during the next week or so and read the ones I still deem interesting based on the title and a quick scroll through, those that don't catch my interest any more or are just too darn long will get C-w'd.
Also when I have a few dozen tabs open in my phone I just send them to my desktop(s) and close them on the phone - they were either too long to be read on a phone, or required some investigation before a commitment.
Not trying to sound snarky, this tool just seems a bit like overkill. It might be useful on my iPad where it is cumbersome to do those steps, but it would also be useful to have Tridactyl there too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/op...
how about multiple layer tabs
I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
My current solution is to having developed a webextension + server system (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/) where I can stash any tab in a TOREAD list, and those replace my blank new tab page. Crude, but it does the job for me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel
I occurred to me that this might make a nice working metaphor for web browsers:
Make a virtual wheel with a defined (default-manageable) number of positions to fill.
Add ability to rotate, or slide, in a number of such wheels.
Any wheel that doesn't get active use for some reasonable amount of time goes automatically from active inventory to searchable long term archives.
The remaining use cases are more around opening a bunch of links from the same page, so we'd keep tabs around for that, but maybe auto-group them with the page of origin for some contextualization.
I frequently move 1-2 tabs to the left side and use "close tabs to right". Probably do this 4-5 times per day.
If I end up needing something I just look in history or ctrl + shift + t to get it back.
Having too many open feels super distracting to me and makes it harder to focus.
I also use bookmarks a lot too, so that might be the difference.
Now I have to close/archive anything I'm not currently using.
Emails, apps, tabs, background processes, messenger contacts.
If I dealt with it and isn't something that is used on a regular basis, like the WhatsApp conversations of my partners, it has to go.
I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open. And that's if I'm busy. Normally it's one or two -- whatever it is that I'm currently working on.
And at the end of the day -- all closed. History and cache cleared. Start clean the next day.
I'd like a browser function that says "open a text file and save all the URLs"
tell application "Chromium"
set tabCount to get count every tab of window 1
repeat with i from 1 to tabCount
set currentUrl to get URL of tab i of window 1
end repeat
end tell[0] https://github.com/slymax/tablist (links to Chrome and Firefox extensions there)
I use LiveComment for manage 10k+ tabs. Pretty practical https://www.npmjs.com/package/livecomment
What I wish had reliable persistence is Windows 10 virtual desktops.
Vivaldi for music, long running stuff, gmail, Jira.
Firefox for searching, transient stuff.
Chrome for its dev tools.
It means I can kill either FF and Chrome entirely at any point and lose nothing valuable, not interrupt anything.
That and I don’t hoard tabs, I either bookmark and close or just close and use the history.
I imagine that would help with my tab-hoarding, as I tend to branch into more windows (up to ~50) once they reach too many (20 or so) tabs each.
TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338
There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync.
I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.
Losing the great suspender means I can’t in concert with Tabs Outliner switch in and out groups of dozens of tabs at a time. Now doing this chews multiple GB of memory and my machine all but locks up for minutes at a time if I forget that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve run into macOS’s “out of memory killer” window pop up on several occasions now entirely from chrome alone.
I am a heavy user of tabs and I’d be trying all the mentioned ones in this page, but I have to express to anyone who has not tried it, if you are building a tab management tool and have not looked at Tabs Outliner in chrome, you need to, it represents the high water mark of tab hoarder & power user features. I’ve got 17 thousand tabs saved in hundreds of windows and groups on just one of my machines!
I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
I'm not sure you know this, but nowadays browsers have low-level sql-like api called indexeddb[0] which may fit your needs without using sqlite.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...
There's a little known feature in browsers called bookmarks that's like tabs, but they don't consume any RAM or bandwidth when you're not using them, and they don't clutter your UI. You can search them, group them into "tab folders", even synchronize them across devices.
Spread the word - bookmarks are the future.
The problem is that I have multiple things I'm working on and I don't want to close the dozen or two tabs open that I have related to it while I'm still working on the project, because looking up the bookmark, or finding the URL, and then scrolling the right spot is many times more work than just keeping the tab open and switching back to it when I need it.
My favorite Firefox feature of all time was "Tab Candy" which was later renamed to "Panorama" It allowed you to automatically group tabs by project or context and let you switch between them seamlessly. Firefox decided to kill it and there is nothing like it now, all of the closest alternatives--when they actually work--require you to manually save and reload groups, which is not effort I'm willing to make.