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Comment by Groxx | Hacker News Reader

It may not have syncing, but Stainless[1] has a very clever notion of bookmarks that are sessions. Makes it ridiculously easy to e.g. have a bookmark for each account you use on site X, and open them all simultaneously. I absolutely loved it. Unfortunately it's a mostly dead project, though it's open source now.

[1]: http://www.stainlessapp.com/

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Opera has sessions too, super nice if you want to clean up those 100 tags that accumulated in research.

I was certain that I had seen it before - I think it was in Opera. The UX around it was horrible, it somehow got in my way (I can't remember why). I think the more important problem is how to solve sessions from a UX perspective.

Another problem is that when you are building up all of those tabs you are setting up a lot of context in your mind, returning to that context is going to be jarring or impossible. Maybe a replay feature (to show how you created that session, link-by-link) would be a nice idea: "remind me what I was doing."

> Maybe a replay feature (to show how you created that session, link-by-link) would be a nice idea

That sounds like browser history.

That's a valuable and thought-provoking comment that deals with the meat of my comment.

To make it crystal clear:

Lets say you have 7 tabs open. Your browser history may include many more websites than were present in those 7 tabs: websites that you skimmed, rejected and immediately closed during your research, or websites you visited while slacking off. The history also doesn't describe how you reached those 7 tabs - it describes everything you have seen. 2 of them could be search results, 5 of them could be pages opened from the search results, and 2 of those 5 could be navigations done without opening new tabs. There may be 20 or so tabs that you opened that are now closed. It is not straightforward at all to manually derive that information from a simple list of sites that you saw. The replay would consist of seeing yourself navigate to that current state (ignoring all the abandoned paths a.k.a. closed tabs) - screenshots with the links you used highlighted as an uninspired example.

Live action replay might have been more appropriate.

It sounds like you mistook my comment for flippancy. I think it's a good idea, and it sounded like browser history was a good conceptual starting point.

Indeed I did. Thanks for the feedback none-the-less, I guess my comment did need clarification. This would be really interesting to try out with that ExoBrowser tech - if I ever had the time.

We'll release builds on OSX & Linux in the coming days. It'll then be quite easy to hack the default browser. We'll write a doc about it as well!

Didn't know it. Very very cool and interesting. Thanks for sharing the link.

If I understand correctly the bookmark was an URL + the Cookies related to it?

Basically yeah. I imagine there's more to it (localStorage, other forms of persistent data), but that's the idea.

Importantly (to me anyway), you can have multiple tabs to the same site open at once, each with a different session. Tabs opened from one of those tabs will retain that session, so you can e.g. fire up two Google accounts, open a few YouTube tabs from each, and keep your viewing history separate. It's like Chrome profiles on steroids, with way less memory use, and way easier to use.

Yep, Chrome Content API provides everything needed to handle that as well: PartitionStorage.

I wander how was the UX, when would you decide to create a new "session"?

I don't remember in great detail (the app still exists, probably works, I/we could poke at it if so), but I think it was an always thing. By making a bookmark you included the session data, so by logging in and making one you ensured you were always logged in after clicking the bookmark.

I see, definitely interesting!

Yep, still works. And reminds me why I liked it - small and fast :| Chrome has gotten so slow. Firefox is no better.

So, I'd probably recommend trying it yourself too (really, it's a nice alternative browser. many are horrible, this one I used happily for quite a while), but you can only really trigger the behavior by starting a "single-session tab" which is cmd-shift-T instead of cmd-T. Single-session tabs are basically the same as a "private" window, but if you save a bookmark, you save the session.

This is all reinforced by having the bookmarks bar (on the left) primarily populated by dragging tab favicons. It feels like you're literally saving the tab for later, and it behaves exactly like that, unlike normal bookmarks which use whatever global session state you currently have. In Stainless, the bookmark will always bring you to the same page. Elsewhere, a bookmark will take you to the page only if your current user can see it, possibly showing an error, making you log out of your current account....

Honestly, this is one of the few real new-things I've seen in bookmarks/browsing, and I really grew to like it. It's a far nicer experience.

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