Hacker News Reader

You hit on a huge key point: context. For me, that can include:

- Selected text

- Current scroll position

- Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway)

- Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups

- The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it

None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently retained when you restart the browser, either.)

When I leave a tab open for a long time, I almost always have a reason in mind for doing so. However, I can't always remember exactly what that reason was when I return to it, especially if it's been a while. That's the kind of information I'd like to store in a bookmark.

Because of this and other problems, I've often imagined some sort of non-linear visualization of your browsing history. This might look something like a git commit tree, with branches indicating when you opened a new tab from a link, along with other information and "tags" along the way. (One important aspect of this is that just like a VCS, you wouldn't lose your history stack when you hit back a few times and then click on another link within that same tab.) Theoretically, this could even store page states that normally aren't stored in a browser's history, e.g. filling form fields, scroll position, and so on. You could then view your bookmarks, tags, etc in that same interface, with a robust system for filtering and searching of course. Something like this could revolutionize the way I save and recall things online. Plus, I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to see your entire browsing history visualized like that.

If you use TreeStyleTab (or Tab Groups) then the hierarchy is a major context as well.

Not to mention that creating a bookmark feels like a big decision. Something you want to keep for ages. While a Tab might be simply some a page in a reference manual.

You can bookmark entire trees, though, preserving the hierarchy.

I am also asked to defend my habit again and again. And so I have long struggled and meditated on this problem. What I ultimately decided is that a repository of bookmarks or open tabs, or of any kind of knowledge, is useless as a static collection and quickly degenerates into a backlog never to be accessed again. I abandoned my humongous Delicious account and have since been developing a little something that offers a different take on the subject. I have been saving dumps of my open tabs' urls into files for years now, to preserve my sanity, knowing I would one day get around to the right solution to my own ailment.

My take on the problem is action-oriented browsing. I think that anything you clip or save or note down must have an intended action, now or in the future. Maybe you are saving a bookmark because you want to refer to it when you tackle some personal project you want to do someday/maybe. It must then be triggered by that project when you finally get to it. If you never get to it, the bookmark will die with the project, which is just as well.

Most bookmarks will never be accessed again, but you don't know which ones yet. It's the long tail principle. We don't have time to do everything we want, but in the spirit of GTD, ideally we'd like to map out all that we could want to do, so we can always (say, weekly) review our priorities and be ready to pivot into new directions if situations, or our minds, change.

Even if you are only saving a cute picture of a cat, it is still actionable. Why are you saving it? That's the key question. It may be because you want to show it to some people, so it should be triggered in your next interaction with each of those people, and then you're done with that bookmark and you can let go of it.

Articles that you want to read or reread should by triggered by a reading list, or by study plans for particular subjects, or even by a blog post you want to write on the ideas you read on several of these articles.

It's all about what should trigger that bookmark to come into your attention again. You shouldn't need to remember to check it back on your own, or you may well never do.

> And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks.

Woohoo! You're welcome :)

> I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark.

There's a Firefox extension called "toomanytabs" that tries to improve the "volatile bookmark" experience. Frankly, I think it should be called "notenoughtabs".

Btw, I have found that Opera can reliably handle 400+ open tabs simultaneously. The downside is that it's not Firefox. And Chrome took out vertical tabs in 2008 or something. bleh.

FYI, Chrome now has stacked tabs and tab grouping.

Thanks, I've been waiting for this. It's still experimental (under "about:flags"). Stacked tabs are great, but unfortunately "tab grouping" is not that, it's just a feature that makes it possible to select several tabs at once?!

With real tab grouping in Chrome, including a feature to only load tabs when selected, I could finally make the switch from Firefox and the great "TabGroupsManager" addon.

Unfortunately, Chrome dev team decided that opening all tabs on startup is a good thing and marked intelligent lazy loading of tabs as "won't fix". I cannot find one good argument against this feature, unless it's extremely difficult technically (which is unlikely).

Source: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105666

I've found that Opera crashes too often with 150+ tabs, often even at startup. What I would like Opera to have is a similar option to Firefox to let tabs remain dormant until you click on them. That might make me switch back.

Yeah, context, especially how you got there. I've been wishing for that for years. Also what your other tabs were doing for any particular tab/bookmark.

I leave a lot of tabs open too, all related to each other. There are usually two or three groups of related tabs. TreeStyleTab addon helps a lot with that, since the vertical tab list shows parent/child tab relationships and lets me move things in and out of hierarchies.

I don't even use FF's bookmarks anymore, which is a shame because I miss the address bar integration. I just use pinboard, which is basic but works.

Panorama / Tab groups are amazingly helpful for this, one of the best FF4+ features. This is another good step towards improving the feature.

I'm not sure how well the Dropzilla concept will work with a large number of bookmarks, or folders within folders, but I look forward to testing whatever they come up with.

I thought the dropzilla concept in the final slide looks pretty similar to what tab groups can already do. I hope they do combine them rather than having the two as separate features, otherwise it'll be splitting up bookmarks in different areas.

The Tab Groups feature is really useful but it's also quite awfully done. I particularly hate the way it resizes and moves around groups when you resize the browser. Ideally, it should use an automated layout, similar to tiling window managers, where you have a fixed master area, and a stacking area for other recently used groups. It'd also be fairly handy if you could nest groups, or have multiple panoramas, for people like me who have too many tabs open to fit on the screen at once.

I actually love Chrome for this use case, as I can use the Task Manager view to kill all my tabs while leaving them "open". I additionally made a one-line change to my local build of Chromium so that when I open it all tabs come up "crashed", so I can now manage a nearly infinite number of tabs with almost no memory usage at all.

What was that one-line change? That'd be useful for me as well.

    diff --git a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    index 40ebe27..0cb39b8 100644
    --- a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    +++ b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
    @@ -995,6 +995,7 @@ class SessionRestoreImpl : public content::NotificationObserver {
               GrantPermissionsForFile(id, *file, read_file_permissions);
         }
     
    +    schedule_load = false;
         if (schedule_load)
           tab_loader_->ScheduleLoad(&web_contents->GetController());
         return web_contents;

I do the same. My hundreds of tabs are my memory "staging area".

If I revisit them ~3 times or more - they get "committed" to my long term "repository" (aka bookmarked and mentally memorized).

Another reason why I like FF for large tab workloads are TreeStyle Tabs. That way I can easily hierarchically manage my tabs. On Chrome there is simply the tab bar that quickly overflows. E.g., on my laptop the tab bar gets too crowded for my taste with more than 15-20 tabs open.

I'm currently using chrome for Hacker News, reddit, and similar websites. For casual browsing. And FF is for serious browsing where keeping Tabs and large amounts of Tabs are more important.

If you are a vim person, you might want to try Pentadactyl/Vimperator. You can use the ":b $searchterm" to search your open tabs, and ":buffers" to display the list of open tabs. Very handy.

How is Xmarks holding for you? I couldn't get it to work satisfactorily, so I created my own solution for syncing my tabs across computers. Didn't use it for bookmarks, as I use Pinboard.in for that. Just like you I use my tabs as temporary bookmarks, and "proper" bookmarks as permanent ones—there are lots of solutions to handle permanent bookmarks, but not for tabs whatsoever.

My solution for tab syncing was creating symbolic links to my Dropbox to keep my Firefox user directory in sync across computers, and that comes with the added benefit of everything syncing, plugins, addons, customizations, settings etc. which accumulated in my computer through the years of Firefox use, which I can call at this point an UI fork of mainline Firefox. As long as you don’t open the same Firefox in two places, this solution works pretty well. A recounting of how I did it is available at my blog at this link: http://sublunarorb.it/post/34087338428/so-you-need-to-actual... but it’s aimed at casual users, so it’s a little bit chatty.

I have the same habit, but the opposite experience: that Firefox gobbles RAM+CPU and Chrome handles them elegantly. (Admittedly, I haven't given FF a new chance in about a year.)

Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).

"Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X)."

I'm on Windows 7, and in my experience the memory issues in Firefox haven't been completely resolved yet (though the Mozilla team are actively working on it). However, as a workaround I have found the Memory Fox add-on useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/

Firefox on OS X is remarkably better in the past year. I ditched Chrome many months ago because Firefox now is better with memory and remaining quick and responsive than Chrome for me on OS X.

Have you used it recently?

A few versions ago, they added a feature where tab contents are only reloaded on-demand, when clicked. You no longer have a big lag when opening up the browser with many tabs, and memory usage is quite reasonable.

That's curious. I'm quite used to hearing conversations where people have wildly different performance experiences with Chrome and Firefox. But people with 100s of tabs almost universally say that Firefox handles them ok and Chrome fails miserably.

As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had minor memory consumption improvements. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for more (possibly too much) detail.

If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix....

What is Chrome's bottleneck with hundreds of tabs? The resource load from hundreds of processes? IPC overhead for the browser process to managing the content processes?

Memory usage for that many processes. Even with all the sharing it tries to do, its per-origin (there's usually at most one process for each origin, not for each tab) overhead is much higher than Firefox's.

close some fucking tabs sometime

christ

A lot of work has definitely been done in the last year. Two years ago, firefox was unusable on the netbook I had at the time, so I used chrome. I think the situation would now be reversed, however.

I think "months" has to be an exaggeration, I don't think I've had ff last months without require being restarted. I could imagine weeks, but not months. (FF 16/linux)

Restarting doesn't get rid of tabs.

not for me, they all restore perfectly, there's likely a setting you're not using to restore tabs.

4 seconds of googling shows this for Chrome

you should try the voice search, it's amzingly fast and got everything right that I asked it. I said "directions to cafe prage san francisco" and as soon as I finished the results came up and it talked back saying what it had found - traffic adjusted driving time and map. I tried "oracle stock price" and that showed and spoke the result back to me.

lots of cool features. its >50mb so you need to be on wifi to download it (for some reason)

http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

and this for firefox

http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-previous-session