I actually used to use AppleScript to grab open tab URLs in Chrome but I switched to Firefox and AFAIK, Firefox doesn't support AppleScript.
tell application "Chromium"
set tabCount to get count every tab of window 1
repeat with i from 1 to tabCount
set currentUrl to get URL of tab i of window 1
end repeat
end tell
Somebody shared this in a different comment, but the OneTab extension looks like exactly what you are asking for: https://www.one-tab.com/ (minus it being builtin).
Here is their browser extension for "rethinking" tabs: https://www.skeema.com/ (currently invite + waitlist). Was really hoping for images of the actual, HCI-research-informed UI update, but alas.
Appears to describe a tab grouping extension, but the closed beta (and lack of screenshots) suggests beta testing is machine learning to hash out the UI and grouping criteria. Unless they plan for it to be a service.
I believe back in the day that Opera was the first browser to commonly support the feature. And I remember using Firefox and Mozilla extensions for tab management a decade ago. The more things change...
Vertical tab in Microsoft Edge is a game changer for me. With it, it is easier for me to scan what tabs I have open, which makes it easier for me to close tabs that I no longer need.
Genius idea! Most websites have too much space on the sides anyways, this would be perfect. It simple but I never thought to look for this - just got an extension to do it and it seems great.
Doing this, and then never ever following up on it, was how I learned that Chrome on Android changes the tab count to ':D' once you go over 100 tabs open.
I've never seen anything that gave me the impression that it would help, but at one point I was brainstorming a firefox extension a lot like the one described in the article, which is making me hopeful.
I use my tabs like a stack. The bookmarks are the long term overflow.
At the end of the day the stack is closed out or put into bookmarks for later looking at. I then have a set of folders of 'look at later'. If later is greater than some time period I just delete the whole folder. Once a month I look at the overflow. Most of the time it is more of a 'why did I care about this' and just blow it away. It is a variation of the empty mail box. Inbox needs to be done. Then the 'done' folder. There is no real stack or tree. That way lies madness (I have tried).
I try to keep my tabs in context of whatever I am doing. I max out about 10-20 (6 at the moment). Past anything like that and most of them are useless.
Bookmarks are for 'I know I will need this in the future' everything else I can search for again.
I love Onetab as well. The problem I often have is sending a lot of tabs to Onetab, then never looking at them again. Which may not actually be a problem and more of an indication for how "important" the tab actually was.
The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific topic, but the topic is not in the Title of the page and it can get lost in the clutter.
Or maybe more useful, a search service that just crawled the pages in your Chrome history, rather than the entire web.
The OneNote value add to me is that it allows me to close tabs without guilt. I don't really need to save them but can't let go - OneNote lets me let go.
One thing I do is keep a text file with lists of links, e.g. "programming", "gardening", "health" etc and if I haven't looked at a tab after a few days, I copy the URL and put it in the appropriate list, then close the tab.
If the browser prompted me to "archive" a tab after a few days and select a category, I'd probably use the functionality.
I feel like there are broadly 2 groups of tech literate users; those who like lots of tabs and those who keep things lean. I absolutely cannot relate to the first group, as much as I try to understand the mentality.
When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.
I'm completely the same, I might have a dozen active tabs but everything gets closed down asap, and in general I'll have multiple windows for different contexts each with just a few tabs.
For me, tabs are very much a manifestation of what’s going on in my mind at that very instant. Basically a cache. But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.
The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.
>But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.
That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt.
Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation.
Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.
> But once I’m done with my task or work is over, I’ll close every. Single. One.
What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.
Keeping every tab in your trail of research is like using a highlighter on evert page of the book you’re reading because “it’s all important”. I don’t believe it’s ultimately productive for the actual goal.
I also use a window and the tabs within it similarly to the OP of this thread. They're usually used to complete a task and then the entire window gets closed.
Bookmarks for frequently visited recurring links.
Bookmarks that I visit multiple times a day (Calendar, Email, etc) get pinned.
I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at work.
Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm at 20.
I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for instance when opening new tabs from other apps).
I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them, so I tend not to fight it.
I have 14 pinned, those are tools I use at least daily at work.
How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well, but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this site.
Well, "need" is a funny word. I guess I don't "need" any tabs, or even bookmarks. I could just type URLs all day and have a very pretty browser.
They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.
Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come back.
Let’s call it 200. You have 5 days in the week. So that’s 40 tabs you need to visit each day. 5 different tabs each hour, just to get through them. Even! Even if you need to visit all those different things - you know what they are and you want to go there, so why not hit cmd-l and autocomplete on the name from any tab and open it? If I want intercom, I type ‘app.i - enter’. Why would I want it open?
I keep open 200 and more tabs, especially when I can't finish a job before I start or continue another one. It's a matter of efficiency - closing a group of tabs found after painful and time-consuming research is unreasonable IMO. To find a specific tab after a day or two I use the tabFX Firefox extension. It allows searching for the tab containing keywords in the title/URL or tabs similar to the selected one. Also allows closing tabs directly from the search result list. Extremely useful.
I just opened HN 20 minutes ago, from there opened 5 tabs into comment threads, and from each comment thread opened the linked article in a new tab. This is a new tab I opened to reply without losing my place in the thread. That's 12 tabs.
I feel like people are deliberately misreading the scenario we’re talking about in my parent post. The GP wasn’t saying there were one off tabs, but ones used at least once a week. My point is more that to just get through these regular ones you’re in a bit of a doom cycle before you visit anything new.
Yes, same here. "Close Tabs to the Right" gets used a lot. If there's anything I want to keep I either pin it or drag it all the way to the left first.
for a lot of people you search for something to solve a problem. for instance debugging an issue. you middle click on a bunch of promising tabs and then go through them. if there is some useful information on that page you leave it open but it's rare that it's the only thing you need to know to solve your problem. another use is some API you need to use so you'd open up a bunch of tabs on the functions you are exploring how you need to use them.
I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full bookmark but not finished with.
I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
As someone who often carries a lot of tabs, I often keep the tabs around because the cost of evaluating whether a tab is worthwhile or not is high. It usually pulls me out of flow and pulls me into whatever article is bookmarked, which slows me way down.
It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.
I currently have 12 visible windows open. I prefer a spacial interface where I can see and change everything vs. a modal interface of only seeing one task at a time and having to constantly switch between each task/tab.
Same. I tend to use my tabs as a stack. On the left side I have the tabs I never close; like my Jira dashboard. Going towards the right I have my tabs that are todo -> in-progress. As I get through each thing, I close the tab. This tends to keep it pretty lean.
It would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between how many tabs you like open and when you started using the web. I used it for a long time before tabs were even a feature, and I find it easy to keep my tab count down. Compared to having to keep things down to "preferably 1, but maybe 3 or 4 if you're in a real pinch", keeping the tab count under 100 is no big deal.
(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)
Looks like I've 81 tabs open in this Firefox window. It's not uncommon that I'll be over 1k (across one window per monitor).
With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and it'll get cleaned up in due course.
Seems like 1k is well beyond the state of usefulness for most people. Isn't it faster to re-google something than find the tab? And if there is a nice tab search.. is it better than google? Why keep a local cache?
For me, the problem tabs solve isn’t finding the thing, but remembering the thing to find. Bookmarks solve the former, but tabs act as a collection of topics that I care about at a given point in time.
While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.
All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.
Woah that's pretty cool. I expected it to be a vimium-style modal if I just typed `%` at any point in time - so for anyone else who was confused like me, it's a prefix in your address bar so ctrl+L then % and then type your query but still, awesome!
For me it's a todo list. If I'm playing a game, researching a topic, and so on I have a window with tabs in it for that one thing. This works well enough and it feels nice shutting the window for closure when I no longer need it.
The problem is when I have stuff that sits around for longer like the Fast AI course I'm doing. That window is taunting and mocking me.
Edit: Looks like I have this in a tab because I meant to finish reading it. 7 months. I have a problem.
I used to use tab groups and have hundreds of tabs in Firefox some years back. Now, like you, I close things as soon as I don't need them.
Anything unpinned is temporary, and I only pin a few tabs. I also heavily bookmark and quickmark (qutebrowser) things and can usually get back to them easily.
I don't remember what changed my behavior, but I had incidents in the past with running out of RAM and swap and my whole PC hanging despite having 16GB of RAM, so I probably just scared myself straight.
Things feel cleaner when I have fewer tabs, which I think contributes to my mood being better. If I'm ever partway through a deep-dive or project that involves a lot of open tabs, I find I feel stressed. Sometimes I even decide enough is enough and close them all, feeling near-instant relief.
Even the history, eh? That would definitely slow me down next time I want to go back to that same page. I guess I rely on the browser suggesting the previously visited website to me.
Tree style tabs on the side of my window absolutely changed my computing life. I stopped seeing tabs as a collection of what Im doing and instead started using them + the browsers inclination to save my tabs across restarts to track everything.
Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs open (but asleep!) and just pick the tree im interested in. Dont need to save bookmarks or save articles for later - they are all there always.
All except us who will cling as to not give Google a way to make ad blocking impossible. And for me it is actually not about the ads, it is about tracking power; about should decide what runs or not on my hardware.
Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.)
I'd like to be able to:
- Search tabs (by metadata).
- Search tabs (by content).
- Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks.
- A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.)
- Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select.
- Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.)
I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.
I made https://cretz.github.io/doogie/ to solve this, but I don't really maintain it (I just build it for myself on each new Chromium) and it doesn't work on Mac.
I have multi-row tabs on Firefox (just requires some chrome CSS customization). I use 3 rows of 30 tabs with enough space so I can read the title.
I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any other browser, that's basically unmanageable.
I agree, I'm the same. People who sneer at large tab collections don't seem to realise that when they can be put to sleep, tidied away (various extensions allow groups to be folded), they are more like advanced bookmarks and working context. Or, they think there is no justification for having such collections.
For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y beckons. There is usually not enough time.
I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things. I would really like to learn from highly productive "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one.
So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot if the page is removed. I would really like them to be integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the ability to capture and show a collection of web page content decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major part of my working life in closed commercial software.
I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox, unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree Style Tabs extension.
It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n²) somewhere, but it reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but kept the tabs, everything became fast.
Sidebery. After trying out other extensions I settled on Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways, and works reasonably well with containers.
(There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my windows there are empty panels as a result.)
Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the window?
That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something.
Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc.
Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been burned before by my browser "forgetting" my tabs before on restart, as well as browser sync bugs, so I don't put a ton of faith in the longevity of tabs.
Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
> Is what you're describing any different from just bookmarking all the tabs in a window to a new folder and closing the window?
Tabs are formed automatically, closed easily, and organized by the order you opened them in.
Bookmarks require going through a multi-step dialog, removing them requires another dialog, and they're organized by manually creating a nested folder hierarchy.
I think most excessive tab use is down to bookmarks not having the best UX.
Why do you think you can't back up your tab session? I've had firefox corrupt the sessionstore file a few times over the years and when that happens I just open up Time Machine and restore the last good version.
First, if you "open the whole folder", you have to wait for a few hundred tabs to open for a large project, a few tens for a small project. That's very slow and uses a lot of memory. They don't open quickly in the asleep state the same was as tab sessions do.
Then there is the maintenance of the folder. If you bookmark all tabs in a window to a folder, later you'll open the whole folder, do a bit of work, reading, whatever, then save to a new folder because the set of active items isn't the same as it was when you started. Now you have to delete the old folder, otherwise you'll end up with a different miserable problem: Huge numbers of folders of bookmarks, all slightly different.
You'll probably need to do this a few hundred times over the life of a big project, if you context switch like I do in and out of different projects. That's a lot of folder activity.
Sure you can date them, but do you remember why you didn't delete a folder, was it because you wanted to keep that one or just forgot?
You can't realistically update the bookmark folder incrementally as you go, because there is no visual indicator showing which of the currently active tabs in the window has a matching bookmark (or which bookmarks in the folder are now excess), and it's too onerous and difficult to bookmark each time you open a tab in that window and delete a bookmark each time you close a tab.
Then, there's context. It's a little thing, but remembering the scroll position is a useful cue for later, in a large article, though if some section or comment has a permalink I tend to click that before leaving the tab. Ideally I'd want to be able to annotate pages as well, to quickly note why I've kept that article, documentation, comment or whatever open, but we take what little we can get from the tools we have. (It's possible to select text regions in each tab, at least in Firefox, but I've never actually checked if those selections stay selected across a browser restart. Anyway, they disappear uncomfortably too easy to rely on.)
> Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
For perspective, I wouldn't say I do 100 mini projects in a year, it's fewer than that, but a number of them span multiple years.
I don't have 100 windows, I have currently 22, but it's temporary and will reduce. I consolidated some related things recently. Three windows are for my current work project, for which there are about 300 tabs. This is because there's an active working area window (GitHub etc), a collected-things-from-work-and-researched-items-for-work window, and another for activities on a different monitor like watching videos and shared notes.
With some tab management extensions you can make foldable groups - this is what people talk about with Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery (which I'm using now) and other hierarchical tab management extensions. This means you don't need 100 windows for 100 projects; you can effectively archive projects.
To even find Windows used to be very difficult until I started using an extension that lets me give names to Windows. Ironically the window-naming extension I use is Tab Count in Window Title, because I tried several others and they showed up as using more browser resources, so this is the one I use. Having the tab count is quite helpful anyway :-) (Because if I forgot to give a window a title, it still tends to have a a recognisable tab count and current page.) Now they all have names in the "Window" menu, and when moving around in the window manager. I find this useful for "Move to window" (by name) as well, which I use to move a tab that was opened in the wrong place or something ephemeral I decided to keep, to the appropriate window where I can go through and organise them a...
Thank you for the brain dump. I liked that this came up. I used tree style tabs for a few years starting way back in maybe 2012, but eventually just abandoned it because of the same performance problems you mentioned. I didn't replace it with anything good, and was just recently getting annoyed at the state of things as i suddenly find myself context switching a lot on mini projects. I was just setting myself up in Emacs org mode and felt i needed better integration with the browser. I have a little extra time to put into making it right. I think at the very least i am going to write some small amount of integration for the currently clocked Emacs org task, the main OS views, and Firefox, just Mac OS X to start, all open source.
Anyway, i was exploring options and i was glad to find your experience. I think i am ultimately looking for something similar to what you want and maybe will email you at some point to ask about this if i do indeed get a little deeper into it if you don't mind.
I'm in a very similar situation as you are regarding my browser usage and needs. I now have 46 windows open and 2.1K tabs open, but I've had at some point almost 70 windows and more than 7K tabs...
This is the script I made to bring up the firefox window I desire from the custom name I gave it using window-titler:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
#
# switches to the firefox window that starts with the provided word between brackets
NAME=$1
WIN=$(wmctrl -l | grep Firefox | grep "\[${NAME}")
if [[ -z $WIN ]]; then
echo "no window found"
exit
fi
NUM_WINS=$(echo "$WIN" | wc -l)
if [[ $NUM_WINS -ne "1" ]]; then
echo -e "$NUM_WINS windows found, please be more specific:\n"
for w in "$WIN"; do
echo "$w" | cut -d' ' -f4-
done
exit
fi
WIN_NAME=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f4-)
WIN_ID=$(echo $WIN | cut -d' ' -f1)
echo opening: $WIN_NAME
wmctrl -iR $WIN_ID
And winger allows me to stash not-currently-needed windows in bookmarks, and restore them later...
This is a less than perfect system, but it's good enough for me for now.
> I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things.
And what are these kinds of projects that you are the only one to tackle?
I'm not unique in the kinds of projects I've tackled over the years. My projects tend to be technical, scientific, or legal/accounting, and tend to build on a lot of serendipitously found knowledge in articles, comments, mailing list posts, Github issues, research papers, as I read around or discover on the side while researching specific topics.
I should have said, "I asked people who like to tell me I'm doing it wrong what they do...".
There's a small subset of people I found telling me I'm wrong/insane, there's something wrong with me, I'm untidy, that I should do something else and I have a hoarding problem, etc...
Among that subset, I found they consistently had no better solutions to offer when asked, and this is because they just didn't feel the need to tackle problems involving a lot of reading material that needs to be retained, referenced from and used as an increasingly authoritative knowledge base over time in order to complete technical projects using that knowledge.
It is that lack of better solutions from armchair critics which has led me to believe I'm not necessarily "doing it wrong", even though I know perfectly well that it has problems, and what kinds of systems I would prefer to use if I could find or build them.
One of those people was quite helpful though, and rightly pointed me to knowledge-base software (that they themselves weren't using mind), but somehow seemed to think I have a lot more spare time than I do to maintain the contents, and thought I was bluffing about that. I do actually take a lot of notes already, have been doing so for many years, and I know how long it takes me. When to take notes, and when to leave things in tabs (perhaps to take notes on later), is about prioritising long-term task flows.
I'm sure there are people who have much better solutions than I've found so far, and perhaps they could show me someday. (Though, it's not likely to convince me if it involves closed-source software and locked away information, or too much time-consuming clipping process before you're allowed to move on to some other big task, as those do come up.)
But I haven't met those people yet. Only critics who don't have better solutions, and think large numbers of tabs is a sign of mental laziness or something. Whatever I am, it's not lazy. Perhaps I should go to a tab-hoarders' conference and we can devise better tools there :-)
This is the only reason I use edge over chrome, for tree tabs. I would use firefox but I have noticed significant slowdown on some websites that I use frequently.
The most interesting feature of tree-style tabs is that they build a detailed information structure implicitly, as a side effect of browsing actions that you would do anyway. I think that is the right approach for any attempt to improve browser UIs.
Do tab extensions like this pose any security risk in terms of hoovering up and transmitting your browser history of sensitive info on pages you visit (think tokens in Urls)?
I have 0 problems with tabs. I used to and man they can be annoying.
The system that finally worked for me is to bind "Close all Tabs to Left" to Ctrl + Left, likewise for right, and Close All Except Open Tab to Ctrl + Up.
I found this enables painless instant culls, I just save URLs everything I want to survive a total cull (it's hardly ever more than 2 URLs, most tabs are junk which I suppose is the main problem).
Ctrl + W for Close Current Tab and Ctrl + Shift + T for Reopen Closed Tab are also pretty useful (require no bind).
I was actually a big user of firefox panorama. I know that it wasn’t easy to discover but it was the best idea of tabs I’ve seen. Expose, grids, and multiple desktops work the best for switching windows, why not have it for tabs?
I think that with the right desktop environment we could completely get rid of most tabs. Windows and ie were terrible with opening new windows which made tabs a necessity, but really they should be used for grouping related pages.
I never really got to grips with having different sets of tabs within the same window -- that's the kind of thing I use multiple windows for. But I still have the extension installed because it's the easiest way to show several hundred tabs in a way which means I can avoid loading the content just to close tabs.
There have been so many forks of this, and they have all been buggy or gotten stalled. This one in particular randomly forgets some of your tab groups. ("you had ONE job!")
I would love to see a Miro-style, infinite canvas, tiling tab manager. If I zoom out past the page, show me a canvas with thumbnails of all my tabs, that I can click and drag to group or arrange however I want. Then let me zoom into one of the thumbnails to switch to that tab.
Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.
Doesn't Tab Overview in Safari on macOS already does that? ( Without the Drag and Drop Part )
The problem is its current implementation completely kills your SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview gesture and icons.
Safari's Tab Overview is unfortunately not like the OP's idea. The lack of dragging, and also because there's no way to zoom out further and make visual groups. And I suppose being horribly slow with many tabs makes it very different from the OP's idea too.
I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state, just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work.
I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself).
But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast while using a huge amount of memory that slows down everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and being the reason other things I use for work were getting slow.
I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.
>and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work.
I have the exact problem with pinch to zoom. I had to disable it to stop Tab Overview from loading, once ran out of memory it will start paging everything to SSD, which is why I said it is basically kill the SSD.
I still dont know why the Tab Overview wouldn't automatically become a list view once it is over certain number of tabs.
Sort of, but only in the sense that it’s a grid. I want way more creative control. I want pan and zoom, the ability to move and resize thumbnails, and some grouping/clustering mechanism. Maybe some “gravity” type thing where if I move a tab near another one they snap together. Nested grouping would be cool too. And it needs keyboard shortcuts that I can use to manipulate the groups of tabs and navigate between them all.
>Internet browser tabs are a major source of friction on the internet. People love them. People hate them. For some users, tabs bring order and efficiency to their web browsing. For others, they spiral out of control, shrinking at the top of the screen as their numbers expand.
how about multiple layer tabs
I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
I think it's just an information hoarding mentality. Like people you see on hoarding TV shows with stacks upon stacks of old newspapers just in case they "need" to refer to them one day.
There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync.
I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.
I scrolled all the way to here since I expected way more mentions of Tabs Outliner. It’s kept me stuck on Chrome for so long, but now with the death of The Great Suspender extension my hand has been forced to build my own personal replacement as I want to get off chrome again…
Losing the great suspender means I can’t in concert with Tabs Outliner switch in and out groups of dozens of tabs at a time. Now doing this chews multiple GB of memory and my machine all but locks up for minutes at a time if I forget that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve run into macOS’s “out of memory killer” window pop up on several occasions now entirely from chrome alone.
I am a heavy user of tabs and I’d be trying all the mentioned ones in this page, but I have to express to anyone who has not tried it, if you are building a tab management tool and have not looked at Tabs Outliner in chrome, you need to, it represents the high water mark of tab hoarder & power user features. I’ve got 17 thousand tabs saved in hundreds of windows and groups on just one of my machines!
I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
>I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
I'm not sure you know this, but nowadays browsers have low-level sql-like api called indexeddb[0] which may fit your needs without using sqlite.
Thanks for your reply. It's good to hear that Tabs Outliner is a favorite for other power users out there. Interesting that you had a great synergy between it and The Great Suspender. I myself hadn't ever used The Great Suspender before hearing about it's recent demise. It sounded pretty useful, and upon looking for alternatives, I discovered the cross-browser extention Auto Tab Discard. FYI: https://github.com/rNeomy/auto-tab-discard
I still miss Opera's MDI (Multiple Document Interface). Using that vs using tabs felt like using a tiled window manager vs graphical window manager. You could get so much more efficient with the MDI once you dialed in shortcuts, window switching and rearranging, etc.
239 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 340 ms ] threadI'd like a browser function that says "open a text file and save all the URLs"
[0] https://github.com/slymax/tablist (links to Chrome and Firefox extensions there)
Though this one seems to be okay: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs...
I believe back in the day that Opera was the first browser to commonly support the feature. And I remember using Firefox and Mozilla extensions for tab management a decade ago. The more things change...
At the end of the day the stack is closed out or put into bookmarks for later looking at. I then have a set of folders of 'look at later'. If later is greater than some time period I just delete the whole folder. Once a month I look at the overflow. Most of the time it is more of a 'why did I care about this' and just blow it away. It is a variation of the empty mail box. Inbox needs to be done. Then the 'done' folder. There is no real stack or tree. That way lies madness (I have tried).
I try to keep my tabs in context of whatever I am doing. I max out about 10-20 (6 at the moment). Past anything like that and most of them are useless.
Bookmarks are for 'I know I will need this in the future' everything else I can search for again.
The dream for me would be if Onetab has a search feature that allowed you to search the text on all the tabbed pages that you saved. Because sometimes you save a tab because of a specific topic, but the topic is not in the Title of the page and it can get lost in the clutter.
Or maybe more useful, a search service that just crawled the pages in your Chrome history, rather than the entire web.
If the browser prompted me to "archive" a tab after a few days and select a category, I'd probably use the functionality.
When I’m digging deep into something new I might end up with 20 tabs, but a) it’s an exception and b) the moment I can see no more value I just close them all down and reset.
The fear of not being able to recall information is a classic busy-syndrome feeling. Sometimes I also have to tell myself “I’ll probably remember what I worked in yesterday, so maybe there’s no need to panic after all”.
That works for the general case but sometimes I search a solution to a problem (possibly without even knowing how to search for it so lots of experimentation) then find a possible solution after much sleuthing. But then... I'll have to record this somewhere so that when I encounter this problem again, I know what to do, where to find help and won't waste another 30 mins of my life to the same problem. That record keeping has friction, needs a commitment and I'm probably busy. And there are probably a couple other valuable sites I found that would help with the problem's domain in the near future. So I /may/ need to reference them in the future. So better record it somewhere, but I don't have a good "system" so don't know where to put them. Bookmarks are already a cesspool. I have documents for projects and note taking but it will need some explaining before I describe the problem to make the result searchable. Did I say I was busy? I'll do it later... but now another problem pops up. More sleuthing, tabs accumulate, same problem, twice the size, twice more procrastinated debt.
Yeah, I can close them all. But I /emotionally/ want to avoid the pain of finding myself in the exact position of a few hours ago, having that annoying problem without a solution. I don't want to waste more time on this. I will eventually forget the solutions I found. I need to keep track of all this. But don't have the time or motivation.
Then, path of least resistance is accumulation of tabs - inaction.
What if you're never done? I have so many tabs open about things I was researching or studying. Something else came up and I had to prioritize... Eventually I forgot about the tabs.
Bookmarks for frequently visited recurring links.
Bookmarks that I visit multiple times a day (Calendar, Email, etc) get pinned.
Add in a page of search results, 3 or 4 of those opened, HN and some article I'm reading during "clear my head" time, and I'm at 20.
I'm usually working on multiple tasks, many of which take multiple days. I have tried to group tabs in windows thematically, but browsers are shit about respecting that (for instance when opening new tabs from other apps).
I'd rather read what's in my tabs than mess around with them, so I tend not to fight it.
How do you open these pinned ones? I used to do this as well, but since browsers got better at fuzzy matching (or whatever it is called) in the address bar I figured this keyboard-only approach gets me to commonly visited sites faster. Ctrl-T (or Alt-D to reuse current tab), yc, Enter -> I end up on this site.
And multiple day tasks, I still can’t imagine why you need all the tabs. For me, I get in, get what I need and get out again.
They are things like GHE, monitoring, DNS, our CA. Things I use/change literally every day, some of them I'm in constantly. I don't pin things I don't use all the time.
Multiday tasks are typically research-heavy, closing things is equivalent to "loosing my place". I suppose I could use "bookmark this group of tabs", but it hasn't really mattered when I can just... leave them there until I come back.
In the last week it was down to 157 a day. Because I've spent more time in head-down coding.
5 tabs an hour, hah.
Generally 300+ tabs in firefox. Mostly in chunks corresponding to home or work projects that take months or longer to finish.
I also separate the issue by window too and also use tabs and windows as temporary bookmarks really. not worthy of a full bookmark but not finished with.
I created an webextension to deal with handling those tabs because having a bunch of tabs across a bunch of windows is not the most ergonomic without one. might be useful for someone here I suppose: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/
It'd be nice to have them slowly fade away so I didn't have to make a decision because most of the time, I don't need the tab and wouldn't even remember that it's gone lol.
(I'm abundantly sure the correlation isn't 1, so simply citing your own experience, alas, won't do much.)
With `%` to search across open tabs, and an unused tab not really taking any meaningful amount of resources (especially with Auto Tab Discard) I open a whole load of tabs, close them if I realise I'm done with them while I'm looking at them, and if I don't close the tab then that's fine -- it's probably scrolled off the left of the tab bar where I can't see it and it'll get cleaned up in due course.
While bookmarks accumulate over years and lose relevance and context, my tab collection acts in a revolving manner where old ones fall off as often as new ones are added. Their arrangement also forms an informal categorization system that requires very little effort; I hate trying to organize bookmarks, but organizing tabs is almost automatic. And while I do keep a lot of tabs (300-500 on average), the fact that they’re not free (they take up screen space and memory) prevents me from going overboard and encourages me to frequently cull tabs that have lost relevance.
All in all, I think my usage of tabs has come to reflect the way that I think and work, like an extension of my medium-term memory. That’s why I keep a cache of them.
...No way. That's my TIL for the day. Am I the only one who didn't know about this!?
The problem is when I have stuff that sits around for longer like the Fast AI course I'm doing. That window is taunting and mocking me.
Edit: Looks like I have this in a tab because I meant to finish reading it. 7 months. I have a problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24737026
Someone should develop an actually good Alfred like tab finder for Firefox and I’m golden.
Anything unpinned is temporary, and I only pin a few tabs. I also heavily bookmark and quickmark (qutebrowser) things and can usually get back to them easily.
I don't remember what changed my behavior, but I had incidents in the past with running out of RAM and swap and my whole PC hanging despite having 16GB of RAM, so I probably just scared myself straight.
Things feel cleaner when I have fewer tabs, which I think contributes to my mood being better. If I'm ever partway through a deep-dive or project that involves a lot of open tabs, I find I feel stressed. Sometimes I even decide enough is enough and close them all, feeling near-instant relief.
I rarely have more than half a dozen tabs open. And that's if I'm busy. Normally it's one or two -- whatever it is that I'm currently working on.
And at the end of the day -- all closed. History and cache cleared. Start clean the next day.
Ill have a tree of tabs for blogs im reading, a tree for work stuff, a tree for amazon orders, etc. All that context can be closed in a single click. Ill have hundreds of tabs open (but asleep!) and just pick the tree im interested in. Dont need to save bookmarks or save articles for later - they are all there always.
And: this might be hard to believe but it was much better before - extension wise.
I think, the day chrome makes TST possible, is the day Firefox loses a large fraction of it's remaining power users.
I'd recommend more people think like this.
For me it is a small sacrifice for now at least.
I’m interested in trying.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
It's not available on Android / Mobile, of course, but on any windowing desktop OS it's an option.
Firefox + Tree Style Tabs is still worlds ahead of this.
imho the pinacle of tab-ui was pre-quantum firefox with tabkitv2.
tree style tabs is roughly on par with what opera delivered in the early 2000's or nowadays vivaldi.
Good, and possibly better than today's TST, but still short of my goal(s). And that's without its instability (ISTR that crashing a fair bit.)
I'd like to be able to:
- Search tabs (by metadata).
- Search tabs (by content).
- Organise tabs by task / project. Including assigning open tabs to tasks, and possibly to multiple tasks.
- A sense of utility vs. info tabs. (Pinned tabs ... sort of does this. Examples might be webmail, chat app, or tools like a dictionary or other data-lookup page.)
- Arbitrarily grouping a set of tabs based on specifiable criteria, or UI-based multi-select.
- Taking actions based on those groupings (close, combine under a single tree, bookmark, print, save, etc.)
I'd have to think more on what sorts of things I'd be doing, but Web as Workflow is a major component of this. Current browser design seems entirely antithetical to this.
I just open every new link a new tab. It's not uncommon, if I'm doing some kind of research, to have over 100 tabs open. In any other browser, that's basically unmanageable.
For me they are working context for different projects over years. Working on project X a month ago? 6 months ago? Great, I can go back to where I was. People have told me I "need" to close all tabs and if I need working context, copy links and notes into some kind of knowledge-base. But I tried that, and in practice a "context switch" from project X to activity Y takes hours and occasionally days to write up. Making knowledge-base notes is valuable, I do it sometimes, and that's how I know how long it takes me. But it takes a long time so it's not always the best use of priority when activity Y beckons. There is usually not enough time.
I asked people what they do to tackle my sorts of projects. The answers were always the same: Some ums and ahs, and it turns out they don't. They just don't take on the same kinds of things. I would really like to learn from highly productive "clean desk" people, working on similar projects to mine, how it is done, but to the best of my knowledge I've never met one.
So sleepable tabs it is for now. There's still room for better organising. Tree style tabs aren't very searchable. The content of the pages is even less searchable, and it would be helpful if there were a way to go back in time to an earlier snapshot if the page is removed. I would really like them to be integrated into other tools. I tried Org-mode (I use Emacs all the time) but the one feature lacking in Org-mode is the ability to capture and show a collection of web page content decently, so it hasn't worked out for this kind of knowledge capture. There are commercial tools that claim to be what I'm really looking for, but I'm not going to store such a major part of my working life in closed commercial software.
I had to stop using the Tree Style Tabs extension for Firefox, unfortunately, because it was slowing down the browser terribly. This wasn't Firefox, or the tabs. It was the Tree Style Tabs extension.
It's probably some trivial algorithmic O(n²) somewhere, but it reached the point where opening a tab or clicking on a tab, or doing other things in Firefox that should be near-instant would take 5+ seconds, and the browser would take 5 minutes to start up, even though almost all tabs start up asleep. There is no good reason to be this slow, because most tabs are unloaded most of the time in Firefox. And indeed when I disabled TST but kept the tabs, everything became fast.
Sidebery. After trying out other extensions I settled on Sidebery, which is working out well so far. In particularly, it's very much faster than TST for large numbers of tabs, and doesn't appear to slow down the browser during non-tab operations. It's also working out nicely for me in other ways, and works reasonably well with containers.
(There are some quirks: Dragging sometimes just fails, refuses to move some tabs, or a tab even "disappears" until Sidebery is turned off and on again. Moving a list of tabs to another window can be very slow, about one a second. The "panels" tab-grouping feature is odd because it's the same list of tab-groups in every window, which doesn't make sense; in most of my windows there are empty panels as a result.)
That's what I do. And then just open the whole folder as tabs in a new window when I go back to something.
Then the advantage is that I can give the folder a name, a date, tags, nest it under a grouping of folders, etc.
Plus I can back up bookmarks which gives me huge peace of mind. I've been burned before by my browser "forgetting" my tabs before on restart, as well as browser sync bugs, so I don't put a ton of faith in the longevity of tabs.
Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
Tabs are formed automatically, closed easily, and organized by the order you opened them in.
Bookmarks require going through a multi-step dialog, removing them requires another dialog, and they're organized by manually creating a nested folder hierarchy.
I think most excessive tab use is down to bookmarks not having the best UX.
First, if you "open the whole folder", you have to wait for a few hundred tabs to open for a large project, a few tens for a small project. That's very slow and uses a lot of memory. They don't open quickly in the asleep state the same was as tab sessions do.
Then there is the maintenance of the folder. If you bookmark all tabs in a window to a folder, later you'll open the whole folder, do a bit of work, reading, whatever, then save to a new folder because the set of active items isn't the same as it was when you started. Now you have to delete the old folder, otherwise you'll end up with a different miserable problem: Huge numbers of folders of bookmarks, all slightly different.
You'll probably need to do this a few hundred times over the life of a big project, if you context switch like I do in and out of different projects. That's a lot of folder activity.
Sure you can date them, but do you remember why you didn't delete a folder, was it because you wanted to keep that one or just forgot?
You can't realistically update the bookmark folder incrementally as you go, because there is no visual indicator showing which of the currently active tabs in the window has a matching bookmark (or which bookmarks in the folder are now excess), and it's too onerous and difficult to bookmark each time you open a tab in that window and delete a bookmark each time you close a tab.
Then, there's context. It's a little thing, but remembering the scroll position is a useful cue for later, in a large article, though if some section or comment has a permalink I tend to click that before leaving the tab. Ideally I'd want to be able to annotate pages as well, to quickly note why I've kept that article, documentation, comment or whatever open, but we take what little we can get from the tools we have. (It's possible to select text regions in each tab, at least in Firefox, but I've never actually checked if those selections stay selected across a browser restart. Anyway, they disappear uncomfortably too easy to rely on.)
> Even if tabs are sleeping, if you have 100 different mini-projects going on from the past year, do you have... 100 different windows open all the time? How do you even find the window you need?
For perspective, I wouldn't say I do 100 mini projects in a year, it's fewer than that, but a number of them span multiple years.
I don't have 100 windows, I have currently 22, but it's temporary and will reduce. I consolidated some related things recently. Three windows are for my current work project, for which there are about 300 tabs. This is because there's an active working area window (GitHub etc), a collected-things-from-work-and-researched-items-for-work window, and another for activities on a different monitor like watching videos and shared notes.
With some tab management extensions you can make foldable groups - this is what people talk about with Tree Style Tabs, Sidebery (which I'm using now) and other hierarchical tab management extensions. This means you don't need 100 windows for 100 projects; you can effectively archive projects.
To even find Windows used to be very difficult until I started using an extension that lets me give names to Windows. Ironically the window-naming extension I use is Tab Count in Window Title, because I tried several others and they showed up as using more browser resources, so this is the one I use. Having the tab count is quite helpful anyway :-) (Because if I forgot to give a window a title, it still tends to have a a recognisable tab count and current page.) Now they all have names in the "Window" menu, and when moving around in the window manager. I find this useful for "Move to window" (by name) as well, which I use to move a tab that was opened in the wrong place or something ephemeral I decided to keep, to the appropriate window where I can go through and organise them a...
Anyway, i was exploring options and i was glad to find your experience. I think i am ultimately looking for something similar to what you want and maybe will email you at some point to ask about this if i do indeed get a little deeper into it if you don't mind.
The most useful extensions I've found to manage this complexity are https://github.com/tpamula/webextension-window-titler and https://github.com/l10nelw/winger.
This is the script I made to bring up the firefox window I desire from the custom name I gave it using window-titler:
And winger allows me to stash not-currently-needed windows in bookmarks, and restore them later...This is a less than perfect system, but it's good enough for me for now.
And what are these kinds of projects that you are the only one to tackle?
I should have said, "I asked people who like to tell me I'm doing it wrong what they do...".
There's a small subset of people I found telling me I'm wrong/insane, there's something wrong with me, I'm untidy, that I should do something else and I have a hoarding problem, etc...
Among that subset, I found they consistently had no better solutions to offer when asked, and this is because they just didn't feel the need to tackle problems involving a lot of reading material that needs to be retained, referenced from and used as an increasingly authoritative knowledge base over time in order to complete technical projects using that knowledge.
It is that lack of better solutions from armchair critics which has led me to believe I'm not necessarily "doing it wrong", even though I know perfectly well that it has problems, and what kinds of systems I would prefer to use if I could find or build them.
One of those people was quite helpful though, and rightly pointed me to knowledge-base software (that they themselves weren't using mind), but somehow seemed to think I have a lot more spare time than I do to maintain the contents, and thought I was bluffing about that. I do actually take a lot of notes already, have been doing so for many years, and I know how long it takes me. When to take notes, and when to leave things in tabs (perhaps to take notes on later), is about prioritising long-term task flows.
I'm sure there are people who have much better solutions than I've found so far, and perhaps they could show me someday. (Though, it's not likely to convince me if it involves closed-source software and locked away information, or too much time-consuming clipping process before you're allowed to move on to some other big task, as those do come up.)
But I haven't met those people yet. Only critics who don't have better solutions, and think large numbers of tabs is a sign of mental laziness or something. Whatever I am, it's not lazy. Perhaps I should go to a tab-hoarders' conference and we can devise better tools there :-)
https://utk-se.github.io/CodeRibbon/
The system that finally worked for me is to bind "Close all Tabs to Left" to Ctrl + Left, likewise for right, and Close All Except Open Tab to Ctrl + Up.
I found this enables painless instant culls, I just save URLs everything I want to survive a total cull (it's hardly ever more than 2 URLs, most tabs are junk which I suppose is the main problem).
Ctrl + W for Close Current Tab and Ctrl + Shift + T for Reopen Closed Tab are also pretty useful (require no bind).
TabFS: Mount your Browser Tabs as a Filesystem https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338
I think that with the right desktop environment we could completely get rid of most tabs. Windows and ie were terrible with opening new windows which made tabs a necessity, but really they should be used for grouping related pages.
I never really got to grips with having different sets of tabs within the same window -- that's the kind of thing I use multiple windows for. But I still have the extension installed because it's the easiest way to show several hundred tabs in a way which means I can avoid loading the content just to close tabs.
The closest thing that works for me is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-gro... but I'm not thrilled with the user experience.
Basically Apple’s mobile Photos.app interface but for browser tabs.
The problem is its current implementation completely kills your SSD if you have too many tabs. The problem has been going on for years. To the point I have to manually disable Tab Overview gesture and icons.
I also found Tab Overview is a disaster if you have too many tabs. I've occasionally been looking at Google Maps and done pinch-to-zoom-out. Big mistake: Safari zoomed out of the page instead and tried to show Tab Overview. That scheduling loading every tab that was previously in a sleeping state, just to show the thumbnails, and would typically show as using 30-40GB memory while I realised I'd have to kill and restart the Safari process to get back to work.
I like Safari, and switched to it from Firefox because Firefox was getting very slow. (Turned out to be the Tree Style Tabs extension, not Firefox itself).
But it eventually I found Safari is good at seeming fast while using a huge amount of memory that slows down everything else on the system. It was not unusual to find Safari using a lot of swap and increasing over time, and being the reason other things I use for work were getting slow.
I switched back to Firefox and found, rather pleasantly, its memory use rarely shows higher than about 10GB.
I have the exact problem with pinch to zoom. I had to disable it to stop Tab Overview from loading, once ran out of memory it will start paging everything to SSD, which is why I said it is basically kill the SSD.
I still dont know why the Tab Overview wouldn't automatically become a list view once it is over certain number of tabs.
https://i.stack.imgur.com/lxfU9.png
Is this what you are describing?
[1] https://www.gettabli.com/
I imagine that would help with my tab-hoarding, as I tend to branch into more windows (up to ~50) once they reach too many (20 or so) tabs each.
how about multiple layer tabs
I am a big fan of hoarding tabs. Bookmaking a page can sometimes result in the page being different when reloading or not working. Tabs stay permanent in memory can be referred to later in an unchanged state. It is like the digital equivalent of a library. I can always defer to an open tab when i need something.
https://lee-phillips.org/permatab/
There are a few tools that help me effectively manage a large number of tabs. (No, Firefox's Tree Style Tabs isn't one of them - while it is great, it is not powerful enough for me.)
The best experience I've had so far is with Tabs Outliner for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. I find that it's UI requires the least amount of clicks and remains performant even when I have a thousand open tabs and hundreds of thousands of saved tabs. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...
My two main gripes with Tabs Outliner is that it is not FOSS, and that it often forgets that I've purchased a license for Google Drive sync.
I have yearned for a FOSS alternative to Tabs Outliner. The best one I've tried so far is Tab Fern: https://cxw42.github.io/TabFern/
I love the Tab Fern concept and it would be my primary choice but for the following two issues. First and least consequential, the performance is close to but not 100% on par with Tabs Outliner. Second, you cannot open a single saved tab as with Tabs Outliner - instead it will open up the entire window. This is a headache to deal with when your Window has a lot of tabs (it's also a feature that's on the Tabs Fern roadmap.)
I badly wish there was a Tabs Outliner or Tabs Fern for Firefox. Perhaps architectural differences between Chrome and Firefox mean that it will never happen. In lieu of that, I've settled on Session Sync for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-sync/
Session Sync is pretty awesome, especially so because it's also FOSS. It can effectively manage the same amount of tabs as Tabs Outliner while avoiding both of the issues I've mentioned for TabFern. The main problem I have with Session Sync is that these things all require more clicks. For example, if you want to close a tab using either TabFern or Tabs Outliner, you can find the tab in the listing (presumably you searched for it to save time :) and there is an icon right there to close the tab. With Session Sync, you actually have to right-click on the tab before you are presented with the list of available options, which include a Delete option. While this is inconvenient, it's still perfectly workable, and it also has the benefit of slick import/export/backup/sync options that the other two are missing.
As for Skeema, the Chrome extension described in the article, I'd give it a try (if they accept my request for invitation) and would like to see if it could supplant either of the 3 alternatives I've mentioned.
Losing the great suspender means I can’t in concert with Tabs Outliner switch in and out groups of dozens of tabs at a time. Now doing this chews multiple GB of memory and my machine all but locks up for minutes at a time if I forget that I can’t do this anymore. I’ve run into macOS’s “out of memory killer” window pop up on several occasions now entirely from chrome alone.
I am a heavy user of tabs and I’d be trying all the mentioned ones in this page, but I have to express to anyone who has not tried it, if you are building a tab management tool and have not looked at Tabs Outliner in chrome, you need to, it represents the high water mark of tab hoarder & power user features. I’ve got 17 thousand tabs saved in hundreds of windows and groups on just one of my machines!
I’ve got to the point where the design for the tool im building to replace this, must have a query language or just raw SQL power search box to get to whatever underlying dB stores it all (probably going to be Sqlite)
I'm not sure you know this, but nowadays browsers have low-level sql-like api called indexeddb[0] which may fit your needs without using sqlite.
[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/IndexedDB_A...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-document_interface
https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/old-software/web-browsers/op...
I am currently working on a new and fun approach to managing this kind of cognitive spaces, hopefully to be published this month.