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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

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enriquto

> abusing browser tabs as bookmarks

This is not really abuse, it's very natural.

Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be one and the same thing.

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I don't like this idea. I can see how others would though.

I have a really hard time getting back into things. Any state a thing remembers is the opposite of helpful.

For example, I don't suspend laptops, I turn them off. It'd be a waste of time closing what I was doing before because I don't remember where I was earlier and it's easier to start over.

Browser tabs are a current state. If I will want to use it multiple times, I use a bookmark. History is for the rare time I think "wait, I swear I read that earlier".

It isn't just computing, I forget where I was in books and games sometimes and start over too. I can't be the only one.

I feel like I start to lose focus when I have more than a few tabs open. When I see people with dozens of tabs open I get a little panicky. I want to focus on the task at hand and if I want to recall an old site I'll use bookmarks and history for that, not bloat my active session state.

Uh. Afraid to say this, but I've had more than 1000 tabs open.

It's useful too. One time I remembered doing something, found the tab. Sure, it was a 6 year old tab, but it was helpful.

This doesn't sound too much different than my garage, really. Just junk and half finished projects piled up.

That might be useful some day. toss

I get why it'd be useful, and stretching the capabilities like that means that browsers get more and more useful and efficient. It just doesn't work for me, and that's alright. If you can open 1000 tabs, my 10 are no problem!

I periodically take firefox's recovery.jsonlz4 and pipe it through a bunch of jq to export it as a datestamped bookmarks-$(date ...).org file. Right now I have 15 windows and 5351 tabs. Then I close all but the windows I have actually looked at in the last month.

Neat idea. With how lame Google search is, this is handy when looking for something already found.

I once had ~40k tabs.

Relationally the only difference between a "tab", "history", and a "bookmark" is a column that tells you what kind it is.

Kinda but not really.

I expect a tab to stay in memory, at least in virtual memory, and not need to hit the server if it's in the background for a while and then I click on it again, unlike history or bookmarks.

I expect history to not be loaded in memory, it would be a waste of memory.

I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".

All browsers use SQLite3 DBs for this stuff. History is not "loaded into memory" -- it's in the SQLite3 DB, which has a page cache, so some of it might be in memory, but the amount of memory dedicated to the page cache is fixed, so you need not worry about it.

> I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it.

There is truly no difference except that some URIs are bookmarked (and maybe also in recent history) and some are not. Either way searching these is just a SQL query against the SQLite3 DB. You really need not worry about the efficiency of the search -- it's fast enough. The table(s) that store these things have enough metadata to enable the kinds of searches you might want to do. Among such metadata is "this is a bookmark" and "this is not a bookmark".

> "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".

That doesn't preclude treating it not that differently from history. You really need not worry about those details.

Also, a "bookmark" is more than that: it also has a name, it may be in a folder, it may be in the bookmark toolbar, it may have tags to help you search for it, etc.

If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else?

I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information.

I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.

They don't have to be displayed in tabs.

Your response confuses me. The discussion in the thread includes comments about people keeping 1000 tabs, and other people saying that tabs, bookmarks and history are the same thing. I was responding that it doesn't feel very practical for my own usage. Can you explain what you mean in your response?

They are all just rows in a SQLite3 DB table. That allows you to search all of them -bookmarks, history, tabs- at once.

In some sense they are the same thing, they are all stored in the Places database in a relatively uniform schema. In another sense they aren't, history is erased after a few months whereas losing bookmarks or tabs would be very bad. Firefox Mobile has this "inactive tabs" feature which is OK but I would never turn on the option to auto-close tabs.

Not here. Would much prefer something like evolved bookmarks, yet still very much separate from a bookmark I specifically chose. Evolved would be more like the browser just hangs onto History longer if you go there more.

Tabs, I donno, I'm not the target audience for Tabs. I'm on somewhat limited resource hardware, so keeping 100 tabs open is simply not feasible. All browsers run like slugs with 100 tabs open from personal experience.

With four tabs open on Firefox Developer 125.0b9 I have (6) main process groups with (8) further subprocesses for 1075 MB of memory while doing ... nothing.

The tabs are Not impressive. HN (2,text), WP (text), Gmail (text). Adding only Redfin and Facebook jumps me up 500 further MB in resident memory. Two tabs, no actions. How do the landing pages for two major companies eat 500 MB of resident memory statically?...

firefox and chrome seem to have long embraced the philosophy of `why worry about memory usage when I know if it uses too much RAM the browser will simply crash or become completely unresponsive due to swapping forcing the user to reboot (or if very lucky only force-kill the browser) ........problem solved!'

I'm totally with you on this. I remember seeing this concept video from Mozilla in the mid '00s, IIRC it's pretty much this vision, and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY.

I'm actually a bit shocked that almost 20 years later and the browser interface is pretty much still the same.

Some of the ideas about being able to work with data in different formats are cool, as is attempting to group related sites/pages/topics together, but that UI looks way too visual and spatial for me. Too much movement, too many images. Text is much less work to parse for me.

It's a concept, but I agree. It does show nicely what a true "user agent" could look like. I want this, the browser as sidekick not machinery with multiple buttons etc. I want my browser to be my operating system.

browser history is a log and presumably contains things one doesn't care about after reading but definitely so for tabs and bookmarks as "things that are interesting" - the tab is notable because it has a back/forward aspect.

It seems to me in this day & age you have media organization tools (jellyfin? I think it's called?) that just handle everything. I'd love to see some basic AI language model (more of the BERT/gensim flavor likely) that can similarly auto-organize trounces of bookmarks, I have way too many.

The other interesting and increasingly relevant feature towards bookmarks would be the concept of saving them for posteriority, as we know the internet is not forever, whether this means a local save or a ping to archive.org as to say "someone bookmarked this maybe you can hang onto it". The trick of it there is not just capturing all the content of a webpage including videos, but if we say "tabs are bookmarks" then maybe you want to capture the back/forward button pages to a degree.

Anyway that's what my dream browser might look like. Also dream browser powerfully denies browser fingerprinting.

Have you checked out Arc Browser? [0]

It's pretty opinionated. "Archives" tabs after a pre-set amount of time, uses pinned vertical tabs instead of bookmarks…

[0] https://arc.net/

Dumping everything you have onto the kitchen counter is also very natural. It just doesn’t remain effective for long. The cabinets are a pretty darn useful invention. Don’t mix work surface with storage.

Damn, thanks! I've been saying this for a while. They're all references to pages, optionally with some state.

Did you know that history in Chrome only remains for three months?

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