This is a brilliant piece of work. As someone who has thousands of tabs open, I've always wanted to "close all tabs with a single command", or view all the open tabs and mass select them and close, for years. Otherwise, going through them one by one and deleting takes forever. Now somebody make a vim pluggin so I can delete tabs by visual selecting a bunch of them and typing "d".
It's a huge leap forward in browser management. Not exactly a replacement for headless browsing/scraping etc, but for personal use, nothing compares. A big contribution to the "personal data management" toolbox.
In the realm of tab management, I use this one liner in console of chrome://inspect every once in a while, then just close all of my tabs:
collection = document.getElementById("pages").getElementsByClassName("subrow"); final_output_tsv = "title\turl\n"; for (let item of collection) {final_output_tsv += `${item.children[0].innerHTML}\t${item.children[1] ? item.children[1].innerHTML : "N/A"}\n`}; copy(final_output_tsv)
Substitute "devices" for "pages" to get android chrome tabs
This way I can backup all my tabs in simple, non-bookmark format and search them using python etc.
cool this seems handy, but when I try my chrome://inspect/#pages only contains a small subset of tabs out of the few dozen windows I have open. Any tips?
Looks like only recently opened tabs (or some variation on that) show up here. To test, reload all tabs In one window (I used an extension) and check out chrome://inspect again. It's all there. Maybe there's a good reason for not showing all pages in inspect. Who knows. Another problem is that my script grabs page subprocess urls also. I've mainly used this for grabbing my android tabs.
This is an adapted version that skips grabbing subprocesses
I keep a few tabs open, and close the browser regularly.
A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.
However as time has gone on, I've been surprised to find I may have the rare behavior and it is common for people to work this way.
So.. maybe this is a way he can backup his "filesystem" and not suffer a nervous breakdown when his machine reboots or some othe browser failure where he loses his world.
I am like your friend... basically tabs are a "working memory" that you don't want to store permanently in bookmarks. each window or sets of windows is typically a different topic that is being research on with a bunch of middle clicks to open tabs. I have so many open that I wrote a small webext for it that shows a page of all your tabs that you can click on to navigate to that tab with a click. just a nicer interface to see all the windows open and all the tabs. https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
I hope you find it useful :) if you have any suggestions let me know. i have been working on a small upgrade to it where the tabs can be closed with a middle click and reordered in the windows but i don't work on it very often as it's quite useful as it stands for my needs
edit cmd-shift-e/ctrl-shift-e will open up the extension which I guess I should update on the homepage.
Hey cool, thanks, I've installed it now too - it'll be quite useful!
I'd love if you could have a link on the Tabist page that shows a popup allowing for copy/pasting of a text box to show list of titles/URL or just URLs for either easy sharing of a grouping of tabs or so I could do an occasional backup of URLs? Not sure if this person's code is useful for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605222 ?
Maybe a global link for all windows and one per window?
Edit to add: I have a dream of someday contributing financially to a bunch of open source organizational tools that I'd like to see/would use and depend on heavily, let me know if interested in hearing more - can email me matt@engn.com if curious.
Awesome! I'm not sure if the version on the store has the tab backup feature enabled or not but there is a backup feature that is under the options area. It just dumps a json file with all your tabs and a restore feature where it opens up all those tabs again but that is really slow if you have a lot of tabs.
Interesting idea on the popup; I'll give that some thought.
Cool, thanks. Another use case other than backup I was thinking is if just wanting to share a window of tabs (so all relating to a project) by copy/pasting it to someone in a message/email; I guess on flip side too, if person receiving the links also had Tabist then could have another popup to "open links" (maybe there's a way to do that in Chrome easily but I'm not aware); could eventually create a centralized service that just pushes the links to them and perhaps auto-opens them - obvious potential security issues there but arguably person you're receiving links from would be trusted by you.
> A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.
For those in the comments who are like myself (and parent's friend) and have hundreds or even thousands of tabs open, I highly recommend the Panorama Tab Groups extension for Firefox:
This extension adds back in the functionality that was removed from Firefox half a decade ago. It gives you a visual, 2D-map of arbitrary groups of tabs in a tile layout you can view with "Ctrl-Shift-F". Combined with the backup feature (just in case it crashes or gets corrupted, although this has yet to happen to me) and Firefox's built-in tab session saving option, so long as you have enough memory (I bought 40 gigs of RAM for this laptop after terrible memories of running Firefox on a Chromebook with 4GB of soldered RAM), you can basically browse as though you'll never have to close a tab again, AND also be able to stay organized.
Is having several tabs open in a browser rare? My social circle - which comprises mostly software engineers, admittedly - sees browsers with 30+ tabs open as normal.
Same here, currently sitting at 300 tabs ( Lost about 800 a few weeks ago from Safari crash again ). I just wish the Show All tabs on Safari put up a list of tabs so I could quickly navigate through them ( and selectively close them ). Right now Show All Tabs Reloads all the tabs. That is the same on macOS and iOS. Your phone gets quite warm doing it.
> Lost about 800 a few weeks ago from Safari crash again
Sounds like someone taking a corner at 200 mph and rolling their eyes when they hit the crash barrier. Not often is the following true, but - you're using that tool wrong.
The crash has nothing to do with 800 tabs. Most of those Tabs are not active. And a crash, whether it has 1 tabs or 10000 tabs that lost the previous sessions is not using the tool wrong.
It wasn't designed for that kind of use, and it's being used that way. There are extensions, bookmarking tools, session savers, other browsers and all of their extensions, which are better able to handle this kind of thing.
Yes. I immediately check that after it happened except the plist was empty.
Firefox used to have similar problem with their json so after a few bug report with them they fixed it with another json.bak as redundancy. ( The good days of Firefox )
Show All Tabs on iOS definitely does not reload tabs. I know on macOS it used to force all tabs to load but I had the impression lately that it wasn’t doing that anymore (though I rarely use this feature).
iOS reloads them ( or partially load them ) as you scroll through it to get a screenshot. I tried it just now. Or they somehow saved a Screenshot of it. ( But then there is no reason why macOS safari isn't doing the same. )
iOS saves screenshots of tabs. I scrolled through my own and found a bunch of old tabs (didn't realize I had so many) that just showed pure black.
macOS saves screenshots too, to show when hovering over a tab. Curiously, it doesn't seem to use these saved screenshots in Show All Tabs. Also I just tested, Show All Tabs on macOS is no longer loading unloaded tabs. I have a window with 13 tabs right now, only two of which I've visited since launching Safari, and the others just remain as blank in Show All Tabs.
1 - Right-click empty space next to the tabs and select 'Bookmark all tabs'
2 - Name the bookmark folder (within the top-level bookmark folder) something like: 'Tab-mess-from-<date-time>'
3 - Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time. You can close 200+ tabs in a minute. (or as other suggested, right-click any tab and use the option 'close other tabs').
I open a new window for each "task" and open tabs in that window, if it is non trivial I also move that window to a new Desktop/Space. When I want to shelve a task I bookmark all the tabs in that window into a dedicated folder then close the whole window and the desktop.
you should try amna, which basically automates that process. You make a task, it gives you a chrome window for the task and syncs your work. You can then close the browser, and the data is saved.
> Ctrl-F4 close them. Press and hold Ctrl, then F4 them one at a time.
Ctrl-F4 shuts down entire browser, Ctrl-W closes each tab with a press of w. This is behavior in Ubuntu and it holds true for most application windows.
yeah about that, are you sure they are open and not hibernated? Chrome had
proactive-tab-freeze-and-discard , later renamed to proactive-tab-freeze and finally forced On in 80 with no option of turning it off. 'hibernated' tabs are merely a bookmark without loaded content. I dont think this extension would be able to work with non loaded tabs without forcing them all to load. 300 tabs is able to easily eat 16GB of ram, Im scared to think what would happen with 1000 tabs loaded in Chrome.
I remember good old Opera 12.x where you could sit on 200 actually loaded and active tabs and RAM usage was somewhere around 2GB.
Using single process Firefox forks I often load in 500 tabs plus another 500+ suspended in under 4 GB. Of course I'm also running NoScript temp whitelist only and most sites are websites not web applications. But 1000 loaded tabs is certainly doable in way less than 16GB of ram if you don't use a multi-process browser. It's just a shame this is written as a chrome style extension (which modern FF supports) and not a firefox extension.
Somehow, Chrome doesn't seem to actually do this despite claims to, which is why I use The Great Suspender (a Chrome extension that actually hibernates tabs).
If you just want to close all tabs then in Firefox right click a tab and select "Close Other Tabs". Also, you can control-click on tabs to apply commands the the whole set, such as closing them, sending them to your phone, etc.
Hm, I'm kind of confused by your perspective here. Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed? I use my current laptop both for work and personally, and in my personal workspaces alone, I have at least half a dozen browser windows with ~20 tabs representing research that I'm doing or a task that I'm organizing; everything from gift-buying to medical devices for a family issue to building a new workout routine for the pandemic. You can rack up tons of relevant tabs pretty quickly in these scenarios, and there's really no advantage to closing them in any well-managed environment (ie one that has non-rudimentary window management and a browser/extension that handles idle tabs with negligible ongoing resource use).
I probably have hundreds of "productive" tabs open, and that's before even getting to tabs that are serving as an "L1 cache" version of a read-it-later service. And all of this comes with extremely quick clean-up; once I buy the gift/finalize the routine/purchase the item, it's trivial to close the entire window for that task.
I cannot speak for the user you replied to, but to answer this question:
> Do you only have a single thread of tasks you're doing at any given time on your machine, all of whose resources are torn down and rebuilt from scratch when needed?
Yes, absolutely, at least when it comes to my web browser.
I run Firefox Nightly and intentionally use its prompt to restart for an update as a prompt to consider whether I should close the things I have open. I'll sometimes ignore the update for a few hours, but not usually longer than that.
If I need to retain some information over a period of more than a few hours, I'll transfer it to a note-taking app or something similar. Habitually not keeping a large number of tabs open helps me maintain focus to some extent, and deliberating over whether to close a tab or window presents and opportunity to think about extracting a snippet for storage elsewhere.
To me the idea of keeping an entire webpage open as a method of storing what is likely a very small subset of what it contains just doesn't seem "right", regardless of actual resource consumption on the computer I'm using.
I do the same. In a notes app, I have a TODO note where I save links and a few word description of what a link is. This gives me one place to maintain a reading list.
I also have notes for current projects/tasks. I have structure and search to find things.
As a life-hack to make better use of my time, I use the Freedom.io service to block all social media and “time wasting” sites so that I can only access them before work, first half hour of lunch time, and after end of work day. In practice what this means is that I scan HN and Twitter early each morning for tech stuff that is useful/interesting and add any useful links to my notes. Every few days I edit my notes to discard material.
On the topic of blocking distractions, I've found that creating a separate user account for focus time helps quite a bit, since it's sufficiently annoying to remove that particular barrier. Choosing not to configure a keyboard shortcut for account switching was a good call, too.
I tried using multiple Little Snitch profiles or different browsers on the same user account in the past but switching between them is way too low effort for my easily distracted brain. Getting back into distraction mode can be performed on autopilot in those cases.
That little delay in waiting for my watch to unlock my user account is just long enough to make me stop and think, and the vibration is like a gentle slap on the wrist.
My focus account has a single Little Snitch profile configured to block the time-vampires I know I'm susceptible to, along with Firefox configured to clear history on close. I don't need to be reminded Twitter exists just because I opened my browser and pressed T, they should at least have to pay for the privilege of advertising to my brain!
In general I think that taking full advantage of computers to make absolutely everything instantly accessible is in many ways actively harmful to many types of brains. We live in an economy and too many of us just give that stuff away.
Having hundreds or thousands open tabs also confuses me and always seems like a mess to me.
The way i work: I mostly work on a one thing at a time. For that i can have probably at max 40 tabs open. Once it gets past some threshold(i don't recognize or remember what's in them) i tend to start to close the obsolete ones. If there is something i find useful i bookmark it. If there is something i think i would like to read in future i also bookmark it. Once the work is done i close all the tabs. In general i like my tabs closed, it brings peace to my mind.
My thoughts on this kind of thing aren't in any way backed by studies or research (I know some folks are sticklers for that sort of thing), but they essentially boil down to reflecting on human history.
The ability to store a huge amount of information and near-instantly recall it with these computery things we all love is an incredibly new development that I don't really consider compatible with my brain. If the brain is a somewhat general purpose computer that's been really slowly optimised by evolution, the alternative approach to ours is akin to* scheduling hundreds of threads on a small number of hardware threads. Doable? Sure. Ideal? Doesn't feel like it to me.
I've tried allowing myself to just continuously spawn tabs and it makes me uncomfortable much like it does to see a Windows desktop used as a dumping ground for whatever a person happens to want to save on their machine. Fortunately I almost never see the latter these days, and I'll choose to believe people don't do that anymore without verifying that assumption...
I don't think I go into thousands, but easily accumulate a few 100 tabs. The way I work, I rarely have a task truly done in one go. Besides various side projects, I work on multiple websites for multiple clients and constantly need to put one on hold and wait for feedback, so I go work on another one. If I expect feedback withing a ~2 day period, it really doesn't make sense for me to close the related tabs. Not only does it save time when picking up the task again, but helps me reconstruct my train of thought without having to take notes.
The way I think of it is kind of like swap memory. Instead of wasting effort saving to disk and verifying the saved data (taking notes), I chuck the data somewhere it isn't in the way (a new virtual desktop) so I can pick it up later. In fact, this is exactly what happens with the tabs at the system level. Since I'm constantly running out of ram and have a stupid amount of swap space set up, my OS gladly swaps the relevant browser processes and unswap the relevant set.
> Like you I am an avaricious multi-tasker over extended periods of time and was heading towards the same state you appear to have reached.
> I realised it was not optimal
I will take a look, thank you! Would you mind briefly elaborating on what you found suboptimal about the workspace/window/tab hierarchy for organizing your tasks? So far it's working very well for me, and the low friction is a really important part of it. Though it's completely possible that I have blind spots around my pain points, or am about to run into a wall. Thanks in advance for your thoughts?
My issues with tabs, even with extensions that organise them:
* sheer mental challenge of quickly relocating related tabs and the context for why they were kept and relationships between them
* inability to easily add WIP notes and commentary
* difficulty of sharing tabs and context with others
* possibility of losing them if power lost unexpectedly (during extended suspend for example) or accidentally close a single window instead of doing File > Quit
* moving between different devices and different browsers
* efficiency; affect on the browser and system of keeping tabs open for long periods of time (without quitting browser)
I don't use workspaces for the same reason I don't like tabbing between applications on the same monitor. I use multiple monitors so I only need to move my eyes to switch focus.
This all makes sense, thank you. The friction-free aspect of browser windows is still pretty critical to my workflow, but I'll look into whether it makes sense to grow the habit of "migrating" a task to Zotero when it gets heavy-duty enough.
I first discovered Zotero via the Mozilla add-ons search whilst looking for an extension to help me. Using the Firefox/Chromium connector puts it a context-click away:
Zotero Connector > Save To Zotero > "Web Page with Snapshot" / "Web Page without Snapshot"
So I can both maintain the tab workflow whilst 'tracking' progress with Zotero application itself.
The promo looks slick but there are two blockers for me:
1. Not FOSS (Hard requirement *)
2. Basic/Free version doesn't claim Firefox connector
* I insist all my businesses use only FOSS for core functionality and we have on-premise capability (no 'cloud'). As well as putting us in control of our own destiny (we have the talent) we can add specific functionality at-will and do contribute that back to projects as well as buying support contracts or making regular donations.
Thanks for calling it out! Open Source is a consideration, but we're not there just yet with it. You still have 'On' Premise with Amna. All data is stored on your machine.
> well-managed environment (ie one that has non-rudimentary window management and a browser/extension that handles idle tabs with negligible ongoing resource use).
Can you elaborate on this? Which extensions are you talking about?
I also rack up hundreds of tabs and my browser is often the main resource hog for me. I’ll often have to kill -9 it to force it to start with “oops we crashed, here are your previous tabs in an unloaded state”, but it sounds like you have a better way of doing this
I currently use the Great Suspender on Chrome, which will suspend a tab that's been open for a while. The suspended tab just shows a Great Suspender icon, so it takes up ~0 RAM. I've whitelisted certain domains and sites (eg Messenger apps).
I know there are a ton of extensions aimed at this problem, including OneTab (which will collapse many tabs into a single page of links), but TGS works the best for my workflow.
I also use Session Buddy to periodically backup my current window/tab state, which I find more reliable and powerful than the default tab-restore functionality.
I could really use something like the Great Suspender. However, looking into it, I found quite a bit of controversy surrounding its new (since June) "maintainer". This issue sums it up well: "SECURITY: New maintainer is probably malicious"[1]
Here is the gist of it:
> Using the chrome web store version of this extension, without disabling tracking, will execute code from an untrusted third-party on your computer, with the power to modify any and all websites that you see.
So, installing from the Chrome Web Store is a complete no-go.
One can still install the extension from GitHub, but with Chrome constantly evolving and the now, unmaintained-on-GitHub extension having known issues with losing all your tabs (to which there are workarounds), I'm very wary of using this extension.
I have seen this behaviour repeatedly. Having to many “task windows” makes it difficult to focus. Similar to having to many tasks in Asana or emails in my Inbox. Prioritisation is the only option to come out of this. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to tag priority with the “task windows”. And that’s the reason I daily browse through all windows and close the ones that are not urgent.
Hm, I haven't found this to be the case. This is probably in part because of my WM/OS setup; I use a tiling window manager and different workspaces for different contexts, so my fan-out factor is never that high in cases where it matters.
I derive close to zero value from bookmarks. The only value they provide is that they appear in the address bar during searches. They are organized in a linear fashion, they require constant maintenance and they are also not immediately accessible often requiring you to open a separate window. Worst of all even if you choose to do something as stupid as manage bookmarks you will now have to have to manage both tabs and bookmarks at the same time.
Tabs? They are easy to organize, easily accessible because they are always visible and they are powerful enough to completely remove the need for bookmarks which makes using bookmarks always inferior because of the downsides of bookmarks.
Now lets get to the actual point:
>Have you ever derived any value from a tab you chose not to close?
I close tabs that I don't need eventually, bookmarks just keep accumulating because there is an easy method to add them, but actually finding or deleting bookmarks is a lot of effort.
It helps if you use tags more than folders for bookmarks, that way you can have a page marked as "dogs, computers", another as "dogs, pizza" and then filter to dogs to see both. It also helps (in firefox) if you know the special symbols you can put in the address bar for filtering. * for normal bookmarks, I think + for tags, and % works for open tabs. Follow them with a space and your keyword.
I've been using qutebrowser mainly for a couple months now, and I find the way bookmarks and quickmarks fit into the standard open or open in new tab dialogue feels very powerful. I often am just hitting O to open in new tab, typing a few characters, and picking a result from bookmarks or history. Searching and going to a URL happens there too.
I try to use either descriptive names like "guix-bug-issue" for quickmarks so they show up when I type any of those bits (bug and issue intentionally redundant so if I think to search either, it comes up), or I use very shorts strings like "lfm" for my last.fm profile. In the case of these shorter ones, you get the added advantage of being able to go there without looking. If you type an exact quickmark name in the box and hit enter, it goes straight there, you don't have to wait and look over the suggestions in the box.
Without even bothering to check, this seems like it can't possibly be true. You are surely not saying that the billions of Chrome users worldwide have no browsing history from September or earlier, right?
I open a new window to research a specific topic. Then I open up all the links on sub tabs.
This encloses all my research for this subject in one window. Often times I have upwards of 10+ windows opened. Since some of the work spans over several days or weeks.
I also take screenshots of relevant information. Which gets automatically labeled by date and time into a screenshot folder, and sub-sorted into months.
I am very happy to have shared my thoughts here (and received good feedback and suggestions!), but the best is that it finally made me look into this need - and I am not the first (big surprise :-)
It turns out that just very recently exactly what I need was made possible in Chrome (currently only "experimental") just set this flag [1]. I especially like that it's possible without the need of third party SW.
This page [2] is what alerted my attention to the solution.
NB.: It does make me wonder why this feature have not existed until now as it seems so obvious, I mean ever since the introduction of the TABbed interface in browsers (which started pre 2000 IIRC) the (over-) usage pattern of tabs existed.
Anyway - even if I have missed something pre-existing I am now extremely happy to be able to name my TABS in Chrome!
Since recently, you can also ctrl- and shift-select them and either move or close just those tabs. Sounded like a gimmick when I first saw it, but it has proven to be a huge time saver when I neeed to split a window in two because my browsing session has expanded far beyond the original scope or kill a bunch of tabs in the middle somewhere because a thread of searching has proven fruitless.
Vivaldi has a tabs panel that lists all open tabs (as well as recently closed ones) like files in Windows Explorer, you can multi-select them and hit delete, or indeed hit Ctrl-A and delete. Sadly afaik there's no filter to e.g. select all Stack Overflow tabs.
You can a) right-click a stack overflow tab, stack them and then close them all or b) control-ddubleclick one site and Vivaldi will autoselect all from same domain.
This does seem like a brilliant idea, doesn't it. I'm thinking about how difficult it would be to setup something like 'surf' but using chromium/firefox, and then driving it completely off the CLI. It honestly sounds like my dream browser.
