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Comment by em-bee | Hacker News Reader

i write stuff down so i can stop memorizing it. sometimes i get back to that, sometimes i don't. it doesn't matter. if it is important i will remember it, or remember that i wrote a note about it (and then hopefully find that note). if it is not important then it will stay there left ignored.

the problem is i seem to treat browsertabs the same way. i open tabs intending to look at them later. then forget about them, and so they accumulate. i could close all the tabs, but some actually are important. and so i have to go through them, and clean them out once in a while.

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I used to do the same and that turned in to turning tabs in to bookmarks, then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks.. then I discovered pocket. But within a year I had so many unread items, they even informed I was in the top 3% of users... Fuck.

> then i ended up with soooo many bookmarks

yep. I've been thinking about this problem for some time now. With Google, and especially Slack, what I've discovered is resurfacing is more important than organization. You have some tiny thread of memory than you want to input into a system and have that system bring back the webpages and context. This is what Slack gets right.

We have Slack, we have Google, but we do not have anything that is personal. A personal search engine. Something like macOS Spotlight, but more contextual. In Slack you can find individual messages which match a pattern, but you can also expand to see the entire context of that message with date and time. The bookmarks in Chrome do not even tell you the date/time you added them. That's such a basic thing that is missing. The ability to create a "view" of your bookmarks organized chronologically would be another useful tool. In addition: what other sites were you looking at around that time? What city were you in? What was the weather in that city at that time? Sounds silly, but this sort of info can jog your memory.

The browser extends into the global but we have not yet discovered that the browser should extend the other way, into the personal. On one side we should have Chrome, on the other end should be Joplin or Obsidian.

I do the same, but then I take an iPad with me for long plane/boat trips with all the articles saved for offline reading.

Between the time spent in waiting rooms and actual travel time you can actually go through quite a lot of material (of course, pandemic didn't help with this strategy).

I am looking for an iPad app to read the articles offline as I’m traveling again now. Do you mind sharing what app you use for this?

I use Pocket!

https://help.getpocket.com/article/1136-using-pocket-offline

Thanks

You could also look at raindrop.io though unsure of iOS experience on it

Maybe Pocket should have a leaderboard

And achievements.

This could be a hilarious product idea: adding a leaderboard and achievements to any arbitrary site. I'm sure someone has already done it.

In a slightly better timeline, there's an "everything can have a leaderboard" craze instead of an "everything can be crypto" craze.

And in a VASTLY better timeline, there's an "everything can have a leaderboard" craze instead of an "everything must have ads" craze.

There's still time, friends

ideally with links to HN profiles ;-)

hahaha that would be scary...

I save articles that look interesting but aren't critical to Pocket. I have a daily script that clears anything more than 2 weeks old. Either stuff gets read or it gets forgotten.

I do something similar with reminders - I schedule everything instead of keeping lists. That way I get reminded in a more digestible fashion and often by the time the reminder comes up, it's no longer relevant anyway. Makes clearing the list more organic and less cumbersome.

that's why i don't just bookmark everything. it also takes more effort to open a bookmark than to switch to a tab. instead i try to use bookmarks for the really important things.

I never understood how people can use browser tabs this way. If open tabs represent your backlog of stuff to come back to later, what represents your "current working set"? How can you concentrate on one task when there's so much other stuff open?

If I don't need something right now, it is stored in a read it later service (blog post, news articles) or a bookmark service (software projects, company web pages, etc).

I don't run my brain according to computer science principles, but generally the "current working set" for me are the tabs furthest to the right of a browser window's tab bar.

> computer science principles

Hum... Try process engineering principles. They have no relation to computer science, but with the area of knowledge that focus on organizing work.

Well maybe we can agree it results in a similar level of insufferability.

I use the Tree Style Tab add-on for Firefox. The working set can be one nested tree, like a directory in a file system. Or it can be a window, while I also have other windows with many tabs. I'm not well-organized though, just saying how it is.

For me its actually the browser window itself that represents a working set. I put all related tabs into their own windows and put the windows I'm not using on my supplemental monitor in the background so they're out of the way.

Otherwise I start drowning in browser windows and tabs

My working set is a workspace. I send browser windows to separate workspaces if I context-switch apart from a few basics like e-mail etc. which has a workspace to itself.

I may start adding things to my "scratch" workspace, and then if I realise this is something that's turning into more than just visiting a single page I'll tear of the tab and send it somewhere.

Many of those workspaces can stay up for weeks or months.

For open browser tabs, have a look at Onetab (browser extension). It'll close the tabs but keep them in a list however long you want. It lets you reopen things from the list with a click and optionally remove the ones you reopen from the list. In practice I find I very rarely go back to one of them, but for the rare occasions I do it matters, and knowing the urls are all preserved makes me much more likely to actually click that button now and again.

Not to sound obtuse, but that just sounds like browser history at that point. What sets it apart, aside from only storing the "fatal pages" - the pages that tabs were killed at?

What sets it apart is only storing the "fatal pages". That's the entire point.

Those of us who keep accumulating tabs often do so as a "I think I care about this in the near future" halfway bookmark. I don't know about you, but my browser history for just this morning (it's noon here) is already so extensive that it's worthless for that purpose. When I do need to find something with Onetab, it's maybe 1% of the size of my browser history or less.

EDIT: What's more is that when I reopen, it disappears from the list, whittling down what's left over until I can confidently press "delete all" for a given activation (it groups the tabs by which were open when you pressed it; but you can also drag and drop the "bookmarks" from one list to another)

This pretty much exactly describes my (ab)usage of tabs. I had a tab open with the HN submission for the death of Google Reader for two years, because there were so many interesting replacement suggestions. I finally admitted that Google had ruined RSS for me, and closed the tab.

Thank you for the OneTab elevator pitch. I'll give it a try.

The browser history has been destroyed in my experience. No one seems to care for its usability. One-page applications, pushState/replaceState, non-descript title pages and a horrible UI for it in the browsers, it goes on.

I actually use my browser history, but I forget how much utility I actually get out of it until I clear it :S

What browser do you use where history is at all usable for finding any specific thing? Combing through 150 or 500 by-domain YouTube entries with no other metadata? That thing that was a week or three ago on, uh, some domain with --ohhh look-- multiple subdomains? Hope you remember some words from the page title?

Google and Mozilla have both completely shit on the entire idea of personal browsing continuity. Just close all your tabs at night, then go to the home page they provide and start from scratch every morning and nobody gets hurt.

Moving tabs into history doesn't address why people are keeping tabs pen. The presence of the tab reminds you of something. If you move it into history, you have to go looking for it, which only works if you remember that you saved such a tab in the first place.

As a person with ADHD, this is exactly why I leave some tabs alone to remind me to look into it. I have a structure that helps to manage my process.

1. Tabs - Current 2. Tab Pins - For tabs that are living in my browser for more than a week or two. 3. Session Manager - I used it as a semi-archival bookmarking and used it for categorizing my tabs. This stage is where I decides that I need a new browser window, so I put all of my saved tabs in there and will review them in the future. After I review them, I moves the tab to the last stage. 4. Browser Bookmark - the final stage, I only use this for permanent archive. Bookmarks are regularly backup and sometimes merged from other browser bookmark through NirSoft tools.

hmm, the tab management page of one tab is interesting, but it is only available if i move tabs into onetab. i'd like the ability to manage tabs like that, assign them to groups, move them to windows, etc while all the tabs are open. i remember the original firefox container feature had something like that.

That does sound useful, yes. Chrome bookmarks at least can get you part-way there by letting you bookmarks all tabs in a window (right-click on the title bar) or letting you open an entire bookmarks folders contents as tabs, but it's not quite there.

You're saying that as if only Chrome can do that. At least Firefox has had the same for ages, and Edge has it too. Press Ctrl-Shift-D.

yup I whole heartedly agree with this extension. I use it all the time.

I'm fascinated by browser tab hoarding...

I recently started using a bookmarking app (one of the many, so many) because there were often one or two lingering tabs that I didn't want to close, and it was interfering with the way I normally clean up my screen. Normally, I close the entire browser and start fresh two or three times a day, during the workday. At night I turn the computer off, and start with a blank desktop the next morning.

Anything that really matters will pass by you multiple times in different ways. So, while some of those tabs that collect during the day no doubt have value, arguably none of them are worth keeping.

Chrome has a "bookmark all open tabs" feature, I do this to clear everything out once in a while, safe in the knowledge I'm still hoarding the data safely somewhere.

Yeah, they copied that from Firefox after they noticed how useful it was. So did Microsoft; well after FF, but IIRC long before they rebased Edge on Chromium. In Edge it's even the same hotkey: Ctrl-Shift-D.

I have started using research link collection tools (in my case Zotero) specifically to address this same thing.

remember, browser history is a thing

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