Hacker News Reader

Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

I actively use tree style tabs, and have dozens to hundreds. With auto tab discard, it's not taxing.

This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured, but are much more high-ceremony to create.

To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.

If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so that you can track, from which page did you open this link, what links did you open on this page, etc.

View on HN

> tabs and bookmarks should meld into one

I can see the appeal of this, and more broadly, not having to think about tab management. But for me, I find I actively benefit from the process of deciding what to keep around.

Certainly, you should keep this ability. Close it to not keep around :) Hiding stuff by subtree is not really flexible, I realize, and won't match everyone's tastes equally. Synching tabs and bookmarks could be a configurable option.

I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches using %s?

> I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches using %s?

I outsourced that. Since I have seen leah2's anarchaias [1] tumblelog (and one of its successors project.ioni.st from the rails guys, I fail to find a snapshot online - it was pretty) I iterated through multiple software solutions. My bookmark manager is also a tumblog [2] and online accessible.

I would quickly get to overwhelmed by to many bookmarks and the lack of (plattform independent) organisation tools. I have a bookmarklet that adds the current site as entry (non puplic, and I edit it later (or delete)). It also mirrors and downloads stuff (images, reddit videos, etc).

1. https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/

2. https://wecoso.de/bloogmarks

> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.

Have you tried Arc? It's essentially completely designed around the concept you describe. I believe someone is actively working on an "ArcFox" clone of its behavior for Firefox, but I'm not sure what the current state of the project is.

Arc is Chromium which I wouldn't want to support. If the clone works for Firefox, I'd be more interested, when it's done in the future.

> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one.

Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two. For example: I have groups of bookmarks that I like to open as tabs in a separate window. If I only need them once a week, I want to close the window when I am done and pull them up again when they are needed. Fishing them out of a history of all of my browsing is something that I don't want to endure (even if they are stored in the history as a group).

Other people have other needs. Some only want an extremely limited number of tabs open at one time (presumably to help them focus).

> Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two.

I agree entirely. I don't use the bookmark facilities in the browser at all, because I prefer using separate a bookmark server that I run. That way my bookmarks are available from any machine using any browser that happens to be available.

But I do use tabs. Not to the extent that they need management, though -- I rarely have more than two or three going at a time[1]. Combining bookmarks and tabs implies the addition of complexity that wouldn't benefit me, so I'd prefer not to have it.

[1] If I'm doing something where I need to have many sites open at a time, meaning research, I prefer to have multiple browser instances to organize things, because then I can have multiple pages visible simultaneously and can use the DE to organize things at a higher level.

What do you use for a bookmark server?

online-bookmarks, by Stefan Frech.

http://www.frech.ch/online-bookmarks/, although I haven't been there for years and it is timing out for me now, so I'm not sure if it's still alive.

I do this too; have you found effective ways to tell firefox to maybe chill on eating all memory? I find if I don't restart ~1/week, it will end up reserving ~32GB of RAM for itself, which is just absurd.

Of course, else it would be unmanageable.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc...

I tell it to never discard certain tabs, like gmail or snack or calendar. Also in some situations it's very convenient to ask it to discard tabs in all other windows, or all tabs but the current one. Otherwise it just discards tabs after some time of inactivity.

It integrates with TST and can operate in terms of subtrees.

Crazy that I haven't heard of this one before. Just installed it and after forcibly putting all the tabs in all my windows to sleep my machine's memory usage dropped from 60% to 30%.

Sidebary has this functionality as well. On top of that it has a setting that allows you to have it auto-unload the parent and its child tabs whenever you collapse the group. I l have a few resource hog sites I use frequently that I keep grouped so I can just collapse the group and get back my ram.

I tried the auto tab discard extension but it didn't help for me. I occasionally force kill FF and have it recover the previous session when it starts up again. Same thing to not lose state when rebooting my computer.

In my experience it is not the amount of tabs that is the problem but that certain tabs (ie reddit) sometimes start to misbehave and eat way too much, so I tend to list the tabs by memory usage and handle it on a by tab-basis.

Try disabling accessibility services. (about:config -> accessibility.force_disabled)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726887

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907929

I'm using TST too, but instead of grouping relevant projects into one branch, I'm using the Simple Tab Groups extension to switch between long-term projects. It simply replaces one set of tabs with another. I have a few groups related to work and several groups related to personal stuff (homelab, Hackintosh, Clojure, finance, etc.). I don't access some of these groups for months, but once I have a bit of free time, they are just two clicks away.

Recommend you to check out Sideberry [it is, I think, just outright better than tree style tabs].

Why not use actual bookmarks at that point? They also are able to be nested into a tree structure via folders. I never had tabs open after a session but I keep bookmarks (it turns out I never actually look at the bookmarks, but let's not talk about that).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com