Sessionic: A cross-browser extension to save, manage, restore tabs and sessions
github.com
github.com
It's still WIP but I've been building a browser extension for this on GitHub here: https://github.com/lunabrain-ai/lunabrain
My goal is to be able to use the Internet as normal, but have the extension automatically index and rank content I find important. For example, if I spend 5 minutes on a page that I went to after Hackernews, odds are I found that important so it should be considered in my history differently than other things.
The network effect of this data is pretty interesting too. It would be really cool to see what my friends, or other high trust, high signal, groups i am in find interesting. Being on a page where my mentor has stared, annotated, shared this before will probably give me pause and make me consider this page more deeply.
I'm curious if anybody else has any notes to share.
However tab groups have a bug that hasn’t been fixed since almost 2 years now: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/436025/safari-keep...
Firefox has environment tabs, which are like profiles, but on a per-tab basis. Personally I'd like to have a combo of this and tab groups.
Also, every time I open Safari, I have to manually click the ... and "Show tabs on sidebar" - for each tab group!
This is a total half assed implementation - I seriously doubt there are many who will use it in its current form.
As I can see from changelog, sessionic also supports sync [3]. It would be nice if it is added to description/readme.
[1] https://github.com/ReDEnergy/SessionSync
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
[3] https://github.com/navorite/sessionic/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md...
By the way, Tab Session Manager [1] (another contender) can sync via Google Drive across different browsers (Firefox/Chrome).
1 → https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/onetab/hoi...
2 → https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xbrowsersync/lcbjd...
> A better OneTab for Chrome Temporarily removed from firefox V2 is WIP
Flabbergasted...
* Tab Session Manager loads ALL of the sessions when you bring up the interface, in my case causing it to consume all of the CPU for a good couple of minutes.
* Tab Session Manager does not present me with currently open incognito windows and tabs.
* Sessionic opens tabs in NEW normal (not-incognito) windows when you click on them.
In contrast, I can simply and quickly open Session Buddy and be greeted with a full page (so not just a pop up window) overview of currently open windows and their tabs, when I click on one of them, I'm taken to that tab in that window. If I click on a tab which isn't open (in a previously saved session), then the tab opens in an incognito window.
Seems that only Session Buddy has this behavior currently.
Tangentially: Do you know what kind of tracking it does? Like does it send all of your tabs to the mothership for instance?
I like the idea but don't really get how this particular extension is used. When you save sessions is there a way to modify them later? or is it assumed you'll delete them and save again each time you change them?
Did not check if there is any sync to the outside world though.
1: https://github.com/navorite/sessionic/blob/main/src/lib/util...
Same goes with the files on my desktop (which is also the download folder). Select all, delete. Multiple times a day.
This digging generally routes me to places of internet not found or shown by my search engine of choice, hence if I close that set of tabs, I'll lose another half day to find them.
However, I can't touch that set of tabs, because a small or another big, more urgent thing gets in the way. I move that tab set to another window and start over. When the task at hand completed, these tabs/windows are closed.
The ones that piled over? Save that Windows's session, label it "X Research", and go on.
What that research or task ends, some tasks got bookmarked, others got closed, and the saved session is deleted.
Internet is much deeper when compared to 00s, and the most valuable information is not on the first page of Google/Kagi/whatever most of the time. Hence the apparent hoarding.
In my tab bar things are organized into groups that I collapse when I'm not actively using. Thus I can easily find those GitHub issues, discussion forum posts, datasheets, or whatever else I was looking at when I last worked on e.g. my brother's keyboard USB conversion, which sadly had to be put on hold due to other life stuff.
This could be replicated with bookmarks, but I have no reason to use bookmarks when my tab bar already works the way I want it to.
Safari live updates the displayed history if you reopen a link. Which resets your cursor.
Bulk deleting selected entries deletes. each. and. every. single. entry. one. at. a. time. It can take minutes to delete 100s of entries.
With a bunch of entries selected, to bulk delete them, it's common to accidentally unintentionally reopen them.
There's no way to filter noise entries. Like search results and shopping carts.
Using a treetable, with each visited domain as a top level node, would be spiffy. Double extra bonus points for cascading trees mirroring the URL. As God intended.
Search is painful.
I have similar complaints for Firefox.
I still remember a time before tabbed browsing existed.
To be fair, it wasn’t actually that long ago :) (or maybe I’m just old too?)
A bit of a scary way to measure time, I definitely feel old now.
That all said, it’s still longer than I thought. Time flys!
It’s logical to not understand other people’s workflows when they themselves complain about their own workflow frequently and vocally (not on HN, but where I work it’s a frequent comment whenever anyone is getting ready to screenshare something)
- “The house is a mess”
- “I eat too much junk food / takeaways”
- “I’m so hungover”
Etc
A lot of the time it’s more a just small talk, rather than a genuine complaint. Or in the case of tabs during a screen share, a way of filling an uncomfortable silence while they’re getting set up for a meeting.
If you have more than 12 tabs open concurrently, vertical tabs are a hard requirement. There isn't even a workable vertical tabs solution for Chrome or Safari. Ironically, Edge and Orion have it out of the box. At least Mozilla has validated Sidebury, but they still make it a big pain to turn off the damn default horizontal tabs.
I can’t but think of https://xkcd.com/1172
Products are designed with a certain workflow in mind. Back when people would open a website at a time, nobody needed tabs. Now everyone uses tabs, but relatively no one needs to organize their tabs. It’s acceptable that browser don’t make their UI extra complex for a vocal minority.
I can't remember a time where I didn't open every link in a new window in the days prior to tabs. Back button navigation is chaos.
Browser vendors have dealt with that by adding a "tab expiration" setting, where tabs can be deleted after a certain amount of days. I think it's a fantastic idea, just like a self-emptying trash bin.
Unless your job is specifically to collect information, then you probably don't have time to comb through everything you find online. While it's easy to want to catalog everything, the sanest option is to default on our digital debts frequently.
my losses:
- time spent copying the information, even more so to have the same subgroups/order
- losing that order when you regroup tabs during continuous work
- harder navigation as now I need an extra "bookmarks" UI instead of existing tab lista
What would the universal gains be that would justify this?
> If you don’t, don’t keep clutter around.
Did you notice the word 'sessions' in the title? That's for organizing
> Do you still keep all the files in the download folder since 2013?
Nope, I split them into folders, just like I split my tabs into sessions
This is an HN thread about an extension that offers extra UI to save, manage your tabs. It's evident that the one-line-of-tabs UI is not enough for your use case.
Bookmarks already definitely have better UX for organization, they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
> Did you notice the word 'sessions' in the title? That's for organizing
My point is that you can store your "sessions" in a bookmarks folder. Browsers have made it excessively easy to "save all tabs" and "open all bookmarks" already. "Saving a tab session" is literally indistinguishable from "Saving all tabs as bookmarks", you're just duplicating a native browser feature by installing a 3rd party extension that has access to your entire browser history.
But your misunderstanding was much broader, and I'm responding to that. This extension is bad since it doesn't allow auto-sync, but that's not relevant to your promotion of bookmarks
> Bookmarks already definitely have better UX for organization, they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
only if you ignore the issues that make them worse UX for organizations that I've already mentioned in the list, specifically
> losing that order when you regroup tabs during continuous work
This is a critical difference between "retain your working SESSION at the latest point your worked on it" and "Saving all tabs as bookmarks" that you just ignore
also,
> they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
How to you add multiple tags in Safari ... natively?
1. See an interesting paper, open in a web browser
2. Start to read, but get distracted, leave for later
3. Find a new study, open that one.
4. Have too many tabs open, close all.
The other kind of tab-explosion is when I am doing something specific, like researching some topic and open tabs end up being stuff that I deemed worth reading or that remains a to-read. And often enough I don't come back to them and they just sit around. As soon as even more tabs have piled up to make them disappear across the tab bar, they are almost lost in my open tabs forever.
Also I am not addicted to heroin, but I can understand that people can get there and can't get out. I keep a very clean apartment, but I understand that not everyone can. I go to the gym 5-6 times a week, but I understand that not everyone can. I consider it part of becoming an adult to understand that not everyone finds it easy to do things you yourself find easy to do.
That the modern web is designed to encourage addiction and OCD is not my fault.
I think chrome has this. Grouping can manage the clutter at the least if not solve the problem of diverted attention.
Open tabs are not books, they’re mail. You deal with it and discard what you don’t need. Heck we even have browser history to find what we saw in the past.
Which means you then need a browser plugin to manage your history more effectively. And then someone else will say “I don’t understand people who are constantly search for stuff in their history…” followed by them describing their workflow as if it’s the only way to effectively manage data on a computer. ;)
Still, it would have been nice to be able to sync them with other browsers (e.g. from Safari to Firefox). I guess “cross-browser” means “the author’s favourite browsers”.
still, one platform only :(