[HN Gopher] Overcoming Tab Overload
___________________________________________________________________
Overcoming Tab Overload
Author : tmfi
Score : 98 points
Date : 2021-05-14 17:39 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.scs.cmu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.scs.cmu.edu)
| jxramos wrote:
| Is there a public demo of it posted anywhere?
| spython wrote:
| A few years ago I've argued that a tab is the wrong metaphor,
| wrong unit of interaction:
| https://rybakov.com/blog/open_tabs_are_cognitive_spaces/
|
| I am currently working on a new and fun approach to managing this
| kind of cognitive spaces, hopefully to be published this month.
| kuratkull wrote:
| "... or ashamed by how many they had open"
|
| What is this? I for one am proud of my (minimum) 4 dozen open
| tabs on average.
|
| But on a more serious note, as a SE I rejoice when I see a "<5
| minutes read" article. If it's more than that I just leave it
| open (if it seems interesting enough). Usually I go back to my
| backlog during the next week or so and read the ones I still deem
| interesting based on the title and a quick scroll through, those
| that don't catch my interest any more or are just too darn long
| will get C-w'd.
|
| Also when I have a few dozen tabs open in my phone I just send
| them to my desktop(s) and close them on the phone - they were
| either too long to be read on a phone, or required some
| investigation before a commitment.
| jzoch wrote:
| Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my
| computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im
| doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination
| to save my tabs across restarts to track everything.
|
| Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work
| stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be
| closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs open (but
| asleep!) and just pick the tree im interested in. Dont need to
| save bookmarks or save articles for later - they are all there
| always.
| wvenable wrote:
| I have multi-row tabs on Firefox (just requires some chrome CSS
| customization). I use 3 rows of 30 tabs with enough space so I
| can read the title.
|
| I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm
| doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any
| other browser, that's basically unmanageable.
| jlokier wrote:
| I agree, I'm the same. People who sneer at large tab
| collections don't seem to realise that when they can be put to
| sleep, tidied away (various extensions allow groups to be
| folded), they are more like advanced bookmarks and working
| context. Or, they think there is no justification for having
| such collections.
|
| For me they are working context for different projects over
| years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I
| can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to
| close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and
| notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and
| in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y
| takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making
| knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's
| how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so
| it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y
| beckons. There is usually not enough time.
|
| I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The
| answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns
| out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of
| things. I would really like to learn from highly productive
| "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how
| it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one.
|
| So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better
| organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content
| of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful
| if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot
| if the page is removed. I would really like them to be
| integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all
| the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the
| ability to capture and show a collection of web page content
| decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge
| capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm
| really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major
| part of my working life in closed commercial software.
|
| I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox,
| unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser
| terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree
| Style Tabs extension.
|
| It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n2) somewhere, but it
| reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or
| doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would
| take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start
| up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no
| good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded
| most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but
| kept the tabs, everything became fast.
|
| _Sidebery_. After trying out other extensions I settled on
| Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it
| 's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and
| doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab
| operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways,
| and works reasonably well with containers.
|
| (There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses
| to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is
| turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another
| window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-
| grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-
| groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my
| windows there are empty panels as a result.)
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| > I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects.
| The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it
| turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds
| of things.
|
| And what are these kinds of projects that you are the only
| one to tackle?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking
| all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the
| window?
|
| That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs
| in a new window when I go back to something.
|
| Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a
| date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc.
|
| Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of
| mind. I've been burned before by my browser "forgetting" my
| tabs before on restart, as well as browser sync bugs, so I
| don't put a ton of faith in the longevity of tabs.
|
| Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-
| projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100
| different windows open all the time? How do you even find the
| window you need?
| jtolmar wrote:
| > Is what you're describing any different from just
| bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and
| closing the window?
|
| Tabs are formed automatically, closed easily, and organized
| by the order you opened them in.
|
| Bookmarks require going through a multi-step dialog,
| removing them requires another dialog, and they're
| organized by manually creating a nested folder hierarchy.
|
| I think most excessive tab use is down to bookmarks not
| having the best UX.
| plorkyeran wrote:
| Why do you think you can't back up your tab session? I've
| had firefox corrupt the sessionstore file a few times over
| the years and when that happens I just open up Time Machine
| and restore the last good version.
| harshalizee wrote:
| Yup, grouping in tree style tabs is a godsend. I largely ended
| up sticking to Firefox over chrome mainly due to this
| extension.
| lightfooted wrote:
| I'd like to try this. What browser do you use? I see that it's
| a feature for Vivaldi and I also see a Chrome extension.
| zo1 wrote:
| Not OP, but Tree Style Tabs is for Firefox.
| jrcii2 wrote:
| Thank you so much for sharing! This is a game changer - I'd
| been using two separate windows and manually dragging
| things around like a noob.
| eitland wrote:
| Now you also probably see why many of us prefer Firefox.
|
| And: this might be hard to believe but it was much better
| before - extension wise.
| all_usernames wrote:
| I switched to Firefox for Tree Style Tabs.
| generalizations wrote:
| I only stay with Firefox for tree style tabs.
|
| I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day
| Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power
| users.
| jeanchen wrote:
| I highly recommend Tabs Outliner, a Chrome extension
| kirubakaran wrote:
| https://histre.com/ does tree-style web history
| visualization. This is a personal knowledge graph app I'm
| working on.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| I was actually a big user of firefox panorama. I know that it
| wasn't easy to discover but it was the best idea of tabs I've
| seen. Expose, grids, and multiple desktops work the best for
| switching windows, why not have it for tabs?
|
| I think that with the right desktop environment we could
| completely get rid of most tabs. Windows and ie were terrible
| with opening new windows which made tabs a necessity, but really
| they should be used for grouping related pages.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| It's still around, as a fork of a fork:
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...
|
| I never really got to grips with having different sets of tabs
| within the same window -- that's the kind of thing I use
| multiple windows for. But I still have the extension installed
| because it's the easiest way to show several hundred tabs in a
| way which means I can avoid loading the content just to close
| tabs.
| bityard wrote:
| There have been so many forks of this, and they have all been
| buggy or gotten stalled. This one in particular randomly
| forgets some of your tab groups. ("you had ONE job!")
|
| The closest thing that works for me is
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-
| gro... but I'm not thrilled with the user experience.
| chatmasta wrote:
| I would love to see a Miro-style, infinite canvas, tiling tab
| manager. If I zoom out past the page, show me a canvas with
| thumbnails of all my tabs, that I can click and drag to group or
| arrange however I want. Then let me zoom into one of the
| thumbnails to switch to that tab.
|
| Basically Apple's mobile Photos.app interface but for browser
| tabs.
| MatthewBF wrote:
| No zoom out, but has tile like views (grids, lists, kanban,
| etc.) https://www.partizion.io/
| chatmasta wrote:
| Looks cool, but requires a server to store your open tabs,
| which is less cool.
| sizzle wrote:
| Safari does this natively, you can pinch to zoom out with the
| magic trackpack or keyboard shortcut:
| https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/352694/can-i-disab...
|
| https://i.stack.imgur.com/lxfU9.png
|
| Is this what you are describing?
| chatmasta wrote:
| Sort of, but only in the sense that it's a grid. I want way
| more creative control. I want pan and zoom, the ability to
| move and resize thumbnails, and some grouping/clustering
| mechanism. Maybe some "gravity" type thing where if I move a
| tab near another one they snap together. Nested grouping
| would be cool too. And it needs keyboard shortcuts that I can
| use to manipulate the groups of tabs and navigate between
| them all.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Panorama doesn't quite do that, at least not with that
| affordence, but it's close: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-...
| alin23 wrote:
| Safari on iOS actually does that exact thing when the device is
| in landscape mode.
| ksec wrote:
| Doesn't Tab Overview in Safari on macOS already does that? (
| Without the Drag and Drop Part )
|
| The problem is its current implementation completely kills your
| SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on
| for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview
| gesture and icons.
| jlokier wrote:
| Safari's Tab Overview is unfortunately not like the OP's
| idea. The lack of dragging, and also because there's no way
| to zoom out further and make visual groups. And I suppose
| being horribly slow with many tabs makes it very different
| from the OP's idea too.
|
| I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many
| tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done
| pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page
| instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling
| loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state,
| just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as
| using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and
| restart the Safari process to get back to work.
|
| I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because
| Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree
| Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself).
|
| But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast
| while using a huge amount of memory that slows down
| everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find
| Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and
| being the reason other things I use for work were getting
| slow.
|
| I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its
| memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.
| ksec wrote:
| >and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I
| realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to
| get back to work.
|
| I have the exact problem with pinch to zoom. I had to
| disable it to stop Tab Overview from loading, once ran out
| of memory it will start paging everything to SSD, which is
| why I said it is basically kill the SSD.
|
| I still dont know why the Tab Overview wouldn't
| automatically become a list view once it is over certain
| number of tabs.
| daly wrote:
| Is it ironic that I opened this in a tab?
|
| I'd like a browser function that says "open a text file and save
| all the URLs"
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| I saw mention of this on HN somewhere previously, but I've
| found that Tablist[0] is simple (a couple dozen lines of code)
| and works well.
|
| [0] https://github.com/slymax/tablist (links to Chrome and
| Firefox extensions there)
| Hamuko wrote:
| I actually used to use AppleScript to grab open tab URLs in
| Chrome but I switched to Firefox and AFAIK, Firefox doesn't
| support AppleScript. tell application
| "Chromium" set tabCount to get count every tab of
| window 1 repeat with i from 1 to tabCount
| set currentUrl to get URL of tab i of window 1 end
| repeat end tell
| jmholla wrote:
| Somebody shared this in a different comment, but the OneTab
| extension looks like exactly what you are asking for:
| https://www.one-tab.com/ (minus it being builtin).
| dpflan wrote:
| Here is their browser extension for "rethinking" tabs:
| https://www.skeema.com/ (currently invite + waitlist). Was really
| hoping for images of the actual, HCI-research-informed UI update,
| but alas.
| daralthus wrote:
| I can highly recommend Tabli [1] an open source chrome extension
| that you can use to save and restore groups of tabs very quickly.
|
| [1] https://www.gettabli.com/
| daralthus wrote:
| Skeema sounds something I would try, but fully open source is a
| must.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| Hey, I'm building Amna (https://getamna.com) Tabs + Tasks. This
| research made my day.
|
| I think my findings with users are consistent with the
| researchers. Improved focus, and feeling less overwhelmed, and
| the larger context management aspect of things goes away when you
| browse with tasks offloaded from your head.
|
| Amna works by managing your Chrome Windows. Instead of organizing
| tabs after you've done your work, you start with the task first,
| and click on it. That way you can "scope" a browser to a specific
| goal, and toss it when you're done. It saves your tabs as your
| work.
|
| It's still a WIP (the website and product are kinda out of sync),
| you can still try it out and pass along feedback :)
| azhenley wrote:
| Stop using tabs for your code and start using our tool,
| CodeRibbon:
|
| https://utk-se.github.io/CodeRibbon/
| Assossa wrote:
| Any plans on bringing this to VS Code?
| azhenley wrote:
| It certainly isn't easy, but we are trying!
| https://github.com/utk-se/CodeRibbon/issues/80
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| My main problem with tabs is that they function as an additional
| window manager, meaning I'm constantly using two window managers
| at the same time, and getting confused between them. For example,
| I can use Ctrl+Tab to cycle through browser tabs and Alt+Tab to
| cycle through windows. I can't use either to cycle through
| everything I have open.
| readflaggedcomm wrote:
| Appears to describe a tab grouping extension, but the closed beta
| (and lack of screenshots) suggests beta testing is machine
| learning to hash out the UI and grouping criteria. Unless they
| plan for it to be a service.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I just wish there were a way to save _page state_ along with a
| bookmark or similar.
|
| Sometimes I'd really like to close a ton of tabs, or just close
| my browser, or a whole window, and reopen tomorrow.
|
| But I'm relying on scroll position to know where I am in 20
| different documents, or login credentials that only last for 24
| hours, or certain comment threads that have been expanded while
| others have been collapsed, or my position in a video, etc etc
| etc.
|
| And _all of that gets lost_ if I close a tab or even restart my
| browser to upgrade.
|
| I just want to serialize the current DOM/source files and
| JavaScript/window state to unserialize it later. Sure, network
| connections will break but websites can usually handle that.
|
| Because while the organization/usage of tabs/bookmarks is one
| thing, a HUGE roadblock to closing tabs is losing state.
|
| I'm sure it wouldn't be even close to trivial for browsers to
| build, but it still would just be _so_ helpful.
| diego898 wrote:
| This is a huge problem for me as well. If you find something
| please report back! It would be a huge benefit to me as well!
| FlingPoo wrote:
| With Chrome (at least on Windows), if you use task manager to
| kill the Chrome process, then run Chrome again, it will ask you
| if you want to restore the tabs. It will remember all of them,
| and the point (scroll position) of each tab.
|
| Clearly Chrome is keeping this info up-to-date in case it
| crashes (or someone kills it in task manager). So if its
| already doing this, they should add in a feature to to it
| manually, so I don't need to kill the task.
| kirubakaran wrote:
| I'm working on this for https://histre.com/features/save-
| restore-tabs/
| pseudalopex wrote:
| Is it end to end encrypted?
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| Hi. I may have something for ya. I'm building Amna
| (https://getamna.com) which manages tabs with tasks.
|
| Amna can do this (kind of). If you don't explicitly "close" a a
| browser window within Amna, it will just minimize the window.
| So it preserves the state (e.g scroll), while still giving you
| freedom to work on something else with a clean slate. It's not
| perfect, since the tabs aren't really closed, they'd be just
| out of sight. But it's a start in that direction. On the flip-
| side, in case your computer shuts down or whatever, the tabs
| are saved still.
|
| One challenge I've run into state preservation is auth, a lot
| of websites actually log you out (e.g. AWS Console, Sendgrid),
| even if you have them open in the background.
| lowbloodsugar wrote:
| Minimize window?
| swiley wrote:
| > a way to save page state along with a bookmark or similar.
|
| This is next on the todo list for the browser I'm writing. I
| have a lot of ideas for it but I want to get some basic
| javascript working first.
| [deleted]
| fabrice_d wrote:
| This is (bugs withstanding) what Firefox does if you choose
| to"Restore previous session" int the General/Startup section of
| about:preferences . This feature is provided by a Gecko
| component called the the session store
| (https://searchfox.org/mozilla-
| central/source/toolkit/compone...).
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Yeah I've been relying on this for about a year and have been
| really impressed. It's the first restore browser session I've
| ever used that just works. I never get "oops corrupted
| session, start over!" errors, etc like I used to get with
| chrome. Everything just fires back up with all the tabs, all
| the extensions, even all the different browser windows I had
| before. And it handles ungraceful shutdowns/restarts really
| well (which sadly are far, far too common on this early
| generation Ryzen APU laptop and the current mainline Linux
| kernel :( ).
| spython wrote:
| Perhaps Webmemex is what you are looking for?
| https://blog.webmemex.org/
|
| More specifically freeze-dry, code for page state saving:
| https://github.com/WebMemex/freeze-dry
| alsetmusic wrote:
| The article refers to their "new" tab / task management tool. The
| web page[0] for it has no information or screenshots. Anyone have
| a link to see the tool in action?
|
| [0] https://www.skeema.com/
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| After some digging, I found some more information here:
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-psychology-...
| conorjm wrote:
| Long time lurker, first time commenter here..
|
| We've been working on an angle to this, https://cutout.app
|
| It's a visual, spatial interface for collecting content of
| multiple media types, in one place. And, you can collaborate,
| live, with others. It's designed for web-based research.
|
| An infinite canvas space, to index key references, in a manner
| more conducive to communicating and presenting thoughts and ideas
| - an alternative, or compliment, to lists of bookmarks and stacks
| of tabs.
| QuadrupleA wrote:
| Here's a radical solution - close tabs when you're done with
| them.
|
| There's a little known feature in browsers called _bookmarks_
| that 's like tabs, but they don't consume any RAM or bandwidth
| when you're not using them, and they don't clutter your UI. You
| can search them, group them into "tab folders", even synchronize
| them across devices.
|
| Spread the word - bookmarks are the future.
| shard wrote:
| That's the problem, I have nearly 100 tabs open _because I am
| not done with them_.
| bityard wrote:
| I _do_ close tabs when I'm done with them.
|
| The problem is that I have multiple things I'm working on and I
| don't want to close the dozen or two tabs open that I have
| related to it while I'm still working on the project, because
| looking up the bookmark, or finding the URL, and then scrolling
| the right spot is many times more work than just keeping the
| tab open and switching back to it when I need it.
|
| My favorite Firefox feature of all time was "Tab Candy" which
| was later renamed to "Panorama" It allowed you to automatically
| group tabs by project or context and let you switch between
| them seamlessly. Firefox decided to kill it and there is
| nothing like it now, all of the closest alternatives--when they
| actually work--require you to manually save and reload groups,
| which is not effort I'm willing to make.
| micropresident wrote:
| Given that almost all screens are widescreen, the fact that
| browsers don't have a sidebar of tabs is absolutely retarded UX
| design.
|
| Though this one seems to be okay: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
| lstamour wrote:
| Since March, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium supports vertical
| tabs, just click a button in the tab bar to turn it on:
| https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2021/03/04/amp-u...
|
| I believe back in the day that Opera was the first browser to
| commonly support the feature. And I remember using Firefox and
| Mozilla extensions for tab management a decade ago. The more
| things change...
| wolpoli wrote:
| Vertical tab in Microsoft Edge is a game changer for me. With
| it, it is easier for me to scan what tabs I have open, which
| makes it easier for me to close tabs that I no longer need.
| kube-system wrote:
| Vivaldi does
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Genius idea! Most websites have too much space on the sides
| anyways, this would be perfect. It simple but I never thought
| to look for this - just got an extension to do it and it seems
| great.
| 1MachineElf wrote:
| I am one such tab-overloaded computer user.
|
| There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large
| number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them
| - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
|
| The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for
| Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI
| requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even
| when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of
| saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-
| outliner/eggk...
|
| My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and
| that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google
| Drive sync.
|
| I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best
| one I've tried so far is Tab Fern:
| https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
|
| I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but
| for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the
| performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner.
| Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner
| - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache
| to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a
| feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
|
| I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox.
| Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean
| that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on
| Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
|
| Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also
| FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs
| Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for
| TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these
| things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close
| a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab
| in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :)
| and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session
| Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are
| presented with the list of available options, which include a
| Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly
| workable, and it also has the benefit of slick
| import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
|
| As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd
| give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and
| would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3
| alternatives I've mentioned.
| arduinomancer wrote:
| I don't understand the "having a million tabs open workflow" that
| seems so common
|
| I frequently move 1-2 tabs to the left side and use "close tabs
| to right". Probably do this 4-5 times per day.
|
| If I end up needing something I just look in history or ctrl +
| shift + t to get it back.
|
| Having too many open feels super distracting to me and makes it
| harder to focus.
|
| I also use bookmarks a lot too, so that might be the difference.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| How do you feel about full text search and image extraction and
| classification for those URLs?
| jcun4128 wrote:
| My thing is a chrome extension dumping all open tabs. But that's
| all it does. Also a centralized personal store of info, so I can
| save something for future research... have a scatter brain,
| randomly researching stuff.
|
| What I wish had reliable persistence is Windows 10 virtual
| desktops.
| stzsch wrote:
| I wish there was a way to completely force firefox to keep only
| one window open.
|
| I imagine that would help with my tab-hoarding, as I tend to
| branch into more windows (up to ~50) once they reach too many (20
| or so) tabs each.
| flobosg wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27095701
| kordlessagain wrote:
| Hi Mike.
| alfl wrote:
| I've opened this in a tab and intend to read it later.
| Arrath wrote:
| Doing this, and then never ever following up on it, was how I
| learned that Chrome on Android changes the tab count to ':D'
| once you go over 100 tabs open.
| ksec wrote:
| Same here, it is acting like a reading list. Mostly because
| Bookmark sucks.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Fixing bookmarks would cure tab hoarders like me.
| jrcii2 wrote:
| What have you tried? Just curious as I use Pocket and I am
| somewhat satisfied with it, though I rarely end up reading
| any of the articles I bookmark.
| pessimizer wrote:
| I've never seen anything that gave me the impression that
| it would help, but at one point I was brainstorming a
| firefox extension a lot like the one described in the
| article, which is making me hopeful.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| I use my tabs like a stack. The bookmarks are the long term
| overflow.
|
| At the end of the day the stack is closed out or put into
| bookmarks for later looking at. I then have a set of
| folders of 'look at later'. If later is greater than some
| time period I just delete the whole folder. Once a month I
| look at the overflow. Most of the time it is more of a 'why
| did I care about this' and just blow it away. It is a
| variation of the empty mail box. Inbox needs to be done.
| Then the 'done' folder. There is no real stack or tree.
| That way lies madness (I have tried).
|
| I try to keep my tabs in context of whatever I am doing. I
| max out about 10-20 (6 at the moment). Past anything like
| that and most of them are useless.
|
| Bookmarks are for 'I know I will need this in the future'
| everything else I can search for again.
| andrewla wrote:
| The real problem here is that the "back" button doesn't really
| make anyone happy. If it were instantaneous (like the page was
| kept alive in an invisible tab, essentially) and preserved state,
| then 75% of the use cases for tabs would go away.
|
| The remaining use cases are more around opening a bunch of links
| from the same page, so we'd keep tabs around for that, but maybe
| auto-group them with the page of origin for some
| contextualization.
| bityard wrote:
| Huh? The back button renders the previous page absolutely
| instantaneously for me in Firefox and Chrome. I am plenty happy
| with the Back button. The problem is that my browsing is not at
| all linear. While reading one page, I'll open 3 or 4 links in
| new tabs to read once I'm done with the current one. (I have
| done this already on this very HN comments page.)
| colordrops wrote:
| Brave on android recently added a feature that automatically
| groups tabs. It's quite nice.
| paulpauper wrote:
| >Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the
| internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users,
| tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For
| others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the
| screen as their numbers expand.
|
| how about multiple layer tabs
|
| I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes
| result in the page being different when reloading or not working.
| Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an
| unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library.
| I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
| leephillips wrote:
| It sounds like you would enjoy this new browser:
|
| https://lee-phillips.org/permatab/
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| Vivaldi has this, it's actually quite useful.
| lyall wrote:
| I've found doing something that sounds crazy very helpful in
| overcoming my own personal tab overload: automatically closing
| tabs after they go ignored for a certain amount of time (~12
| hours for me). It's garbage collection for tabs! I use the Tab
| Wrangler Chrome extension[0] for the job, but there are others
| too.
|
| Turns out that I don't actually care about the vast majority of
| tabs that I leave open--but can't seem to close!--and the
| extension makes it easy to re-open any automatically closed ones
| that I did happen to care about. The result is logging on each
| day to much less tab clutter than I left the night before.
|
| 0: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-
| wrangler/egnjh...
| mlac wrote:
| Same here. You can do this on iOS with tabs that are open
| longer than a day, but I don't think this is a built in feature
| for safari on MacOS. I find it useful on the phone where I'll
| often open multiple tabs (navigate through to the new tab and
| leaving the old one open in case I need to go back) and
| completely forget about them.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-automatically-close-t...
| naggie wrote:
| I used to have many dozens of tabs open statically, kind of like
| a TODO list I never get round to. Some tabs are open all the time
| for email, chat as well.
|
| I've eliminated those tabs and now have tabs related to what I'm
| currently doing only. There could still be dozens, but
| importantly they do get closed.
|
| To prevent the static tabs, I do 2 things:
|
| 1) Map tabs I monitor (email, chat etc) to a streamdeck, pressing
| a physical button every time I want to check
|
| 2) Save those static "TODO" tabs to a task manager[1] and treat
| them as tasks.
|
| [1]: My own task manager: https://github.com/naggie/dstask/ --
| saving the URL in note means I can open the tab in a browser
| again in a command (open)
| namero999 wrote:
| Opera solved this problem egregiously with workspaces. No need
| for extensions or other tricks. This feature alone is worth a try
| of what is regardless the most ergonomic browser I've ever used.
| dole wrote:
| I love OneTab, being able to dump 50-100 tabs out to a running
| page of links to restart the browser is simple peace of mind to
| me.
| imilk wrote:
| I love Onetab as well. The problem I often have is sending a
| lot of tabs to Onetab, then never looking at them again. Which
| may not actually be a problem and more of an indication for how
| "important" the tab actually was.
|
| The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that
| allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you
| saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific
| topic, but the topic is not in the Title of the page and it can
| get lost in the clutter.
|
| Or maybe more useful, a search service that just crawled the
| pages in your Chrome history, rather than the entire web.
| NwtnsMthd wrote:
| I don't need a better way to manage the tabs I have open I need
| to quit the habit of opening dozens of them. Its digital
| hoarding.
|
| Maybe it's overly dramatic of me to compare it to hoarding, it
| does legitimately increase productivity. But it also tends to
| spiral out of control now and then (for me).
| qwertox wrote:
| I miss the Tab Mix Plus Firefox extension so much. I had 3 rows
| of tabs with more via the scroll wheel, and they were of fixed
| width.
|
| I often ended up with 80 open tabs and switching was no issue. It
| was such a great feeling being able to close all the tabs after
| the work was done.
|
| With Chrome now I constantly need to drag tabs out in order to
| create a new window to start a new collection of tabs, so that I
| normally have about 6 browser windows open, then, when looking
| for a group of tabs, I first need to find the window. It's the
| same with Firefox since they moved away from allowing custom XUL
| code.
|
| Here's an example I just found on Google
| https://thasulinux.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tab_mix_plus....
| IHLayman wrote:
| On my iPad this is a problem. On my desktops, I have Firefox with
| Tridactyl installed, turning off the tab bar, nav bar, and menu.
| Everything is handled via keyboard if I can help it, including
| tab navigation: with a single keystroke I can start searching my
| open tabs fairly quickly by typing a portion of the tab title,
| and at end of day I bookmark tabs I want to read later with one
| command, clear all remaining tabs with another. Super easy, and
| no need for a learning algorithm to start trying to learn my
| surfing habits.
|
| Not trying to sound snarky, this tool just seems a bit like
| overkill. It might be useful on my iPad where it is cumbersome to
| do those steps, but it would also be useful to have Tridactyl
| there too.
| colordrops wrote:
| One thing I do is keep a text file with lists of links, e.g.
| "programming", "gardening", "health" etc and if I haven't looked
| at a tab after a few days, I copy the URL and put it in the
| appropriate list, then close the tab.
|
| If the browser prompted me to "archive" a tab after a few days
| and select a category, I'd probably use the functionality.
| vxxzy wrote:
| Just fire up another window :)
| bonecrush wrote:
| I have 0 problems with tabs. I used to and man they can be
| annoying.
|
| The system that finally worked for me is to bind "Close all Tabs
| to Left" to Ctrl + Left, likewise for right, and Close All Except
| Open Tab to Ctrl + Up.
|
| I found this enables painless instant culls, I just save URLs
| everything I want to survive a total cull (it's hardly ever more
| than 2 URLs, most tabs are junk which I suppose is the main
| problem).
|
| Ctrl + W for Close Current Tab and Ctrl + Shift + T for Reopen
| Closed Tab are also pretty useful (require no bind).
| greenmana wrote:
| Vivaldi is such a great browser, it has really wonderful and
| hands down the best tab management features.
| https://vivaldi.com/features/tab-management/
| andyxor wrote:
| related:
|
| TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338
| aidos wrote:
| I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users;
| those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I
| absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to
| understand the mentality.
|
| When I'm digging deep into something new I might end up with 20
| tabs, but a) it's an exception and b) the moment I can see no
| more value I just close them all down and reset.
| refactor_master wrote:
| For me, tabs are very much a manifestation of what's going on
| in my mind at that very instant. Basically a cache. But once
| I'm done with my task or work is over, I'll close every.
| Single. One.
|
| The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic
| busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself
| "I'll _probably_ remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe
| there's no need to panic after all".
| dkarras wrote:
| >But once I'm done with my task or work is over, I'll close
| every. Single. One.
|
| That works for the general case but sometimes I search a
| solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to
| search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a
| possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have
| to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this
| problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and
| won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem.
| That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm
| probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable
| sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in
| the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the
| future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a
| good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are
| already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note
| taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the
| problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy?
| I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More
| sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size,
| twice more procrastinated debt.
|
| Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid
| the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few
| hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I
| don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually
| forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all
| this. But don't have the time or motivation.
|
| Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs -
| inaction.
| weaksauce wrote:
| for a lot of people you search for something to solve a
| problem. for instance debugging an issue. you middle click on a
| bunch of promising tabs and then go through them. if there is
| some useful information on that page you leave it open but it's
| rare that it's the only thing you need to know to solve your
| problem. another use is some API you need to use so you'd open
| up a bunch of tabs on the functions you are exploring how you
| need to use them.
|
| I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and
| windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full
| bookmark but not finished with.
|
| I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs
| because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not
| the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone
| here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
|
| https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
| jrcii2 wrote:
| As someone who often carries a lot of tabs, I often keep the
| tabs around because the cost of evaluating whether a tab is
| worthwhile or not is high. It usually pulls me out of flow and
| pulls me into whatever article is bookmarked, which slows me
| way down.
|
| It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to
| make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab
| and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.
| skipants wrote:
| Same. I tend to use my tabs as a stack. On the left side I have
| the tabs I never close; like my Jira dashboard. Going towards
| the right I have my tabs that are todo -> in-progress. As I get
| through each thing, I close the tab. This tends to keep it
| pretty lean.
| jerf wrote:
| It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between
| how many tabs you like open and when you started using the web.
| I used it for a long time before tabs were even a feature, and
| I find it easy to keep my tab count down. Compared to having to
| keep things down to "preferably 1, but maybe 3 or 4 if you're
| in a real pinch", keeping the tab count under 100 is no big
| deal.
|
| (I'm _abundantly sure_ the correlation isn 't 1, so simply
| citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Looks like I've 81 tabs open in this Firefox window. It's not
| uncommon that I'll be over 1k (across one window per monitor).
|
| With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not
| really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially
| with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them
| if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and
| if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably
| scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and
| it'll get cleaned up in due course.
| cschep wrote:
| Seems like 1k is well beyond the state of usefulness for most
| people. Isn't it faster to re-google something than find the
| tab? And if there is a nice tab search.. is it better than
| google? Why keep a local cache?
| Twisol wrote:
| > With `%` to search across open tabs
|
| ... _No way._ That 's my TIL for the day. Am I the only one
| who didn't know about this!?
| _jal wrote:
| I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at work.
|
| Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and
| some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm
| at 20.
|
| I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take
| multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows
| thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for
| instance when opening new tabs from other apps).
|
| I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them,
| so I tend not to fight it.
| aidos wrote:
| Do you really need 14 pinned tabs? I use plenty of apps too,
| but they don't need to be sitting there _all the time_.
|
| And multiple day tasks, I still can't imagine why you need
| all the tabs. For me, I get in, get what I need and get out
| again.
| _jal wrote:
| Well, "need" is a funny word. I guess I don't "need" any
| tabs, or even bookmarks. I could just type URLs all day and
| have a very pretty browser.
|
| They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I
| use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in
| constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.
|
| Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things
| is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use
| "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really
| mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come
| back.
| stinos wrote:
| _I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at
| work._
|
| How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well,
| but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever
| it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only
| approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or
| Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this
| site.
| mmphosis wrote:
| I avoid browser tabs if possible. I currently have 5 browser
| windows open, and have hacked userChrome.css to hide the tab
| bar: #pageActionButton { display: none
| !important; } .urlbar-history-dropmarker, .urlbar-
| history-dropmarker:hover { display: none !important;
| } #TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }
|
| I currently have 12 visible windows open. I prefer a spacial
| interface where I can see and change everything vs. a modal
| interface of only seeing one task at a time and having to
| constantly switch between each task/tab.
| DoomHotel wrote:
| Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If
| there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all
| the way to the left first.
| paulpauper wrote:
| I had hundreds and I use all of them at least once a week
| aidos wrote:
| Let's call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that's 40
| tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour,
| just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all
| those different things - you know what they are and you want
| to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the
| name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type
| 'app.i - enter'. Why would I want it open?
| pessimizer wrote:
| I just opened HN 20 minutes ago, from there opened 5 tabs
| into comment threads, and from each comment thread opened
| the linked article in a new tab. This is a new tab I opened
| to reply without losing my place in the thread. That's 12
| tabs.
| jlokier wrote:
| In April 2021 I visited 5036 pages, 167 pages a day
| average.
|
| In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've
| spent more time in head-down coding.
|
| 5 tabs an hour, hah.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| I feel you. April 2021 : 7752 pages visited.
|
| Generally 300+ tabs in firefox. Mostly in chunks
| corresponding to home or work projects that take months
| or longer to finish.
| witrak wrote:
| I keep open 200 and more tabs, especially when I can't
| finish a job before I start or continue another one. It's a
| matter of efficiency - closing a group of tabs found after
| painful and time-consuming research is unreasonable IMO. To
| find a specific tab after a day or two I use the tabFX
| Firefox extension. It allows searching for the tab
| containing keywords in the title/URL or tabs similar to the
| selected one. Also allows closing tabs directly from the
| search result list. Extremely useful.
| eterm wrote:
| I'm completely the same, I might have a dozen active tabs but
| everything gets closed down asap, and in general I'll have
| multiple windows for different contexts each with just a few
| tabs.
| riccardomc wrote:
| I am ruthless with my tabs. I always close them all at the end of
| my day.
|
| Just like Inbox 0, I aim for Tab 0. Serenity is the reward for
| this small disciplined effort.
|
| Close them. They're not going anywhere. You can always find the
| links back tomorrow. An entire multi-million industry wants you
| to find them back as easily as possible.
|
| You might even find better ones when you start fresh.
|
| It's just your loss aversion instincts kicking in[1]. It's how
| your brain is wired. But we live in the golden age of information
| retrieval. You don't need to hoard tabs. Your brain just doesn't
| know.
|
| Trust me, if you can. Close them.
|
| It will be ok.
|
| [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
| dewlinedew2 wrote:
| I used to use the Bookmark all Tabs to a folder feature at the
| end of each day. It's the equivalent of sweeping it under the
| rug, or creating a folder named desktop_new and burying
| everything there
| dmt0 wrote:
| That multi-million industry does a good job at burying the
| content that's not fresh any more, and not a very good job at
| filtering out SEO manipulators. Good luck googling for that
| article from a year ago that had a nuanced comparison of A and
| B.
| riccardomc wrote:
| I also find search engine result signal to noise
| deteriorating in favour of SEO-crafted content.
|
| On the other hand, that article from a year ago is most
| probably outdated by now.
| NaturalPhallacy wrote:
| Same here.
|
| Right clicking my leftmost tab and hitting "Close tabs to the
| right" is so freeing once you get used to it.
|
| That aside, how do you do the [1] type of linking? Manually? I
| checked the docs and in classic hacker style they didn't avail
| me.
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Yeah, it's a social construct not a feature. You type [1] in
| the paragraph, and then you type
|
| [1]: https://example.com/
|
| at the end of your comment.
| [deleted]
| eivarv wrote:
| I'm currently trying to solve this and more in an application
| called Cleave.
|
| https://cleave.app
|
| Cleave lets users persist OS state as a "context" - saving and
| loading open applications, their windows (and their positions),
| tabs, open files/documents and so on. Think of it as a workspace
| or project manager from an IDE, but on the OS-level.
|
| I started working on it because of frequent multitasking of heavy
| work with limited resources; Made it because I wanted to switch
| between studying, working, reading, looking for an apartment,
| etc. without manually managing all states or consuming all
| resources.
|
| I'll release an Open Beta (macOS) as soon as I finish license
| verification and delta updates, but I keep getting sidetracked...
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| I still miss Opera's MDI (Multiple Document Interface). Using
| that vs using tabs felt like using a tiled window manager vs
| graphical window manager. You could get so much more efficient
| with the MDI once you dialed in shortcuts, window switching and
| rearranging, etc.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
|
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/op...
| Overdr0ne wrote:
| I really want my tabs to just be emacs buffers.
|
| Emacs has sooo many different tools to organize and operate on
| buffers, so different types of users can compose a workflow that
| works for them, including plain old tabs if they really want. And
| of course, extensibility, the most important feature imo
|
| And you can do this now of course, with w3m or other plaintext
| browsers, but it's just not that comfy for most webpages these
| days. And there's emacs-webkit, but it's still a bit of a pita to
| install.
|
| I still use qutebrowser for most things, and with i3/sway plus
| the save-session function, i can get hierarchy and persistence,
| and that seems sufficient for now...
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| I just declare a tab bankruptcy every once in a while. Close
| everything, forget I opened those tabs. If it is important
| enough, it's already stashed away in a format that lends itself
| to offline reading. If it's not yet stashed, it will bubble up
| eventually from among other things.
|
| If I don't have time to stash it away, whom am I kidding? I'm not
| going to come back to it in a near future anyway. I already have
| a couple of things that remind me of how guilty I am by not
| coming back to them, why add more?
| rubyist5eva wrote:
| i get anxious when I have more than like 5 tabs open...I don't
| know how people handle having 20-100+
| deckard1 wrote:
| Based on what they show so far[1], I'm not really convinced tasks
| are the solution. The UI they present seems really clunky for
| 2021.
|
| > He means we need something richer, that we should be collecting
| information by "task" or another word he brings up again and
| again, "context."
|
| Yes, context makes sense. But it needs to be context over time.
| Context that evolves and can be searched and revisited. You
| should be able to pull up the context of last month, or the 2nd
| week of May of last year.
|
| > "If you think about it, Google does a good job giving us
| thousands of search results," says Kittur. "But that entire
| process after search results is being done pretty much entirely
| in our heads.
|
| Precisely. Fixing tabs is not about the browser at all. It's a
| problem with search. Search begins and ends at Google. What we
| _really_ need is a search that starts global and integrates
| _personally_. Think of tabs as a sort of cache of what you have
| brought in from the broader internet. This "cache" should have a
| simple search interface (think Slack's search, vim Ctrl+P, fzf,
| Command+Space/Spotlight, etc.) but also have the ability to pull
| up some sort of window that you can navigate context by other
| means. Such as date, device, location, etc. "Show me what I was
| looking at on my phone when I was at Starbucks last Wednesday"
| kind of thing.
|
| Tabs are the fear of losing context. Make context durable,
| transparent, holistic (i.e. you can zoom to either the trees or
| the forest), and global (sync across all devices) then you will
| have largely solved tabs.
|
| [1] https://www.fastcompany.com/90635776/the-twisted-
| psychology-...
| [deleted]
| throwawayboise wrote:
| So weird to me. I think this every time I read about browser
| tabs, organization strategies, etc.
|
| I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open. And that's if I'm
| busy. Normally it's one or two -- whatever it is that I'm
| currently working on.
|
| And at the end of the day -- all closed. History and cache
| cleared. Start clean the next day.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Even the history, eh? That would definitely slow me down next
| time I want to go back to that same page. I guess I rely on the
| browser suggesting the previously visited website to me.
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(page generated 2021-05-14 23:00 UTC)