"Originally, I was thinking about blocking users from closing their overgrown tabs until they slash all plants, but I thought it would be too annoying... "
I would ask that you please add this as an option :), might actually use it for that feature alone because I do accidentally close old tabs by accident without noticing that was meaning to keep open.
Even if it were useless, it still wouldn't be useless! Remember that old windows program that would let you smash your screen with hammers and shoot it with guns? I knew several people growing up who would have been offended and flabbergasted by the assertion that it was useless :)
These useless programs are like what you used to see back in win98 or winxp with dancing monkey or scoopydoo walking all over your desktop windows, which I think later turned to human dancers before being used to distribute all sort of viruses.
"BonziBuddy was described as spyware[1] and adware,[2] and was discontinued in 2004 after Bonzi Software, Inc. faced lawsuits and fines regarding the software.[3]"
It's just a matter of time before something like a "Zoltar screensaver for Basecamp" becomes an IP siphon.
Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.
OK, now I'm having flashbacks of astronomy Macintosh lab, late at night, too much homework (early 90's).
Fell asleep in front of keyboard, woke up to "Can of Worms" screensaver (never seen it before), had a heck of a start, wondering what the sound was, and what all those things were crawling all over the screen???
People get inspired by seeing a new color, smelling a new scent, or hearing a new song. Inspiration comes in all shapes and forms. Makes me kind of sad that you seemingly haven't been inspired by something random in life yet.
Woah, my interests! Anyone have any tips or favorite projects to share from procedural vine/flora generation? It's a fascinating space, and this extension seems to do surprisingly convincing job of it
I have serious ADHD and I often dive a rabbit hole for an idea for side project. Or research. Or combination of both. Most of my side projects you could categorize as spikes. There's no serious intent on delivering something of value for the world, just going from A to B and learning a thing or two on the run.
I'm like kerosene, I light up instantly, but the fire goes away very quickly. I can be researching a thing for 3 nights straight in my spare time to gather hooks and pieces of information... and then I get distracted and my focus goes somewhere else. And I'm left with 10 tabs that were suppose to kick start my idea.
To my own surprise I tend to go back to these ideas, but sometimes it takes me months, and sometimes, I keep these tabs on one of my devices, opened for months at a time. Sometimes I scrape them, adding links with notes to Obsidian.
Of course the amount of hoarded information vastly exceeds my throughput.
This is so cool! I wish for this to be available on Firefox, where I usually have multiple windows with each window having several tabs. The repository doesn’t make it clear if this works on non-Chrome/ium browsers.
I don't think any browsers are really designed for the range of how many tabs people keep open.
I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.
It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.
Do you actually come back to a tab 2,000 tabs later?
Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.
The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.
Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.
For youtube, sticking it on 'watch later' is one approach, or some other playlist. Even better, that way you can cronjob a script to save them locally. I'll leave youtube tabs for too long (despite this) and too often I've eventually returned and it's been removed. My other tab-shrinking habits are bookmark folders in the form "year-unread" and a local txt file where I loosely dump related URLs into pseudo-categories/sections.
Might be just me but I just close everything at the end of day to start a clean slate for next day (usually around 50). I also just use bookmarks for persistent autocomplete.
I used to be so good at this, then came Claude. My newest invention is a root Claude that has clear instructions on how to handle me, and it writes handoff notes. Doesn’t help though so mayday.
I do the same. Bookmarks are a case of “out of sight, out of mind”, whereas I come across open tabs eventually. They are like physical cues to remind me of things, akin to leaving the trash bag in front of the door so you can’t forget to take it when you leave.
This feels like a hoarders mentality. You don't have to answer this but do you hoard in any other aspects of life? There's nothing more therapeutic than closing tabs. Worst case, everything is in history and can be opened again.
No I don't think I do. I associate "hoarders" with reality tv and disastrously messy homes though which I can't relate to.
If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.
This is nice, but doesn't really have a way to easily close those tabs. I still need to manually hunt for them one-by-one and close them. I don't think this would scale to 12k tabs.
Making this into a browser extension should enable supporting such a behavior.
In the meantime, added support for "Find tab" option that guides the user switch to the tab of interest with minimal keystrokes using the browser's built-in search-tab functionality.
What is the point of having that many tabs open? You just need to close your browser and start over from one. Websites don't go away just because you close the tab, you can come back later.
Honest question how many of that 2k are just the same webpages but just different days?
I personally am a close the whole browser out at the end of the day guy. With bookmarks for things I just have not got to yet. With a every few months cleanup of the 'to do' folder. Just today I have probably opened 20 tabs and closed 15 so far. At the end of the day they should all be gone.
Surprising there's only one comment mentioning tab unloading. I'm the kind of person who has hundreds of tabs opened (422 right now), and this tool is useless for me because at any time only ~20 of them are loaded. And I'm not going to visit a tab to see how overgrown it is, something like this would work better if it worked on tab items in the tab bar instead of the contents of the tabs themselves.
I did a small mockup (built by a LLM agent) of a related concept. A page that gets more wear where people interact with it https://app.squidler.io/peggy/patina/
97 comments
[ 8.0 ms ] story [ 45.7 ms ] threadTo put it another way, it helps me recognize which tabs I am using. And which I am saving for later without having to evaluate the content of the tab.
One tweak… the coverage percentage can it be adjustable? Max = 100% looses all information about the pages contents, except the title.
Also also… if the images can be made translucent… you can make old timey effects like yellowing and decay.
You can't use the old tab because all the plants. You open a new tab for the same page. Don't need to close any old tab for that.
versus what the operating system or browser can provide.
In fact, weren't bookmarks supposed to solve EXACTLY this? You'd just bookmark a website on any page then come back to it any time in the future.
But then websites wanted to be apps and stopped storing state in the URL...
But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.
Have session storage extensions ever caught up to where they were before firefox dumped XUL?
Oh yeah, you're right. I do sometimes need the Back button to retain its history, and sometimes duplicate tabs to start a new "breadcrumb" path.
https://github.com/echelon/browser-focus
I need to add screenshots.
Basically puts an overlay on all timed out tabs, shows all timed out tabs so you can kill them all together, etc.
I want a better algorithm / heuristic that can semantically track what I'm doing.
I might eventually be brave enough to break out of tabs and let my windowing system handle everything.
"BonziBuddy was described as spyware[1] and adware,[2] and was discontinued in 2004 after Bonzi Software, Inc. faced lawsuits and fines regarding the software.[3]"
It's just a matter of time before something like a "Zoltar screensaver for Basecamp" becomes an IP siphon.
Fell asleep in front of keyboard, woke up to "Can of Worms" screensaver (never seen it before), had a heck of a start, wondering what the sound was, and what all those things were crawling all over the screen???
I have a ton of these tabs. I don't consider them "neglected" though.
Some things take years to come to fruition. You can't just go buy them at home despot.
Maybe younger people don't yet have an appreciation for things that assume an air of legacy and heritage after many years of "just sitting there".
When finally re-visited, they have a meaning that can only accumulate with the passage of significant time...
https://trello.com/power-ups/55a5d917446f517774210012
I was doing a little creative exercise the other day around the word "Overgrowth”…
Is this a common thing in the creative space? Seems like a fun activity
At some point it’ll get flushed and you’ll only have yourself to blame…
I have serious ADHD and I often dive a rabbit hole for an idea for side project. Or research. Or combination of both. Most of my side projects you could categorize as spikes. There's no serious intent on delivering something of value for the world, just going from A to B and learning a thing or two on the run.
I'm like kerosene, I light up instantly, but the fire goes away very quickly. I can be researching a thing for 3 nights straight in my spare time to gather hooks and pieces of information... and then I get distracted and my focus goes somewhere else. And I'm left with 10 tabs that were suppose to kick start my idea.
To my own surprise I tend to go back to these ideas, but sometimes it takes me months, and sometimes, I keep these tabs on one of my devices, opened for months at a time. Sometimes I scrape them, adding links with notes to Obsidian.
Of course the amount of hoarded information vastly exceeds my throughput.
I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.
It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.
Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.
The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.
Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.
If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.
Would you mind giving this a shot and sharing your feedback? https://github.com/TheCodeArtist/firefox-tabs-review
Helps wade through the backlog of tabs to "burndown" one by one or en-masse?
Isn't it dead at the slogan already?
In the meantime, added support for "Find tab" option that guides the user switch to the tab of interest with minimal keystrokes using the browser's built-in search-tab functionality.
Published a version 1.1.
I personally am a close the whole browser out at the end of the day guy. With bookmarks for things I just have not got to yet. With a every few months cleanup of the 'to do' folder. Just today I have probably opened 20 tabs and closed 15 so far. At the end of the day they should all be gone.