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Comment by danShumway | Hacker News Reader

Not going to expand on your point too much, but I've commented similarly in the past, and I heavily agree with you. There's so much room for innovation in browser UX, Bookmarks and tab archival never really evolved and it feels like we're just stuck in the past.

Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way, because I'm not going to do heavy browsing in a 3rd-party Chromium fork that doesn't have Firefox's privacy tools or support for Ublock Origin.

But more experimentation with bookmarking systems would be very welcome. In the meantime, here I sit with my 977 open tabs.

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I respectfully disagree with both of you. A tab is a bookmark, the fact that tabs are allowed to run background processes and consume a crazy amount of system resources is the problem.

Why the hell is JavaScript allowed to run amok? I understand things like Spotify, but Facebook has no need to stream news feed updates if you aren’t even looking at the page. It really needs to be up to browsers to stop this behaviour because obviously JavaScript devs don’t self regulate.

I'm not sure I follow. Either that or I'm not sure you understand what I'm trying to say.

Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage. The UX isn't designed for that volume of separate pages, the tabs are cumbersome to navigate and still just don't really lend themselves well to large sessions that span multiple topics.

I'd believe the same thing even if Javascript had never been invented, tabs as they exist today aren't suitable for long-term content storage/references. Firefox doesn't even support tab grouping unless you set up another extension to try and hobble in tab tree support.

>Turning off Javascript won't suddenly make 900+ tabs easy to manage.

I'm fine with searching. I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs.

Just for a back of the napkin calculation, I took the plain text from this comments page and saved it, and it came to 52kb.

My PC has 64Gb RAM. So even without any form of compression or indexing, I should be able to hold searchable fulltext of over a million tabs in RAM.

My PC also has Terabytes of slower storage.

Now please tell me, why should I ever have to close a tab?

Because Facebook needs continuous doomscrolling for its victims?

Well, that's a tradeoff that I wish wasn't forced on me, because I'd gladly force all those sites to be paginated if it was possible.

Again, I'm not sure what you're arguing about.

I just said "the UX here is due for a lot of innovation." And you replied "I want to have searchable fulltext in those 900+ tabs." Where is the conflict?

Yes, you could build a really interesting tab/bookmarking system in a browser that blurred the lines between tabs and bookmarks and archival. You could do really interesting things with browser history, you could do really interesting things with all of these features.

That is exactly what I just said, the area is ripe for innovation. Currently, you don't have full-text searchable tabs, the UX isn't optimized for your use case. Would be cool if you did though, that would be a feature that would be fun for browsers to play around with.

Just FYI, but Opera does search the full page contents of every tab when using the tab search located next to the minimize button. The browser seems to be one of the only ones innovating right now, at least for power users.

Edit: Now if only they'd fix their bookmark system!

Maybe I should check Opera out again, I used to use it back in the day and it had innovative features back then.

I forget what they called it but you could link one page to another, so I could have an index page open on one monitor and when you clicked on links in that, it would open those links in tabs in a window I had on another monitor.

I wouldn't say I was arguing, just ranting about my desires like most people here. And "again" implies that I've replied to you before, but that was my first reply to your comment. Perhaps you were confusing me with hsbauauvhabzb.

I even quoted the part of your comment that I was replying to.

I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but nvme drives are pretty rapidly approaching ram in terms of bandwidth, so it’s possibly sane to just offload tabs to ‘slow memory’ too.

I don't think you're missing anything. It's frustrating.

Tab management is a UX problem, same with grouping (I think there’s some plugins that manage tree views).

Tabs should be short lived bookmarks, long lived bookmarks could do with a UX update too.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, and we’re probably both half right. We’ve taken concepts which have been around since I can remember (IE5/6 days) and just run with them for 20 years without many substantial changes.

I use Total Suspender to shut down unused tabs and it works fairly well. Unfortunately, YouTube tabs take an overlong time to reload.

> Part of the problem is that it's tricky for people to innovate on bookmarks in an accessible way

Actually, I think it should be very simple. We already have Tree Style Tabs and it has Group-Tabs. Just mirror the Tab-Tree with a Bookmark-Tree, where Group-Tabs are folders, done. There is already a tab-tree-addon doing something similar (was it sideberry?), but it's still a bit fizzy and unstable and needs more polishing. I guess firefox itself needs more optimization in that area.

Similar could be done with Tab-Groups, when done good. There used to be a XUL-addon which added a tabbar for groups. Combined with tree style tabs on the side, this made a really awesome interface. I'm still sad that addons can't do this today anymore.

a tab, a bookmark, and a history entry

are you getting it?

a tab, a bookmark, and a history entry

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