Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds
blog.entropy.observer
blog.entropy.observer
60 seconds is still quite some time for a reorder operation, but sorting through 400 tabs and giving them a somewhat intuitive position in the tab bar will take much longer than that.
You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. Bookmarks suck for grouping things together, doing to requires a lot of clicks and drags to get the items all in the right place. Besides, with how lazy browsers load tabs these days and the built in ability to search for tabs straight from the address bar you don't really need to bother anyway.
Everyone who's going "wtf sorting 400 items shouldn't take a minute why would you do this" clearly hasn't read the article. If you can't read the article because a site just got hugged to death, please with withhold your criticism until you've managed to find the article contents.
You can visually group tabs together with browser windows. You can then group windows together with workspaces. You can also just save all open tabs in the window as a folder of bookmarks named the current timestamp or whatever you're doing. It takes almost no time at all and prevents the chaos in the first place.
Also it's not easy to open a big batch of bookmarks into inactive tabs.
60 seconds to sort 400 tabs is a hell of a price to pay. It needs to be worth it. Do you really need semantic search? Do you really need semantic search that queries a huge proprietary model?
(A really cool feature that Chrome doesn't have would be the ability to search the content of the webpage as well.)
What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that's not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option.
The benefit of this approach is that you can do it in the browser, in real-time (or at least locally with a downloaded model). Even 400 tabs will be a piece of cake. Plus you won't need to proxy precious API calls to a service which may become unavailable or very expensive with no warning.
So the workflow would be this:
* pay 20$ a month for access to ChatGPT and receive API token
* use my API token w/ 3rd party app
* ChatGPT awards 3rd party app some portion of the 20$
1. Pay $20/month for ChatGPT access, get personal API token
2. Sign up to 3rd party app
a) Enter your API token into app
b) Pay $3/month as a subscription
I like the idea of the user having their own AI profile, like an email, that other services can utilize. Just like it's up to the user to manage their email quota with Google, they would manage their AI quota with OpenAI.
- Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly.
- It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM.
- It has the Workspaces [1] feature, basically creating cloud-saved tab groups. This only works when your account is tied to Azure for now (so only at work), but that's the only time I use it, so it's all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it's nice not to have to use one.
- This hidden gem of a browser extension: Auto-Group Tabs [2]. Lots of extensions claim to do this, few do it well. It supports regex and pops tabs into groups extremely quickly/smoothly. It feels native. Combined with the vertical tabs feature, you get nice, easy to read, collapsable groups. The developer is super responsive and awesome.
Honorable mention extensions I've tried but ultimately don't use anymore:
- Tab Xpert [3] It's a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I've tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don't end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary.
- Clutter Free [4] Keeps you from opening more than one of the same URL. Would be really useful, but I found it too disruptive to use daily. You don't realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that.
I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven't moved over to using it by default yet though.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introduci...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/da...
[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-preve...
[5] https://arc.net/
Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized.
Combine that with the Firefox Addon Copy To Clipboard which enables you to maintain the tree structure when you copy a tab tree, in Markdown, Asciidoctor and Orgmode.
It seems like a really low number of things to sort. If they added two zeros to that, maybe it would be impressive. In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.
There's always gotta be that guy that will come up with the most unreasonable and unbelievable usage of any tool, just to show how special they are.
No, you don't have 4,000 browser tabs open, nobody believes that.
More on the topic, since the title mentions GPT, I imagine it sorts them based on the content, like categories.
As you can see from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g the browser becomes completely unusable with a few thousand tabs, and the experience is massively degraded way before that.
You also would run out of RAM way before opening 4,000 tabs, with most consumer boards supporting only a maximum of 128GB of RAM.
At work now so can't check but my PC at home has 64Gb RAM and up to half of that is used by Firefox.
I've noticed it gets unresponsive over 160 windows. I currently have 156 open (it tells you the number when you exit Firefox. Each of those windows has at least 20 tabs.
Firefox is good for an excessive number of tabs because it only loads the tabs when you activate them. Chrome is a memory hog.
I know it seems hard to believe, but for a single topic its not unusual to have 10+ tabs open, when I do research on a topic I'm often hitting 20-30 tabs, and the more work you do the more you have open.
100 tabs per topic, lets say, and someone interested in 40 topics, I could see 4k tabs as reasonable. I would bet they only have 10 tabs actually activated/loaded, but.
I often get into the 30-50 tab range, and the majority of those are unused and I have to do a purge because I’ve long forgotten the context where I need them. I can believe someone might do similarly with more tabs, but no that many more XD.
Also you can right-click the back button to see the history of each tab. Usually that begins with a google search that reminds me what the context was.
I try to keep all tabs for a certain topic in the same window, or two windows if I want to tile them to view both. Obviously, I'm very bad at respecting such limits. :-)
Have you tried tree style tabs?
I get nervous messing with it too much in case I lose all my tabs.
I know I can manually backup/restore the file from the Firefox profile folder but I'd rather not mess with it.
Can anyone verify that tree style tabs works with an absurd number of tabs?
I also use an extension to group my tabs into categories, which makes it much easier to handle the amount of tabs.
I use tabs to keep the history, so when I come back to that tab, I can right-click the back button and see how I got to that page.
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/2...
So 3900 tabs.
Also... WHY?
I like using tabs because they keep the history of each tab. Bookmarks don't do that. If I just kept bookmarks, if the page went down I wouldn't be able to go back, and maybe find another way to find an archive of that page.
In Firefox I can search for tabs by typing, "% searchterm" into the url bar. Then I can right click on the back button to see how I arrived at a particular page.
If I know I'll want to come back to where I was, I'll mostly duplicate the tab (thus keeping the history), and then click on the link.
Alternatively I'll click a link using the middle mouse button to open the link in a new tab, but that doesn't keep the history.
I try to keep all tabs for a particular project or topic in one or two windows but clearly I'm very bad at doing that.
Firefox only loads background tabs when you click on them, so it's good for this kind of tab abuse.
My PC has 64Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD, why should I ever have to close a tab??
The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don't have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.
If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups within groups (idk if chrome supports that, but there’s extensions like Tree-Style Tab in Firefox that do)
So with 4 upvotes could just be it was its turn to be put on the front page but 4 people had already voted.
Also I thought there was some sort of thing that rewarded if you got a lot of votes quickly, like if you got 4 upvotes in a couple minutes it would probably push you to the front page and keep you there long enough to get more votes?
However take all that with grain of salt because I have never actually tried to figure out how upvotes work, this was just my not trying to understand at all sort of soaked up ideas.
Too bad there isn't a service which automatically queues all of hn/new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting.
Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.
400 in 60 seconds??
The bottleneck seems to be API token limit.
Edit: oh ok it uses gpt-3 to sort by content, but even then I don't want my tabs to be shuffled in any ways..