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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

A solution for the "too many tabs open" problem. Need a way to save my history in an organized and interactive manner, with a nice looking UI. Sort of like the old WebMynd (http://webmynd.com). I find that most of my tabs are open as a form of reminder. If I close it, I'll forget it and might as well not have seen it. Same if I hide it away in some kind of bookmarking app. I think it would be best to apply a UI layer over my entire history in a way that makes it easy to search and recall things that I found interesting int he past.

Need to store all data locally for privacy reasons, and have a way to logically group urls by content and bring them back to the front occasionally (maybe with some kind of gamification?) so they don't disappear.

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Did you have a look at the Firefox add-on Tree Style Tabs? It puts the tab titles on the left hand side, allows for grouping them and seems to be very stable. There are also a couple of add-ons that allow for exporting the tabs. That combination works quite nicely for me.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

If you use Chrome, check out OneTab.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

I love how OneTab works, and it was something I used very frequently. But one day, not sure why exactly my chrome profile folder (osx mac) got corrupted. I cannot give technical details about it really, but not a single one of the chrome addons I had worked any longer. And I tried to recover the tab sessions but was unsuccessful.

If there is a feature OneTab is missing, it's to sync your tabs/sessions to a certain location. Or at least that's a feature I'd really appreciate!

It provides an export as a text file on the 'One Tab' page in the right hand corner. I wrote a small Python script to parse this text file and upload all my tabs to Pinboard.

Good idea. Here's my Clojure script: https://github.com/danneu/onetab-to-pinboard

care to share the script?

I'm with this guy

This functionality is build into chrome. Just right click the tab strip and the bottom option is "Bookmark all Tabs" or use the CTRL+SHIFT+D shortcut. Then they are just saved as tabs in a folder which has the benefit that they show up in address bar searches and are backed up via chrome sync.

I'd love a "Bookmark selected tabs" kind of function that lets me quickly click on a dozen or so relevant tabs. Usually, I'll have 20+ tabs open with 5-10 on a given subject, so "Bookmark All" captures a lot of useless tabs.

Better yet, a "Bookmark similar subject" plugin would be awesome - Leverage Google's search to automatically figure out tabs that are about the same thing and bookmark them by subject. Ignoring pinned tabs would be a bonus.

Usually I find tabs I want are next to each other, or easy to drag together. If there are a log of tabs in the window that I don't want then I use the Tab Split Extension[1] to put them in another window, or I just edit the bookmarks once I've created them.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-split/imjbfepo...

I started using OneTab after I saw this comment last Sunday. Just wanted to come back and thank you for bringing this to my attention :) It's added a lot of value for me.

Use Firefox's tab grouping feature. :)

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tab-groups-organize-tab...

+1 - tab groups are great

It would be great if each tab belonged to a project and I could add new tabs to a project when I open the tab.

If I could, all at once, close all tabs that aren't part of the project I'm working on, that would free up resources for the things that currently matter.

And if the browser could keep track of how much time I browse for a specific project, I could use that to track how much time I spent on each project.

That's kind of what I've found myself doing with multiple Chrome users.

Each project I'm working on is a different user, with a different set of open tabs, and separated cookies, allowing multiple sessions (e.g., Gmail accounts) to be open at the same time, one in each "project".

Firefox has tab groups, have you tried them?

Not a perfect solution but might help: The Great Suspender:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...

"Unload, park, suspend tabs to reduce memory footprint of chrome. Tabs can auto-suspend after a configurable period of time or be suspended manually. Tabs can be whitelisted to avoid automatic suspension. Suspended tabs are retained after closing and reopening browser, preventing many tabs from all reloading after a restart."

Have you tried Onetab for Chrome? It has some of the functionality you're looking for in that it pulls all of your open tabs into one tab and vertically orders them on the page for you to go back and access later. Neat tool, I use it quite a bit. http://www.one-tab.com/

I second 3rd3's suggestion of tree-style tabs. (I ended up with mine as a narrow strip on the right that expands when I mouse over.)

But I'll add that I mainly solved the "as a reminder" thing in other ways. I use Instapaper for a "read later" queue. For to-do-ish stuff, I use KanbanFlow to wrangle short-term tasks, and Trello to manage a deeper backlog. For "maybe I'll want this someday", I use Pinboard.in. Events and related links go into Google Calendar. And for "don't forget X" things, I sometimes use a dry-erase marker on the bathroom mirror, so I glance at things while brushing my teeth.

Now I've got my open tabs down to things I'm actually doing, and it has been a huge relief. Now I don't have to search through a bunch of open windows and tabs trying to find that one thing.

I'd like some UI element that lets me know how long it's been since I read/used a tab. I tend to open lots of tabs and then browse them as is convenient later. Sometimes this means tabs get "lost" (i.e. become stale before I read them). This would let me know which tabs I might have overlooked or should close, bookmark, etc.

I've started using Pocket for this.

They need a better browser UI, since they seem to have been focusing much more on their mobile apps, but their recently-added "highlights" features accomplish the "bring them back to the front occasionally" part of your description.

Opera, up to 12 has the best tab management, groupings, etc that I've ever seen. It's a real shame the new webkit based Opera still isn't up to par. As such I'm in the same place as you hoping for Opera's tab management but left with hundreds of unidentified tabs in Chrome. Plugins help a little bit but nowhere close to Opera's innovative management. Hopefully they'll restore parity soon.

I'm disheartened by their conversion to Webkit. Tab grouping + session save is one hell of a killer feature : I used to archive websessions in order to track my references when writing a academic paper.

I've switched to Firefox from then, but it's not as convenient as Opera12.

The Windows feature (in the sidebar) is especially helpful.

Agreed! I'd love to have something like this. I discussed it a bit in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4714341#up_4715785

Maybe this? http://twin.gl/

Another tool for organizing on-line research is Zotero:

https://www.zotero.org

I made something that addresses this: www.seekaizen.com. I haven't advertised it before and it's mostly just friends/me that use it, but it seems like you might like it. Let me know if it fits your use case.

How about tab grouping? Or multiple windows?

I use SessionBuddy to manage this.

perhaps a followupthen for tabs?

Along these lines, what if the tabs could pop back up at a certain day/time or if you could just snooze tabs? I see people use tabs as a pseudo todo list. Reminding you to do, schedule, research, or buy something. What if you could continue to use tabs that way, yet not clog up your computer, use up memory, or distract you from getting stuff done with open tabs.

*> ... what if the tabs could pop back up at a certain day/time or if you could just snooze tabs?

There are several GTD-type web apps that support "desktop notifications" that might fit the bill.

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