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Comment by ksec | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.

The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.

Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.

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It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.

I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.

In Chrome, you can use cmd+shift+a or ctrl+shift+a to do fuzzy search in all your tabs (I believe this uses the URL and the page title)

How long has this existed?

It didn't exist (or was undiscoverable) when I was last using Chrome / Chromium, though that was ~6+ years ago.

~2-3 years I believe

Thanks!

For anyone else using firefox: Alt+D to select address bar (or F6 or Ctrl/Cmd+L), then start your search with '%' to search your tabs.

tabs is just not the correct abstraction for focused work.

To clarify - is Internet, the browser (to which tabs are implicit) not the “correct” abstraction either? What are you trying to say?

What I find works better than tabs for things like YouTube is “installed” PWAs. In my case under macOS, I use Safari to do this (File > Add to Dock…), which spins out an independent single site browser process that has a dock icon, presence in OS window management functions, etc as well as both windows and tabs. This way I can keep a few YouTube videos open without them getting lost in the shuffle of browser windows and tabs. These windows stay open even if I close my main browser too which is also nice.

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