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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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 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.

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.

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