Hacker News Reader

Comment by antoineaugusti | Hacker News Reader

Warning: if you do this on your Android phone at the moment, you may have to completely clean your Chrome application storage to be able to use the app afterwards.

View on HN

> Note: this is even worse if the URL was opened from an intent. In that case, Chrome can end up completely bricked because upon restart it will immediately attempt to re-open the URL that crashed it. I could not recover from this without having to fully "Clear Storage".

Too late for me. Not even from intent. Chrome force stop later, it still tries to load it and immediately crashes.

Off Topic: I don't get it why, after 10 years of mobile browser development, there still is no "close all tabs at end" option. Every time I visit my parents, I have to clean up their 150+ open chrome android tabs because they don't understand how to properly clean up their browsing sessions. Why on earth would I want to open the same old tabs in the morning, that I already looked at the day before?

Because they are the tabs with your email, facebook, news, and and and.

Is it really necessary to permanently monitor these distractions? (rhetorical question)

That’s what pinned tabs are for.

Because for a large number of people (including me) tabs are also bookmarks. Granted, most of them I’ll never get back to, but it’s a habit that’s difficult to break.

Yep, because you can't save all open tabs as bookmarks

That’s not the point, and sarcasm is uncalled for.

That's not sarcasm. Because this feature is missing on chrome android I only have the option to close all tabs or to manually open each tab and decide to bookmark it or not.

Ah, sorry. I was thinking of desktop browsers that do have the feature (but I don’t think I’ve ever used it as, well, I hardly use bookmarks).

I disable url bar autocompletion for history, so it's only for bookmarks and open tabs, and use my bookmarks as a way to choose which sites are easy to get to.

I think bookmarks on Desktop disappeared for a reason: They are not really useful. On Android, you can save "bookmarks" as symbol-links or install in case of PWAs. These symbols can be organized pretty good using the main Android interface. No need for a dedicated browser feature.

On Desktop, if I want to memorize a blog post etc., I use tools such as ArchiveBox, which also prevents later inaccessibility.

To memorize pages on Desktop, there're better features available that integrate more direcly on the OS level, e.g. similar to Android symbols.. There are also self hosted link organizers with tagging feature etc.

There are such options on Firefox. Auto close and close on quit, although annoyingly the latter now requires choosing quit from the app menu instead of just closing the app like a few years ago. There is also "close all tabs" if you just hold the tab button, as well as in the ... menu on the tab screen

You are right. My point is that you have to take steps to close tabs, if it is just "explicitly closing Firefox". On Desktop, the browser will be terminated on shutdown. Shutdown does not apply to phones. If I want to close all tabs the second I lock my phone - no such thing. It would be enough having a "Stop all Apps&Tabs at 12am" feature.

This is really why I avoid browsing things on my phone at all, or use self-hosted progressive web apps that run in dedicated tasks.

Btw. - can someone explain why my initial comment is downvoted - Is it because my use case appears ignorant or unusually extravagant?

Can you clear the app data via adb?

Could not be bothered to try (my daily driver on Android is Firefox)

Clearing cache was sufficient enough for me to launch Chrome and quickly close the tab.

I just closed chrome, reopened hit and immediately hit the home button at the top left. That was enough to get me to safety.

Thank you

Thanks for this, but I needed to disable animations in accessibility for this to work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com