Tabvention – Manage Your Browser Tab Addiction | Hacker News Reader

Tabvention – Manage Your Browser Tab Addiction

tabvention.io

12 pointslukargo20 comments

Haven't tried, but I think I would find this intrusive and annoying--I'd be mentally keeping track of how many tabs I had open and then checking my bookmarks if I went over. Not for me, but maybe useful for some.

I've tried session managers too, and those are okay for restoring state when things crash.

THE GREATEST THING is Tabs Outliner (chrome only). This displays all your windows and tabs as a tree and lets you rearrange, easily close and restore windows, selectively restore, add notes to tabs, etc.

A slight learning curve, but worth it for the power surfer. Demo of some of the features in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqjcrfKjobY

Is it even good practice to have a dozen of tabs open? Maybe it depends on the type of websites open? Travel related with 10 SO questions and 3 Youtube instances? That's not focused work right? The point is I am very confused why people have dozens of tabs open at once. Please share with me the reason behind this habbit

I use tree style tabs[treeee] in Firefox and often open 5-10, process them (which may involve opening several more each). Eventually I find the information I need, but this makes it easy to group the depth of my search. This branch is from the API docs, that branch is from StackOverflow (and usually has a subbranch of questions that catch my attention from the more fun StackExchange sites, whoops), and then another branch with language specific questions. I try to clear everything at the end of the week, but it's really not a huge burden because I can collapse a tree and just mentally ignore it until then. Average day with lots of coding? 100+ tabs easily.

[treeee]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Not everything I do is focussed work.

Some of it is idle browsing and reading of interesting things.

One reason is trying to follow a HN discussion. I do not see a better way to do this than keeping several tabs open with topics I would like to recheck a few hours later.

There could be other ways doing this and I have some ideas, but right now multiple tabs seem to be most practical solution for this.

1. Before I finish studying a subject, I'm unable to identify the best sources of information.

2. Before I identify the best sources of information, I'm unable to adequately determine which information I should act on and which sources I should make note of in my personal wiki.

3. Before I make note of the best sources of information, I shouldn't close any tabs.

So when I study a subject, I keep all tabs open except for those resources that are clearly of low quality. After I finish studying the subject, I process all tabs, often hundreds, and I make note of the best sources of information in my personal wiki.

I was thinking about something similar a couple of weeks ago: Wouldn't it be useful to be able to serialise browser state? I.e. saving a full package of html+css+javascript state to a compressed file on a hard disk.

Having that ability would solve a host of problems - e.g. having too many tabs. Older tabs could simply be serialised down to disk to free up ram/processing power, and read back in to exactly the same state when the user wants to interact with them again.

They would also aid in debugging, as users could send a serialised snapshot of a page as part of a bug report to help devs diagnose problems with websites.

Unfortunately however, I know far little about hwo browsers are constructed (and I have far too little time) to implement such a thing, but it's something that I've been wishing for for a while now!

maybe you will like session manager

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-manager/bb...

Ah interesting! I'll check that out asap!

For the Waterfox/Firefox users, there are various unload tab add-ons, which aim at reducing the unloaded tabs' memory footprint to a minimum. They generally lag behind the latest version in compatibility somewhat, but use the Session Manager add-on to preserve tab state and any crashes won't take out all the effort you put into organizing open tabs. I currently use UnloadTab [1].

People who organize their browser activity around hundreds of tabs must not be a large use case population, because this organizational method seems quite popular among this vocal set of users but not popular among the browser designers/architects/developers.

These days I'm transitioning to organizing my links inline into my organizing that I perform inside my emacs Org mode files. Instead of a massive list of links, I inline the link as part of the note-taking for a particular task/note/appt. The Org mode grab link function for Macs make it easier to grab a link from Waterfox/Firefox, saving some copy-paste context-switching time. If I could insert a current tab's URL into my Org mode file-and-outline structure, iswitch-style from within the browser, save the changes to the Org mode file, then close the tab, that would be quite an efficiency boost.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/unloadtab/

I recently switched back to Firefox exactly for this reason. Firefox has tab overflow so that I can actually tell what an open tab is. Additionally, Firefox can be set to ONLY load the current tab on startup. Have you ever been to a hotel and opened your browser only to be presented with a captive portal? With Chrome all of your other tabs are now going to that page also. It caused me lots of sadness once.

I maintain a work and personal instance of firefox. When things seem a little sluggish I move open tabs related to projects into a wiki. Or, if its just something I wanted to 'read later'... I read it.

Related to this is an issue that exists for a while now on Chrome on Android devices. Apparently, it isn't possible to close all tabs with a simple operation on this version of Chrome. This causes the number of tabs to accumulate endlessly, and it is apparently driving users insane [1]

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=268157

Lots of tabs are a hint you are time-slicing too finely, IMHO. If I have more than a manageable number, it's a little hint to myself that I'm getting spread too thin to make any sort of reasonable progress on anything.

On a mildly related note, does anyone know if there's a nice analogue to Firefox's tab groups in Chrome? I'm not sure if I'm ready to make the plunge into something automated like this.

this is going to change my life, thank you.

I've been using Session Buddy [1] to "lasso" a set of my open tabs for later use. A little bit more love to that UX and it'd be bliss. I worry about Tabvention automatically closing my tabs.

[1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edac...

I'm using it, too, but it should find a way to eliminate dupes. Also, all these tools lose the history, i.e. if you reopen a tab, you can't go back, which I understand, but would wish there was a way to store at least few hops back.

Anyone know of a comparable extension for Firefox?

http://www.one-tab.com/

not the same, but has a similar impact.

However, it still does not solve the underlying problem, but that is a non-technical one and can only be approached with some kind of yoga, meditation or any other self-control trickery.

In Firefox I had nearly 9,000 tabs in there (no kidding). One day, after rebooting the browser, the .json file it was using got truncated to 0 - one of my worst days ever!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com