Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken?
I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember.
Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken.
If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.
I've attempted (largely unsuccessfully) to try to use Pocket (also a Mozilla product) to address this. The problem with Pocket is that it gets worse the more you use it. From four years ago:
A couple of those issues have been addressed. There's now "find in page" on the Android app, and editing tags is very slightly improved. But overall, Pocket remains a roach motel: articles check in but they never check out.
What I really want is a persistant, local, tagged, searchable, entirely-offline-usable archive of content. There seems to be little interest (or supreme obstacles) in providing this. (I've looked at Zotero, Calibre, and Mendalay, none really suit my workflow.)
I've utterly given up any hope of browser vendors delivering this.
It's weird. The exact same problem affects to-do apps and note taking apps. I'm pretty sure it was a HN post I recently read where the problem of to-do apps was discussed. People go through phases: discover an app, start with a clean slate, get a better night's sleep because you get to write down all the things you're definitely going to do, work your way through x% of the list, gradually accumulate a list of things you shamefully failed to do, and eventually getting thoroughly depressed with the app and stop using it (or nuke the list every few months). Browser tabs are just another to-do list. So are those kitchen drawers, garden shed workbenches with half finished projects on them, tech books you insist that you'll read, and Udemy courses you bought in a sale and never used. These things all remind me of the 90 year old man who lives half a mile from my house, who has two beautiful old cars in his garage. One is an Austen A30, the other a '65 Jaguar S-Type. Both sit quietly rusting under disintegrated tarps. I'm sure he must have had dreams of fully renovating them when he bought them 30 years ago, but he knows that when he dies they'll end up as scrap, or maybe as some other retired gentleman's project that'll never get completed, and whenever he sees them, I'm sure it eats away at him, like the rust eats his cars.
And yes, there's a lot there that resonated strongly with me.
The cars-under-tarps anecdote is an excellent one. As life goes on, one accumulates an ever-growing list of gates which have closed irrevocably behind one. The German word Torschlusspanik is a brilliant invocation of this. The English equivalent is roughly "mid-life crisis", though the German captures far more of the essence and slowly-building grief.
There's saying (memory says Chinese though I'm unsure and can't locate it): a wise man is prepared to part with his possessions several times in his lifetime. That might extend to dreams and expectations as well as physical cargo.
Funny to come across this thread. Just a week ago my best friend had been moaning for two years about tidying his garage. I came with two beers intent on a chill weekend watchinh olympics but I happened to run into his wife as she was parking her car in the garage. We spoke for a minute but I decided we'd rather start working on his garage. My friend came out and we started. A few hours later, tired and hungry, his SO served us with a pretty full meal which is both extraordinary and unusual since Ive never been given anything by her in the ten years we've known each other nor have I seen her cooking. I have no doubt my boy got some that night but it was satisfying to just work and do something useful to bond.
I think there is something fundamentally ancient about it, like how young women braid each others hair and probably been doing it since year one of humanity's existence. Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.
Now that you mention it, it seems that there is indeed a phenomena worth exploring here.
I may have done many things in life that I perceive to be valuable for our family, but nothing earned me as many 'points' with Mrs. as did the act of just sucking it up and cleaning the entire garage one day.
>> Maybe we need others to get things done. Maybe the man would jumpstart his passion if someone shared his thing for restoration.
I think there is a lot of truth to this actually. Admittedly I'm a little sleep deprived right now in that way that leads you reading a statement and feeling it is incredibly profound in a way you might not otherwise... but still I think you are really onto something.
Working with someone smooths out the edges well when things go poorly (if something goes wrong and you are alone it is easier to be grumpy about it than if you have someone with you to say "oh well, we can do X instead" or "It doesn't really matter"), they make the work feel seen and therefore feel more valuable. I can enjoy cooking for (and especially with my partner) but I can never be bothered to really cook for myself, even if I'd enjoy the meal more in the end it doesn't feel worth the time and energy investment when I could just slap together a sandwich or something.
This extends to hobby projects as well in a big way, perhaps even more. Sure I could spend hours painting a picture and have people say "wow, that's impressive" (this is just an example, I can't actually paint), but it feels hard to justify when I have other things I might need to do. If someone else is working on the same thing with you it makes you feel like you are investing that time in them, which is inherently fulfilling.
Even in your example of you helping your friend, once they've accepted you are helping they will feel like every bit of work they do will make your life easier. It's less intense but they will still feel like they are contributing to your efforts in someway, or at least like they are working towards a mutual goal instead of something kind of isolated.
Good explanation of something that I've felt and discussed a few times before.
I've stopped using todo apps and just write the daily/weekly list of high-prio items in my paper notebooks. That way it doesn't accumulate a bunch of items that'll I'll likely never get too. The most important things will resurface anyway.
I feel much better not dragging along a list that keeps growing. Sure, that means I'll sometimes forget or be late or need reminding, but from my perspective, that's an acceptable trade-off.
I have a short list of daily todos that include six subjects that I want to focus on. If I do something towards that task, I add a checkmark for every day of every month. It is interesting to see how consistent or inconsistent I am with tasks over time. This is primarily motivation towards learning basics or attempting master of something.
People should be taught to pursue things on a daily basis from a young age. I think it helps temper expectations about what can actually be done over time, which is not a skillset I had when I was younger: I was in constant pursuit of too many things all of the time.
Check out BrainTool (https://braintool.org) it's a browser extension that allows you to trivially add pages to a custom hierarchal 'Topic tree' along with notes on why you're saving the page, and then to control opening and closing tabs by topic. Everything is saved to an org-mode syntax text file. So of your requirements it's persistent, local, tagged and entirely-offline-usable. Incremental search is in the works.
It works with tab groups on Chrome, Edge and Brave which adds another step toward keeping your browser organized.
Incentives misallignment is a major component of my disillusionment.
It's possible that a non-Google vendor might see the approach as a differentiator. Of these, Mozilla seems to be footgunning itself with exceptional facility, Apple would serve only its own hardware platforms in all likelihood, and the remaining players (KDE / Webkit) are so small as to be utterly outclassed.
The remaining possibility would be a generalised HTTP/HTML (and if possible other document markup) programming libraries.
> Let's work on Servo! It's not completely dead. Super users building a browser for super-users.
Please do!
I already sent some money in that direction and will be happy to send more.
I will also be happy to test it (commit to 1-2 hours or maybe more pr week of actual following-a-plan testing not just "using it and see if it works" for a few weeks) but I am afraid I can't learn enough Rust to be helpful at the moment (small kids and a full time job).
I use Pocket a lot. There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do but I find it at least usable for storing stuff and finding it later once you get used to it. Most of the problems in that post have been at least partly addressed, although I don't ever use tags so have no comments about those.
> There are like 10 easy feature requests I'd love for them to do
Consider that if Mozilla hadn't lied about how it was going to open source it when they announced they were buying Pocket (alternatively, if people actually held them accountable instead of demonstrating that the public's short memory means that you can lie about pretty much anything), then someone would have probably fixed at least a few of those.
If all you're doing is using it to store stuff, then instead of signalling to a company that bad behavior pays off by rewarding them for it, consider using Zotero instead, which doesn't have a history of being insultingly mendacious and by default keeps your data private (in the form of reliable, bog standard files on your own disk). Or, if you're willing to suffer through slightly more geekery, there's Perkeep/Camlistore.
One of my main use cases of Pocket is basically using it like a podcast app (via text2speech and syncing across different devices) with highlighting capability. I've created some of my own workarounds for its failings (such as not being able to save articles behind some paywalled websites).
I'd ideally like to move to something else but I haven't found an alternative that's as good. Not being able to export my data, do any kind of advanced searching, or access a few of my files in Pocket really does suck.
I see Zotero has a third-party Android app, maybe I'll try that and see if it is decent.
I believe it is in Google's and Microsoft's interest to keep bookmarks crippled. Every time you forgo using your bookmarks to lookup something, you instead use their search services, which indirectly translates to money in their pocket.
So the reasoning is there's a Google corporate stooge sending secret emails to Mozilla, telling them "if you ever make a bookmark system better than ours, we'll pull all our Google funding"?
I'm going to stick with Hanlon's razor and assume making a better bookmark system is non-trivial.
The project had reportedly already integrated the major improvements from Servo into the main engine. It's not outlandish to assume that the marginal benefit of working on Servo was lower, compared to working on features on the main browser.
If you really want to go that route, you could make an argument that maybe Mozilla is handicapping Firefox's bookmark feature to get people to subscribe to Pocket... but people in this thread who are using Pocket also complain it doesn't solve their problems. What's the angle there? Pocket doesn't want paying customers?
However Apple has no such agenda and yet Safari has probably the worst bookmark/history management of them all. So it seems to be a question of product management priorities really.
Firefox allows to search your bookmarks by prepending * (an asterisk) to the input of the adress bar. They have also added a button for that a while ago. It's next to the search engine buttons at the bottom of the results panel. These buttons also show the shortcut symbols in their hover-text.
The search functionality is still very limited, though. I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines, I remember mentions of the thing the article is telling about.
Local bookmarks need an offline cache that at least contains the text content and headings of the URL. Otherwise, the search will stay useless because nobody can organize them manually without making (human) mistakes after a while.
Ironically, Chromium's omnibar search worked by searching through headlines for a while; but meanwhile it's broken again, and it never worked for bookmarks and only for history entries.
> I don't remember URLs with /some/post/id/123.html. I remember headlines
When I open a new window[1] in Firefox and start typing in the address bar, I get matches based on the page title not just on the url.
For example, I open a new window and type "brow" and the matches I get include "I closed a lot of browser tabs | Hacker News" (see image[2].)
So I rarely if ever use bookmarks, I can almost always find what I'm looking for by typing in the url bar, or if that fails by searching in history.
1: Are you seated? Good. I don't use tabs, I just open new windows with ctrl-n and use alt-tab & ctrl-w to navigate. I have middle-click set to open in a new window. I use customise to put the "open new window" icon onto my buttons, next to the address bar. I would happily use a version of firefox with no tabs, they add nothing to my life.
I went the nuclear option in Firefox and disabled search suggestions and history from my omni bar. The only thing that shows up when I type now are my bookmarks, which purposefully only include stuff like personal finance, gmail, and project documentation links.
The omni-bar reinforcing past browsing habits that were formed out of addiction by putting them in the top of the suggestion list is a dark pattern for me.
2. Bookmarks aren't a constant reminder in my field of vision that they exist.
3. It turns the "too many tabs problem" into "too many bookmarks".
Once in a while I "unload" my tabs by bookmarking them into a separate folder. I close the tabs and because there's no visual reminder anymore I forget they exist. Eventually I build to to another few hundred tabs and do it again.
Now I'm dealing with a couple of thousand bookmarks. I once deleted my old bookmarks. A couple of years later I went looking for a specific one. I knew exactly where the bookmark should've been, but I had deleted it.
Edit: all of this is to say that I'm not sure whether this has a technological problem. Maybe if the UX of bookmarks was really good.
100% agree. Bookmarks are cumbersome to make, hard to search, and just generally kind of annoying to work with. They kind of integrate into searching on the URL bar, but not very well. Many of them have tagging support, but the system feels like an afterthought.
And I'll add onto that, the way browser history works is also kind of annoying. I don't really trust that I'll be able to re-find a page I visited at a particular point in time. Visiting the same page twice doesn't create multiple history entries, it's hard to search by date. It feels really unreliable to use as a log.
There's a lot of room for innovation here, we're only just now starting to see browsers merge in tab grouping and containers, which I could have sworn Opera already supported ~10-15 years ago. I don't feel like we've spent enough time actually thinking about what different types of workflows people have for browsing the web and about how bookmarks/history/tabs could be adjusted to make those workflows easier.
It would take too long to list out all of the experiments that would be worth running (bookmarking screenshots or assets on a page, having bookmark "containers" for search, automatically categorizing bookmarks based on the domain or keywords inside the page, offline bookmarks that store the current state/DOM of the page, not just the URL, etc, etc). I think Edge was playing around with marking up pages using a stylus, but I don't know if that's still a thing now that they're based off of Chrome. And web annotations have been standardized for ages now. Still not integrated into any browser UIs that I'm aware of.
In my opinion bookmarks are one of the most underdeveloped parts of the modern browser, closely followed by history, and then by tabs themselves.
This literally was the primary reason to build my peer to peer browser that has a persistent cache which can be shared with other (local) peers.
I think the cache needs to be persistent and offline ready, ignoring ETags and other stupid headers. Otherwise it's a useless cache that is not controlled by the user.
1. Bookmarks fail for medium term usage. There's some research material for a doc or PR I'm actively working on - Why bookmark, catalogue and eventually prune if I'm not going to need it past tomorrow?
2. Bookmarks don't keep page state. As more apps go the PWA route, not all of them have URIs that lead to your preferred state. Even just stuff like expanding/hide comment threads is a start, not to mention things like NPR which redirect me to the homepage if it's been too long since I last did the CMP dance.
Bookmarks are for medium-long term storage. If theres something you don't need right now but might need later on in the week, are you really going to put it in with all your other junk?
Of course you could argue that better organisation and regular cleaning of your bookmarks is needed, but at that point it becomes a job in of itself.
I'm also not sure bookmarks are something you learn to use. If you've ever used any file system before, you've pretty much got the hang of it, its not a terribly difficult concept to grasp. Maybe a refusal to make use of bookmarks, I'd disagree thats the solution but it certainly makes more sense
Yeh they have this feature built into chrome. I liked it, in fact I liked it so much that I kept using it, and once again it became an unmanagable mess that I would avoid for things that are actually want to read later. Over time, this would become for things I kind of want to read later. At this point, I don't even remember the last time I used it.
Tabs work because whenever you are using the browser, they're always in front of you. If you have too many and you know you won't go back and read the next thing thats important to you, you just go through and trim the old ones down (which, as a side note, is much easier than deleting bookmarks).
Is it a discipline problem? Absolutely, but for so many people, myself included, tab discipline is not particularly high on the endless todo list.
As someone with 100+ tabs open as well, I'm not sure that all really holds up. I am actually in the process of moving towards bookmarks with my browsing habits and having FFs sidebar alwas open and just there helps a lot with the "always in front of you" aspect - especially considering that chrome only shows you the first X tabs and completely hides the rest while FF needs you to scroll to see them all. Plus folders or keywords in the bookmarks title help a lot with managing different projects or trains of thought.
Pruning is also somewhat faster and simpler because the tabs don't need to reload first (assuming you are using an extension like supsender or auto discard like i do) you just have the favicon and the whole title in your list and can prune fast with just the arrow keys and "delete".
As someone that's been down this rabbit hole a few times, I'm hopeful for your success but I have my doubts. Mainly down to 2 reasons:
1. The bookmarks pane makes obfuscation too easy. Most of us who fall into this trap do so because of the collectors fallacy. Tabs force us to choose between keeping everything we see versus seeing what we need to see. Bookmarks can be infinitely filed away into neat folders which hide the complexity, so instead of deleting you tend to file something away. The immediate effect is the same as closing a tab, you can see more clearly what you want to see, but long term your bookmark system becomes unmanagable, and slowly your tab count begins to increase again, as your brain says "no seriously I want to read this later, dont put it in there with the rest of the fluff".
I know this because even after I gave up on bookmarks it continued to haunt me, after chrome introduced tab groups. They have the same effect, they hide the complexity behind folders that after a while are so clogged up that they're useless, and you go back to old patterns.
2. The reason why tabs work effectively as a kind of todo list is because tabs are how you navigate the browser anyway. Though bookmarks have been included feature of browsers for a very long time, their not required. What I'm trying to say is, you obviously wont be replacing the entire concept of tabs with bookmarks, you still need to use tabs, even if (and I'd say this is a massive if) you only ever have 1 tab open. Which then means you'll be managing 2 systems for multitasking, one of which is significantly easier than the other.
As for pruning being faster with bookmarks, I'd disagree. I do use a suspender, but I usually dont even need to click the tab (if I do, I have it set so going to the tab doesn't auto-unsuspend it, it shows me the title and the suspension screen). I just see the favicon and the first 5-10 letters and can take a good enough guess what it is, and then middle click it from the tab Im currently on and its gone. I never have 100+ tabs open on one window, I tend to split them out (currenly I have 3 windows, each with a varying number of tabs, generally for context switching).
But, maybe things will end better for you, and I genuinely hope they do, but for me, its become a part of my life I've decided not to optimise and instead just embrace the chaos if it feels right :)
The solution for me is to use the great suspender (pre kerfuffle version) which makes tabs act kind of like temporary bookmarks, but you're right in that something better is needed.
I guess the problem is that a lot of people, myself included, use tabs as a kind of todo list of things to look at (whether thats effective or not is another point), whereas bookmarks hide themselves out of sight and out of mind
The Great Suspender was sold to an unknown party which made some less than trustworthy changes, forcing google to eventually take it down for containing malware.
Bookmarks are downplayed because search is browsers' main source of revenues.
I'd personally accept a bit of ads in the bookmark manager (maybe in a section for suggestions based on bookmarks) in exchange for bookmarks to be better integrated and supported.
Interesting, been annoyed about this for years. I'm bookmarking things both in Chrome and on the Samsung internet mobile browser and neither prioritizes my bookmarks when I start typing something in the search bar. It actually seems completely random, sometimes a bookmark shows up, sometimes it shows 5 rows down, often not at all. Weird, bookmarking a site should count as a pretty strong a signal that I might want to see that page again...
You hit the nail. Yes bookmarking is broke. Most bookmarking services act as dumb buckets of information. Like an endless abyss of links that I'll never return to.
That's why I made https://closetab.email - This one delivers a digest of links from my bookmarks straight to my inbox, every monday. This way I end up consuming them eventually and also close tabs a bit more confidently, knowing I'll come back to it later.
Chrome actually does have that feature, but maybe it differs a bit from how Firefox implements it. It gives you a "switch to this tab" option in the omnibox if your input matches the title or URL of an open tab.
One of the best extensions is the tree-style-tabs extensions. It puts your tabs on the left/right of your window organised in a tree, makes finding tabs much faster than having tabs at the top (and with modern wide-screen monitors also optimises screen real-estate)
My too many tabs problem is more than a bookmarking issue.
- It’s partly ADHD: I lose track of tabs I no longer care about
- It’s partly about state: I have actively performed some unsaved work that wouldn’t be preserved by a bookmark
- It’s partly because I use the same computer for work and personal use: this amplifies both of the other problems, and I haven’t found a good profile management solution to mitigate them
I mean by all means an improved bookmark solution could help, and could potentially help to improve these other issues.
But my current solution is to just treat all tabs as ephemeral, and just close them all periodically. I very seldom bookmark anything, I generally use browsing history for that use case instead
As others have mentioned, it might be in the interest of browser vendors to get you to perform more web searches.
I don't know what browser you use, but personally I feel Firefox at least does a slightly better job than the competition at highlighting your bookmarks when you start typing in the search bar. Not sure if that is objectively true of course.
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...
In the meantime, I've used various browser extensions to save and restore open tabs.
Compared to virtual desktops, this allows you to close down apps (consume less resources) as well as maintain multiple working context-specific application states.
> Isn't this tab fatigue of every user not more a hint that bookmarking is broken?
In some ways, I agree. My own solution was to develop reading lists storage (https://github.com/domovikapp/domovik-server/), i.e. an intermediate storage space between “saved for the years to come” of the bookmarks and the “in my face” pinned tabs. They are then displayed on my new tab page, so I can remember to read them whenever I open a new page.
xBrowserSync has completely replaced all bookmark managers for me. No more hunting through extensive folder trees (what a mess that was!). When adding bookmarks, I just manually add a couple tags and be done with it. With xBS, bookmarks are accessed mainly through a simple tag/keyword search.
Bonus: I'm no longer tethered to any particular browser's sync ecosystem. BitWarden has my passwords and xBrowserSync has my bookmarks. I can browser hop on all my devices!
that's the inspiration for my browser extension, Yet Another Speed Dial. it works as the new tab page but basically i use it as a visual bookmark manager. i find it way easier to scan my bookmarks as thumbnails to find what i want. it's open source and supports all the major browsers, check it out!
I was a long time user of Xmarks for online bookmark syncing (cross platform and browser). I was sorely hurt when it was discontinued. I moved over to EverHelper.
These days I don't try to sync bookmarks to browsers, they inevitably get corrupted or lost somewhere shomehow. I just use the EverHelper website as my bookmark manager.
I'd love to find a open source thing I can host myself to fully own my bookmarks too so if anyone knows of that let me know.
I presume they'd be injected by the browser, but it also seems trivial for Google to display your bookmarks in search results if you sync them with your Google account.
also;
From any bookmarked page, I want to be able to delete the bookmark, without having to go into bookmark manager, figure out which folder it's in and delete it.
When I've read the page, I don't need the bookmark anymore.
This is the #1 reason why I have > 60,000 bookmarks. I'd bet that 99% of them are obsolete, or I eventually read them. But it's kind of a monumental task to actually curate them.
I try to only bookmark things that are likely to remain relevant to me long term to some degree, and/or would be a pity to lose a path to for some reason.
I use a graph database for URLs. Either Semantic Synchrony or org-roam. That lets me keep any URL in as many categories as I'd like, and neat them however I want, or even create cycles if need be.
Maybe. For some reason many people just don't use bookmarks at all. The question is why don't they use them. Have they tried but found it broken? Or have they never tried?
I don't use bookmarks. I rely on history. If I want to find something, I'll type relevant keywords and the page shows up. It works without using bookmarks. I usually memorize parts of urls or title without effort, if I didn't have that I guess I would need bookmarks.
I think bookmarks would be good for building lists. Like recipes. But I'm not organized well enough to do this.
I don't use them because I have to know which pages are important enough to bookmark when I come across them first, rather than when I need them later.
Usually I rely on finding something in my history. If I need to get around to it at some point, I'll keep the tab open and I'll get around to it when (if ever) I'm closing a bunch of tabs in a row, which takes relatively little effort. If I bookmark it, it'll just sit there and I'll never think of it again.
It's built-in, you can add tags when you create a bookmark in firefox and yep, that tab grouping feature would be nice, Chrome has tab groups and you can name so it gets close.
This is a type of FOMO. You start collecting Absolutely Essential Reading in tabs, stuff that you'll for sure read later, no joke, seriously.
You never will.
But you can't close the tab or you can't find the content again and bookmarking is mostly useless if you use multiple computers and browsers daily.
I got over my tab-itis with Pinboard[0]. If stuff seems to sit in my tabs for too long, I can send the link easily to Pinboard, slap on a few tags if it's an unique one or grab a few of the suggested ones if it's a common bookmark.
With the Archiving feature it'll even mirror the content for me so it doesn't get lost in the tides of time.
I'll never look at most of the stuff I pin, but my mind is at ease because the precious stuff is stored =)
One way to combat this FOMO is to remember that the subset of web pages you'll never read that also just happen to have caught your attention is dwarfed by the billions of web sites you don't know about and won't ever read. There's no particular reason to privilege this former set in your mind based solely on the randomness of having noticed the items within it. They're just more pages in the set of billions of pages that you won't ever read.
The water that splashes into your boat is the same as the rest of the water in the ocean.
Chiming in to say this was one of my checks notes currently 508 tabs that I saved to read later which I did eventually come back to read and engage in so tab hoarding isn't entirely always fruitless.
I am very much the opposite! I close my entire browser at least once per day - every tab closed. I have about 10 sites in my bookmarks toolbar - which are basically the key sites I use for work, and that's it.
If I have too many tabs open, I lose context.
Ditto with terminals - they ALL get shut down multiple times per day. Reset to zero, spin up state, do task, reset back to zero.
I treat it like a commercial kitchen - you clean the whole place and then you cook the session's meals, and then you clean it all down again.
My most ranty and deservedly downvoted HN comment was expressing this same opinion. The kitchen cleaning analogy is great. What's amazing to me is clean-up takes less than a second. I view all my left over tabs like food scraps, and sweep them off the counter in a single click.
Same. I usually open our company's MatterMost in the first tab when I start (the only one I leave open all day), and will clear out anything else if I'm done with some task that required them.
If I want to read something later I'll find it with DuckDuckGo or just the browser history. If I use it often the address bar will prioritize it so even just the first letter of the URL will show it at the top of the list. For sites that I search frequently I use DuckDuckGo's bangs directly in the address bar: https://duckduckgo.com/bang.
One hundred and fifty tabs‽ Pff, that’s nothing. I currently have 400 — after closing ~4000. My problem is that I regularly check HN (and occasionally other sites as well), and I often end up opening ~20 tabs a day from that alone. Of course, I never get around to reading them, and my tabs simply grow and grow.
What eventually worked for me was getting a reference manager (I use Zotero). Every day I try to close a bunch of tabs by going through them and moving them to my reference manager. That way, I still have them listed just in case I want to go back to them later, but they don’t clutter up my browser any more. The most interesting side-effect of this has been that I’ve accumulated resources on a bunch of topics: if I decide one day that I want to learn CSS or graphics programming or electrical engineering or something, I can just go to my reference manager and find a bunch of high-quality resources waiting for me.
(OK, I tell a slight lie: 4000 tabs is too much to categorise one by one, so about half of them ended up just being copied to a text file, one URL to a line. But rest assured, I will eventually add them all to my reference manager, though I suspect it will take automated keyword extraction or something like that.)
I long for a browser optimized for research. Tab management would be an essential part of what I have in mind.
It would offer a management view, where each window is a column with a list of all open tabs. I can select the tabs I want, move them around, group them into a new window, and (this is the key) save them.
This would prompt me for a title, and would produce an ordinary Markdown text file with the title as an h1 header, each tab title as an h2 header, and the body of each section as just the repeated title with the link as the anchor.
I should be able to add any text I want, including more links in the appropriate format. And I can re-launch the tabs: the browser goes through the h2 headers and launches the first link it sees.
If I reorganize the tabs, the sections move around, and adding more tabs makes more sections, while leaving any textual metadata I have provided alone.
I could email one of these to someone, and they could open it as well.
It would ship with an in-browser Markdown text editor, such that the ordinary user would never have to leave the browser. But of course, being Just Plain Text, it would also be possible to edit it in one's editor of choice.
This would, and I exaggerate only slightly, change my life.
It's nowhere near this advanced, but in Firefox you can shift-click tabs to select multiple, and then with Right-click you can choose "Bookmark Tabs", and it'll save them as a folder.
You can then right click on the folder in your bookmarks and choose "Open all Bookmarks" (which will use the current window).
I think Chrome has similar capability, but I haven't played around with it.
An annotated document of bookmarks would be next-level, though.
My solution is simple: When I feel like I have a lot of tabs [0], I close all of them. What happens when I close a tab I wanted open? I use browser history.
Browser history is one of those things that I feel most people don’t use enough. It’s easy to search, it contains everything you visited, and (for the macOS/iOS ecosystem at least) is synced across devices. A quick cmd-Y and search makes for a very efficient user experience for me.
[0] A “lot” is typically 10-20. I close all of my tabs probably 5-10 times during a typical work day.
It took me a very long time to learn this. I always had multiple hundred of tabs open, until the day I decided to stop caring about it and let them all go. I almost never actually used old open tabs, just refused to close them, by fear of missing something. That’s in fact not true, I now close all of them at the end of the day and start fresh every morning. Anything I have to keep from one day to the other is written down in my daily notes, but it’s really a small amount. Or I just use the history, as you said.
People say it’s a bookmarking issue, I personally think it’s driven by fear of missing out, which isn’t really something solved by tools.
how does one learn this power and enlightenment? I easily have over a thousand tabs open across several browsers. Sometimes I go back to review them and am gladly surprised. Or sometimes I don't remember why I was looking at a thing, but it's still interesting.
I'm still in the process of letting go of my attachment to tabs, but I can share with you some things that have worked for me:
- I've realized that, even though I have a lot of interesting tabs/bookmarks, most of them won't tangibly improve my life immediately.
- I've created a special tag in Firefox that I use to mark bookmarks that I want to specifically come back to read later, called "to-read" - this helps my brain rest easy because it knows that it's saved somewhere.
- Attachment to tabs is an emotional problem - the Fear Of Missing Out. I'm learning to treat this FOMO the same as my social FOMO - "Will I miss this tab after it's bookmarked and closed?" is somewhat similar to "Do I need to go to every single social event?" - no.
- I sort my bookmarks into a deep hierarchy of folders and review them occasionally - this tells my brain that I will eventually come back to a bookmarked site, which makes it much easier to close the tab.
Note for the would-be-users of this approach: Chrome does not save your history infinitely, it only saves the last 90 days. I use an extension called Tabs Outliner to get around this problem.
Firefox, on the other hand, will save history until your storage runs out!
This resonates with me. I also learnt the hard way to simply close all the tabs and then re-assess history if I really want to access the tab. On that note: sometimes I also just use OneTab [0] if my tabs are important but are hogging the system's performance.
Here's something I'd love to have. Let's you are reading hacker news. Clicking a link gives you two options: open in a new tab, or open, replacing the current tab. Opening in a new tab works, but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?"). Replacing the current tab removes the context. When you return to the front page, it may have changed, and you may not remember where you left of.
So why can't I have the front page on the left of the window, and anything I click on on the right (replacing whatever is already there)? The front page would remain in place, so I'm not losing my context. I can click on something, quickly determine if it is worth reading in depth, and go on to the next thing if it's not. I would never have a thousand tabs open; just the one would be enough.
Why isn't this a thing in browsers? It would make so many websites so much easier to deal with...
> but leaves you with a lot of tabs open that are cognitively hard to deal with ("why did I think this would be interesting?")
Get "Tree Style Tabs". All the tabs are in hierarchy. Anything opened via "Open in new tab" becomes a child tab. This way, the "train of thought" is always preserved.
Yes, but then you end up with fifty tabs open, meaning you'll doomscroll for the rest of the day. I very much prefer to see it the way I described it, with the main page on the left and the content on the right. My screen is plenty wide enough to make that possible.
Doomscroll usually isn't an issue. Tree Style Tabs collapses a tree you're not in by default. So by default you only see the top level tabs, and your current branch is expanded. If your screen is 1080p or higher, you can easily see ~20+ tabs in single view.
The trick is to not switch tabs by mouse. Firefox searches through open tabs with '%' prefix. So I don't have to doomscroll ro find my tab. And the tab that I'm currently viewing has full context history open, instead of just homepage as per your suggestion. Our workflows could be different, but two levels of context is bit limiting. Right now, I have 3 trees with 3 layers of hierarchi and one tree with 4 levels. Occasionally I've reached 5 or 6 levels, but those are very short lived and cleaned up immediately.
The biggest advantage this setup provides me is that I can offload the tab (and by proxy work) state onto my machine instead of holding it in my brain. This comes handy when working on multiple things simultaneously, because I can focus on task in front of me, and when I switch to different task the browser retrieves and presents its state from where I left it.
I do this my having two windows open side-by-side (a 32” 4K monitor and a tiling window manager make this easy) and just drag a link from the left browser window over to the right. Not as nice as simply clicking, but usable.
If you’re willing to change browsers if necessary, Firefox has a Side View [0] extension that offers some functionality, though it’s just an “experiment” that hasn’t been updated in years.
I checked out sideview, but if you click a link in the sideview pane it just changes the page in the side view. I want it to change the webpage in the right-hand part of the window.
On iOS you've got link previews on long press which might be similar to what your looking for. There's probably a way to do it on osx as well.
That wouldn't solve my problem though, for me tabs are a way to queue other paths to take in a way of reading that's naturally branching. For example, reading an article in Wikipedia might lead to 3-4 more I want to check out, but the preview system doesn't work because visiting each of those will probably give me 3-4 branches more. I'm basically doing recursive reading over a potentially infinite-depth structure, so there is no guarantee that I'll ever resurface to the upper node.
No offense, but that's something entirely different. I'm looking for a way to utilize my 27" monitor to see an entire article without falling into the doomscroll trap, not a tiny popup containing a lousy summary on an even tinier screen.
So like a left and right pane? That would be extremely useful, especially for search engine results, you could click on results in the left pane and quickly view them in succession in the right side pane.
Interesting choice to use some sort of proprietary OS scripting language instead of just writing a standard WebExtension, I thought. Presumably chrome.tabs.query would have returned all tabs and a native manifest would've allowed comms with the outside world to build a HTTP server. Still, I suppose the approach taken by the author worked at the end of the day - just not very portable.
Yeah I think the web extension approach is the best one. Shame they ruled it out. Extension background scripts can push data wherever you want. You can sideload the extension and talk to localhost ports or anyone on the internet. Use ajax or native events to talk to a local process. There's even an event system that tells you when tabs are opened, closed, activated, deactivated, etc.
Thanks, I'll have a look at writing a web extension, sometime.
It sounds like they might not be such a pain, after all.
Here, I just forged forward with what I already knew I could get done while goofing off on the weekend.
... which would be a plain text listing of all the URLs of all the tabs you have open ?
You could just copy and paste it to a file or whatever. No fancy bookmarking scheme needed.
Instead, we need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
Go search for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing.
EDIT: No, I don't want to install an extension to do this.
Share to Dropbox effectively has this behaviour and works pretty well for me from mobile. I only access a fraction of the links but it's fast easy and not reliant on browsers or plugins.
I'm occasionally tempted to modify Syncthing to have the same behaviour.
On desktop I mostly don't bookmark. The site is saved to pdf/screenshot png of the relevant content.
I get not wanting to install a third party extension just for this, but it would be a simple weekend project to write one to do this yourself (and install it locally to avoid the extension store shitshow)
rsync.net will pay USD $500 for about:tabs to exist in mainline firefox with no extension required.
It couldn't be simpler - you type about:tabs into the URL bar and you get a non-html plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs you have open. Maybe a line break inbetween browser windows so you can tell tabs from one window apart from tabs in another ?
Unless Mozilla has already approved the concept the bounty is unlikely to get claimed. $500 isn't worth trying to get it merged let alone the risk they just flat so no the the page.
I think I've got Firefox up to 3500, indeed I mentioned this when I went to a meetup hosted by Mozilla, and they said that few people use more than 14.
I think some of the tab tools start to make it unstable, but the root issue is that it'd be good to clear down browser tabs often.
I just don’t understand how anyone could have less than 14 tabs open at any time. Just using a search engine requires at least 4 at a time, and I’ve often got four or five searches going at any time. And then there’s at least a half dozen communication tabs.
Even when I declare browser bankruptcy and close whole windows dedicated to some topic, I don’t think I can get my total count below 14.
I mean, I get that my workflow is unique, but I’m apparently truly out of touch with typical browser usage.
I regularly have only one or two at once. When I am done with a tab, I close it - this makes it very simple. Sure I might temporarily open 10 at once when searching, but many will be culled within the first 10-20 seconds of reading the page as either the info I need is not there, or I've found what I need so can close the rest.
Occasionally when cross-referencing stuff I will go up to perhaps 5 or even 10 in extreme circumstances, but then - as before - I close the tab when I am done.
For stuff I want to come back to "later" I just use a bookmark instead of just leaving it open.
At work I tend to leave email chat and calendar open all day, but that is only an extra 3 tabs.
In my experience - both at work and at home - it is better to concentrate on only a small number of things at once and try to work them through to completion (or as far as you can get) so you can just drop it from your head when you are done and not need to dedicate and brain energy on juggling all these differen "in-flight" tasks. I find it easier to concentrate and way more productive to finish a task and then move on, rather than context-switching every 2 minutes and wasting endless time hunting for "that tab with that thing I need" on it.
I have this approach too. When working, I might have up to 20 tabs open at a given time, but most of them are just there passively for things like monitoring and calendars.
Some tips for people who are struggling with their tab count:
* Always close all tabs at the end of the day.
* Use different browser profiles for different types of task (eg work admin/emails/calendars/trello vs work-related documentation/search vs monitoring vs nonwork.)
* If you notice you have enough tabs open that the browser needs to shrink or hide them, cycle through and cull a bunch. If needed, you can always find them again later, either just by searching for them or using your browser history.
All non-pinned tabs are temporary. I may get to over 20 sometimes, but I always aim to deal with them and get back to 3 or so. Usually I do it within the day, sometimes I have some unfinished long articles or something that stay open a few days.
I used to have hundreds of tabs like some people. At some point I started to get very bothered by having too many tabs. I don't remember what happened, but I always keep a low count now. I make heavy use of bookmarks and qutebrowser's quickmarks, and have pretty good luck pulling stuff from my history as well. Some tabs just get bookmarked and immediately closed, like if I find an interesting project on github but have no plans to do anything related to it.
I have 18 open right now, and that's a lot for me. That's where I start looking for something to close. None are search tabs, and usually I don't have any. Looking at them now, 9 are only open due to some definite hoarder mentality. Things I wish I would do, that I'm not going to do. For example, 2 are colleges that I was hoping I might apply to 6 months ago, that I know I'm never going to. But oh no, if I close the tabs it's like the decision is final. Well fuck this noise, I'm closing them all now. Done.
Everyone else is saying bookmarks are their solution to exploding tabs, but I've never used bookmarks. I have six on the bar that are just shortcuts to frequently visited sites. I dunno, I guess I just never find pages that are so unique that I can't google them if I need them later. I'm certainly never going to go back to anything that I didn't have an immediate need for the first time. I might intend to, but I know better.
I can definitely say there is a selection bias at play here. Tab management as it is in major browsers by default sucks. At more than half dozen tabs, you start losing tab titles, basically playing "Where is waldo". When you go beyond a dozen tabs you can barely see the favicon. Any more and it becomes a game of "Concentration"[0]. When the experience is so horrible, no wonder people don't use more than 14 tabs at once. Give people vertical tabs with nested hierarchy and watch how quickly people go about operating 100+ tabs without losing sweat.
I had gotten up to 1000 a few times. Just never getting back to things to close them, mostly.
It turned have to have huge performance impact, so I don't do it anymore. I got out of the habit a few years ago. I think since then, browser went to lazy loading of tabs on restart.
If you think your system is running slow, cut the number of tabs to under 100, and try again. You may see a huge jump in performance.
The one thing that helped me break the habit of not closing tabs was just installing a tab counter extension. Now, if I see it creeping up towards 100, I know it's time to clean house.
When you have this many tabs, do you actively manage them or even have any idea what they contain. How do you find the information you need amongst 3000+ tabs. Isn't it annoying to have to shuffle through lots of windows with lots of tabs? I start to lose track after a dozen or so.
Hacker News facilitates me opening scores of tabs a day, that and not being able to find the tab I need means duplicating it; although the browser now serves me up with the original one.
I tend to open a new window for a new line of work, so the tabs are over 40 or so windows.
The limit used to be the bowser crashing, or me forgetting to reopen history and so relinquishing the interesting things.
My point is that I’d greatly appreciate keeping this down.
I’m currently down to 800 or so, I think the tab history tool crashes Firefox, without it it could go a lot higher.
once it gets to the thousands it breaks down, but in my experience spatial memory + pattern matching on favicons works surprisingly well to navigate a large number of tabs.
The new Chrome tab group is not great, but it does help. One group for things that are being processed (handle asap), one group for "stuff to check", one for each project I'm working on and one for entertainment. All with short names and their own color, so it takes up a minimum of space.
The remaining space is for temporary tabs. Larger temporary side quests get their own window and will be either closed or moved into a new group before closing the browser.
It's still not as good as Firefox's nested Tree Style Tab once was (and might be again?) but I'm kind of locked into Chrome at this point.
Bookmarks only work for tools and resources I need on a regular basis, and even then it's usually easier to just google them when they are needed. Who has the time to actually study all those bookmarks saved for later?
Maybe some kind of organizational bookmark extension, that would help you go through it all, could help with this.
If it's where your passwords and addons live, switching takes effort. Besides, what is the big advantage of Firefox? Chrome has 65% of the worldwide market share. Firefox does not even have 4 [1]. About half of the stuff I build will literally only ever run in Chrome anyway.
OK, you're one of those noble devs working hard to further entrench the Blink/WebKit monopoly situation. I'm sure its practical right now, but try not to be too short sighted. Sorry for the bitterness, but this infuriates me.
Note: the Chrome-only stuff I mentioned runs in a sandbox environment and will not make any difference to the global market. Public projects will work just fine in FF.
But of all the things I am actively fighting for, like decreasing the emission of greenhouse gases, preserving nature and the furthering of various struggling causes that will truly make a difference, I just can't be bothered to take on this fight as well.
Good for you that you can afford to be furious about something like browser market share. For me that's nowhere near the top of my list. Maybe it will move up some day, but at this time I don't feel the need to raise a banner for it.
What I want is a History functionality that allows me to better search through visited pages. Firefox does this, but they only show the page title, which is often not sufficiently descriptive. They should show search results like DDG/Google shows them.
With a better search, I wouldn't feel the need to keep so many tabs open.
That’s what was “to be native” in Cliqz. They were indexing url, title and I’m not sure about content was in plan or implemented - forgot my trials. But they approached exactly that issue in their browser (Firefox fork). There was something like internal index which was pre-fetched and updated next to user data which were added while using. All that was 1 search, 2nd was going to internet. That was really cool idea.
Bookmarks are notes. The problem is there is no proper contexting anymore.
Everything is mixed up. Personal, work, development, everything scattered around in applications, files.
A good solution is to have multiple machines with something like synergy.
I'd still love a multi-user environment (multi-context actually), with separate file systems, application instances etc.
Ultimately, how you use tabs is very related to how your thought process operates.
Some people need to have their tabs always visible as an aid for thought, so they can quickly see all the little tasks that are needed for the goal that they are trying to fulfil. In some cases, tabs that go away from view will literally go away from the user’s mind as well.
Web browsers need to get a lot better at supporting different thinking styles. After all, it is easier to change how our software operates that how people’s brains work.
I open almost all links in new tabs because the sites became too large.
Simple pressing "Back" in the browser takes too much time, but I can quickly switch to the previous tab.
I use firefox. I open ridiculous amount of tabs. I have had atleast 600+ that I have counted. There is a good chance I have exceeded 1000 more than once, maybe often.
One of the reasons is I keep tabs from previous sessions open through "Recover tabs".
I found that having too many tabs also affects my ability to concentrate, as I get distracted often.
To keep the tab count low, I use Two extensions together: Open Tab Count Resurrected (gives me the count of tabs in current window and across windows, current count: 44/147)
Lean Tab Limiter: Limits the number of tabs you can open.
This gives me the wakeup call I need when I exceed the number of tabs I have set.
On Firefox for a lots of tabs management solution I recommend Simple Tab Groups [0]. It is how built-in tab groups should have always worked instead of the manual panorama. It does periodical backups, that I have never needed to use and it even integrates with tab containers.
I have a strong tendency for things to disappear if they are kept around for too long. This happens in real life too. When my girlfriend and I moved house last year we started describing things as "gone" because we kept finding that whole boxes or pieces of furniture became completely invisible to us if they had been in one place too long. The same thing happens with browser tabs. Sometimes I'll leave one open "for later" and then I'll realise sometimes a week later that the tab is still open. I wonder, do these loads of tabs people have the same problem as me, or can they see the tabs and "later" really just hasn't arrived yet?
In emacs I have a completely different approach to "tabs". I actually don't have visible tabs at all and "midnight-mode" automatically garbage collects unused buffers in the middle of the night. That way I only ever have stuff open that I am actually using. And, think about it, you only need to know what "tabs" are available at the moment you are switching, why are they visible at all other times? I wonder if such an approach could work for web browsers too?
I don't get why people litter their browser with tabs. I pretty sure I never used more than 30 at the same time. I just close them if I don't need them anymore. At the latest when I can't read the titles anymore the garbage collection runs. If I might still need it I just bookmark the page. (It helps to sort your bookmarks and have proper syncing)
One problem for me is opening more interesting links than I have time to get to. Bookmarks don't really solve the core problem of not properly managing my time. When I used to use RSS, I would have many feeds racking up dozens of unread and potentially interesting posts as a sort of todo list which I never got around to clearing. So I decided to forget about RSS and try not to worry about catching every single item out there.
I normally just exit the browser if I reach 20 tabs. Mentally I can’t/won’t deal with it and just declare tab bankrupcy and exists everything. Browsers like Safari have excellent time based history, should I need a page within the next few days.
On problem with this method is that is has made me hate webapps, including PWAs, as it they incompatible with the browser being closed down a few times a day.
Because I'll be never sure when I need this tab next time. I can't use bookmarks because bookmarks don't record the exact context (the history leading to that tab and neighbor tabs).
I now can't decide whether to leave this tab open as a reminder for me to implement open tabs vs time graph. Rather than run a server on my machine, I'd prefer a tiny extension that sent an updated count to a service every time I open or close a tab. The easiest service to use would probably be a google sheet.
Cool extension, thanks! I added it to Brave, to only realize that Brave has something similar built-in. It looks like a "play" button in upper right corner, and can be activated by "CTRL-SHIFT-A", lets you search through tabs and switch to one quickly.
I was wondering what that "play" button was for about a month, lol. Unfortunate choice of icon on their part, IMO.
What is the value in keeping all this stuff around in tabs to look at later? If it is important, you will see it again and it is not necessary to put it on a todo list of tabs to read later. If it is not important it is just more busy work. I would also argue that reading all these random things on the internet does not build knowledge. We learn by doing or by repeating, not by reading something once. Isn’t keeping that many tabs around just an example of FOMO?
To be clear, I’m all for todo lists, but tabs are a terrible UI for having a todo list in. If you’re going to keep a todo list, use a proper todo software, and be mindful of what you put on the list.
Tabs, bookmarks and browser history are productivity nightmare; there is just no good way to organize all of it and search through it. Navigation is pain.
Imo the greatest problem of the modern internet is search; there is so much information and in particular unstructured information and no internet search engine even comes close to efficiently searching through all that trove of information.
Personal analytics and better internet search solutions should be the next big focus of web development in order to increase productivity. Metadata and semantic web dream should never be forsaken.
I've been looking for platform-independent bookmark keeper and like to selfhost things, so I've set up a wallabag instance [1] hosted behind my TLD. There's an Android app via F-Droid as well.
Can recommend this a lot. Using it to either save websites (wallabag downloads all HTML content) or catch up on longer articles during train rides etc.
+1 for Wallabag, which cut my open-tab problem in half. I found it a persnickety installation and eventually went with the Docker image, which was fast and painless.
There's a couple guys at work who are the hundred-tabs type and when I pair with them I notice their dev environment is much slower to build and run. I think it considerably reduces their output. Imagine another 15 seconds on your development loop that you do dozens of times a day.
In fact it probably reinforces the problem because I know when I have long rebuild times, I open a tab to read the news!
I discovered that many tabs for me are indicative of my own laziness and lack of discipline and an unhealthy tendency to multitask. Now I pay attention (not just about tabs but also about my desktop files, and the cleanness of my actual desk) and I am happier for it. Optimal number of tabs: < 5, with 1 being Youtube playing some ambient music, 1 being JIRA, one being Github.
I normally have 2–3 browser windows open with at most 5 tabs each. I find that the window → tab hierarchy works very well with my workflow and it allows me to close tabs aggressively when I don't need them without being complex like TreeStyleTabs.
For example, if I'm looking for reference on a particular function I open a new window, open tabs for a couple of relevant results, do some research, and when I'm done I just close the window with all the tabs in it.
I just don't understand people who have a million tabs open in a single window. You clearly don't remember what's on each tab, so it's just screen and mental real estate being used for nothing.
For a Mac, I found that Hyperswitch works really great for letting Command+tab choose the correct window instead of doing the unexplainable mess of OSX application and window switching.
Tree style tab for me. Makes it easy to keep hundreds of tabs open and organised. I generally have about 40 open on my laptop, and between 50 and 100 on my work PC (various documentation websites, applications, etc). Not a generational thing, I'm 50.
How much of this tab proliferation is a function of Google Docs?
I'll explain ...
I never understood why folks would have 100+ tabs. Then I joined a company which uses Google Workplace (Apps) for collaboration. Immediately, I had 2 dozen tabs open because those tabs represented files I was working on; where previously, those were discrete Excel, PowerPoint, Word documents - but where all now "tabs" open in my browser since I didn't use discrete document apps anymore due to Google Docs all being on the web.
The problem is that we are now using the browser for many disparate tasks: web apps, reading, entertainment, shopping/banking/etc. Maybe we need different browsers tailored to each use case? I do something similar using the Window Titler extension where each FF window is labeled for a certain type of task/information.
I don't think most had 20+ Excel, PowerPoint, and Word documents open at the same time so "Google Workspace is browser based" doesn't explain why most have 20 documents unclosed in Google Workspace it just explains why said documents were originally opened in a browser.
Huh? I always have >20 document windows open. Some for future reading, some for future editing and some that I forgot to close. I guess it depends on the kind of work you do. I think many office worker types are similar to me...
I'm not a tons of tabs open person. I am a multiple browser person. Right now I am writing this in firefox on my main window with this tab and the tab for my custom homepage.
I just opened Edge for work-related stuff.
On my secondary monitor I have chrome with my more entertainment-based stuff: twitch (currently multitwitch with two streams), a tab for the video stream of the radio show I listen to in the morning, twitter, and facebook
I built https://closetab.email specifically for this problem. I set a timer within which I'd like to read the tab, and immediately close it. The extension emails me a digest of all these tabs, once a week - until I either finish reading it or the timeout is reached.
Incidentally, since a lot of people hitting this page might not know him, and since he doesn't exactly blazon information about himself around the site, this is the blog of Ricardo Signes, whom I know as a major contributor to Perl (https://github.com/rjbs).
I find Firefox's bookmark UI to be incredibly slow and clunky, not to mention so many things get in my way, like this "Bookmarks Toolbar" I cannot remove.
So, I often find myself resorting to opening the SQLite database Firefox uses to track places and doing queries against that, looking for time ranges and key words in the title or URL.
Use notetaking software instead. Just as searchable, can add context. But also most web content is not worth bookmarking and will be link rotted in an eyeblink anyway. If you are serious about organizing your knowledge do not externalize it to the flighty whims of the web.
I had a co-worker that would have over 300 tabs open. Except, unlike some, in a single window, so the tabs barely had enough room to click on. Yet he could still find the tab he wanted, I think it was down to spatial awareness of what was where. It still boggles my mind.
Lots of discussion of tabs and bookmarks and how to solve them once and for all with a new ontological hierarchy or server or service.. I get that, we’re nerds, that’s what we do.
But if, like me, your tab clutter is more a problem of psychology: not being ready to close things because you might need them later (even though you won’t), plus a distinct lack of interest in spending hours trying to perfectly curate a museum of links, here’s a trick I picked up years ago that has continued to work reasonably well for me.
I have a bookmark folder named after the current year and month (e.g. “2021-08 Bookmarks”). I keep it in my favorites/bookmarks bar. As I realize my tabs are starting to build up again, I fairly ruthlessly dump them all into the current month’s folder (it’s a pretty quick process of Cmd-D, Enter, Cmd-W). I don’t spend time trying to name them, organize them, or think about whether they deserve pride of place. I just put them there and close the tab, knowing I haven’t thrown any information away, and should I choose to get back to it, I at least have it somewhere. This is all my brain needs to let go of the need to have the tab open. This isn’t a chore I need to do every day (that would make me stop doing it), it’s an escape hatch I can use when I start to feel like my browser is a mess.
When I notice it’s a new month, I put the old one into an “Archives” folder and make a new one. Practically this doesn’t do much, but it does keep it from feeling like one giant trash pile.
While I’m doing this, I’ll usually make a smaller collection or two for things that I do actively need at the moment. E.g. if I’m working on a project and have opened a dozen tabs to research how to do part of it, or components I might want to buy, I’ll put them into a sub-folder of my top-level “Projects” or “Shopping” folders. These are the only other things that live in the favorites bar.
The main motivation for this is, again, to allow me to feel ok closing the tab. It might seem today that the information I looked up about hot-wire anemometers is super valuable because I’m thinking about measuring the delta-P in my air conditioning ducts to figure out if I can buy higher MERV filters without compromising evaporator performance. And then next week when I’m no longer as interested in doing that, I still invested that time in finding those articles and Amazon links and might get back to it.. the reality is that if I still care to do this in a year I could easily look it up again, but it doesn’t feel that way. So save it in Projects > Air Filters and get back to Tab Zero.
For me the one-tab extension solved my tab addiction (I accumulated >7k over several years). It saves the tabs, so my fear of losing that data doesn't kick in. But I don't actually have to look at the closed ones and they don't consume resources.
500 is generous. Samsung's "Internet" browser has 50 tabs limit with the same behavior. However unlike Safari, it warns you that you've hit the limit after it had gone ahead and closed the oldest tab.
What do you use to visualize these tabs? Just the tab bar?
I also like to open a lot of tabs, but sometimes find it hard to manage them. I use Tree Style Tab, in a sidebar, wich collapsible groups. I like that a lot but am always wondering what others use.
My Firefox with it's hundreds of session tabs was taking over 23Gb of memory on my PC, which was making it difficult to run some other things - VMs, etc. My PC only had 32Gb RAM.
tab stash for firefox is the best solution I've found so far. i still end up with tab creep every now and again, but when it happens it's really quick to stash them into different groups, give it an optional name of needed, then when you open the that group of the later on, the stash is deleted.
the other thing i love about it is that is just uses plain bookmarks and folders for each stash, so i means that you can sync your bookmarks to mobile and still access them there. a few other extensions ive tried in the past store they bookmarks in a database, so you can only access on another device if you use the same extension
I love articles like this because they remind me how some people live - which reminds me to design with them in mind. Personally, I don't think I've ever had more than 6 tabs open in my life.
The browser extensions "Merge All Windows" and "OneTab" (available in firefox and chrome, not sure about other browsers) basically completely eliminate this issue
I use Firefox and I have too many tabs open. Tab Stash helped a lot though, great extension. Firefox container Tabs puts a color border on tabs and also helps with work stuff.
Max 8 tabs per window. If you need more, open another browser window.
If you 'lose' a tab you can always find it the way you found it in the first place. You should remember how you found things instead of remembering which tab they were in - this way you can reproduce the process and "find" the content on any other device.
Tabs are the better bookmarks imho. They can also be directly searched in the address bar, but are treated consistently like every other tab and stay more visible than items in some hidden list.
They're also just as persistent as bookmarks; last time I reinstalled my system I just copy-pasted the Firefox profile over and instantly had the exact same session back. Of course that's based on the assumption I don't switch the browser. But Firefox is the last relevant non-Chromium browser and I dislike Chromium and its derivatives for various reasons.
Do you use any particular workflows or extensions to manage a large number of tabs? I don't how a tab bar with 40+ tabs is useable, even if tabs persist through crashes and restarts.
The reason I have thousands of tabs open is that Firefox stopped losing tabs on crash/restart in recent years... a decade or more ago this would not be a "problem".
Not sure which way around you're suggesting, but at my first job out of university I had a colleague at the other end of his career; we each (without either influencing the other) had hundreds of tabs open at a time. I don't think it's generational.
I have four Sidebery 'panels' assigned to FF containers; I try to keep each down to ~30, but one or more of them will frequently go well over 100 when I'm in the middle of looking into something, spanning months.
For example, a few weeks ago I hacked together a WiFi-serial adapter for my Prusa Mini, so that I coule use it with Octoprint et al. remotely. I thought I'd like to write it up into a blog post, on the blog I haven't got around to setting up, so until I do - or until I admit I won't - all the tabs from me stumbling through forum threads, the printer firmware, reminding myself how to do embedded anything, ... are all still open as both a reminder to write it, and an aid when/if I do.
Same here. The only time I have more than 10 open is when I'm mass opening gallery links or reading some forum threads, but I rarely have more than 5-6 going at a time.
It’s crazy that we’re forced to distinguish between tabs, windows, history, bookmarks in the browser, and bookmarks in a 3rd party service like Pinboard. What overhead!
Why can’t our browsers just act like 2nd brains, remember it all, and have killer search to find and/or resurface it?
One challenge is paywalls with temp access. Just because I can read an entire article today at a URL, that doesn’t mean I’ll be able to if I revisit that URL. “This is your last free article!”
Vivaldi allows placing the tab bar vertically[1], I've used this since Opera times (an Opera founder departed the company after its Chinese takeover, and started Vivaldi), I currently have around 120 tabs open in 5 windows (actually you can also scroll on the tab bar itself), yeah too damn many.
I suppose people without AppleScript can write a browser extension that iterates through all the tabs and report the count to a Grafana. It would also be interesting to also record ages of tabs (e.g. time since it was opened/time since it was last seen)...
Another option is Sidebery, seemed to be the only maintained one when I last looked. It also supports 'panels' - 'tabs' to the sidebar that switch between sets of tabs. You can assign a panel to a FF container.
This looks like a good replacement of the old tab group Firefox used to have.
The fact we can assign them a container is really promising, I'll give it a go!
"I am widely admired at work for my ability to have many, many browser tabs open. (That, at least, is what I take from the frequent shouts of "holy cow, man, look at your browser!"
You might consider that maybe they're very politely saying "Man, that's insane". Would you leave 150 books open on one table, or maybe use bookmarks instead? I guess the table might work, but it seems like lots of clutter. Everyone's mileage varies.
I wanted to think that, but the article (though interesting) seems to be written by somebody quite impressed by themself. I may be biased, though, because most of the (few) people I've known to have so many tabs open seem that way to me. The ones I know not only have so many tabs open, but they really like it when people notice the great number.
I mean, no matter how I bookmark a website, omnibar is absolutely useless in every browser when it comes to re-discovering your bookmarks via keywords that you remember.
Sometimes I bookmark the same URL multiple times, because the Browser is too stupid to realize that a #generated-hashbang or a ?utm_source is a generated tracking parameter; and that it's actually the same URL with the identical content. In my opinion, bookmarks as implementations are seriously broken.
If we solve bookmarks _locally_, there ain't gonna be a "too many tabs" problem anymore.