Installed. This is pretty nice for the people who uses dozens of tabs as temp bookmarks.
A bit of feedback: I was just typing this comment and hit the button, obviously the comment was lost and had to type it again. Would be great if if checked for focused inputs or textareas or something before closing that tab, or that it restores the tabs them with the content.
Another idea I can think of is to "close" all the tabs that are NOT the one you currently are in, or "close" all the tabs on the right of the current one.
Yeah, I was wondering about this. Honestly feels like a design flaw. When I hit "restore all" I expected the tabs to replace the OneTab... tab. Other than that, and knowing that it's all in HTML5 localStorage, this will be replacing PanicButton!
The open source and free software community is dominated by programmers. There aren't a lot of designers and there are even fewer sales and marketing people. And it shows in what they release. I found it refreshing to see an exception.
Chrome is not my primary browser, so I won't be installing this any time soon, but I thought the copy was really short and sweet, with no fluff. If this was "salesy", I wish more FOSS products were like this one.
Not for me. It answered exactly the question I had in mind. I love the effort they put into the "salesy" page. I don't see why "salesy" is inherently bad. It sells well, even if it is free.
> Your tab URLs are never transmitted or disclosed to either the OneTab developers or any other party, and icons for tab URL domains are generated by Google. The only exception to this is if you intentionally click on our 'share as a web page' feature that allows you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the 'share as a web page' button.
(OneTab developer here): None of your tabs are sent to a third party server. It's all stored in HTML5 local storage.
The only way the one-tab servers know about your tabs is if you click to 'share as a web page', which transmits your tabs to our servers to create a web page you can share with others.
I think this is a great idea, however I think you can make less ambiguous if you don't say "will not share". I think you are better saying...."will not transmit any information to our server". A lot of services don't intend to "share" things that are uploaded to their servers. Much easier decision to download/install if you unequivocally state that nothing will ever be Transmitted to the server. I personally am hesitant to install this just because it has the capability for me to accidentally upload my private info if I click the wrong setting.
The OneTab servers are never accessed unless you click the "share as a web page" button. We don't know what tabs you have open, or what tabs you have put in your OneTab list.
OneTab developer here: thanks for all your suggestions, I'll be working on them :)
A few FAQs:
1. The OneTab tab persists even if you close your web
browser.
2. If you ever close your OneTab tab, this doesn't lose your tabs. You can always get it back by clicking the blue extension icon.
3. Your tabs are never sent to our servers unless you press the button to 'share as a web page'.
What happens if I click it, close it's list tab, open some new tabs and click it again? Does the old list get overwritten? Is there any way to get it back?
Love it. Just used it to conveniently share a web page of 76+ freely available newspaper archives with fellow researchers who are helping me with a project. This is solving an immediate problem for me. I love it. Thanks!
Thanks a lot for this! Just wanted to point out something and maybe make a suggestion:
I had six windows open each with some tabs related to a specific task. Used OneTab on one window and then tried to use it on another and it looks like the window just closed. Took me a minute to release the OneTab tab was on another window and another to find the right window. Not sure if this needs to be fixed or anything but maybe allowing a OneTab tab on each open window would be less confusing.
As for the suggestion, it would be nice to be able to give each tab group a name instead of just showing the number of tabs. Could be useful on the shared web page as well.
Opening a new tab by holding Control instead of right click->new tab opens the page, decreases the tab count in that group, but leaves the entry on the page. Fixed with a refresh.
Edit: This is not meant to sound discouraging to the developer; I just suspect he solved the wrong problem.
I find it very strange that a tool exists to reduce chrome's memory footprint by closing tabs. This does not seem to be the right solution to any problem I can think of.
If memory consumption is what bugs you, maybe you should use a browser that consumes less memory per open tab.
If the number of open tabs is what bugs you, then you are probably using tabs as temporary bookmarks. There should be tools especially for this job. Some sort of "read-it-later" list comes to mind.
"one-tab" looks like some sort of read-it-later list that is labeled as a memory saver. Fascinating.
I use a tool like session buddy for example. I primarily use it when I want to organize/links and make the group quickly accessible.. something most bookmarking programs that don't do right. My immediate use case is, OneTab helps reduce the day to day clutter. I'll have my same browser open for weeks at a time, and just makes it easier to manage from day to day.
You can make the same argument. OneTab is a partial solution whereas using another browser which consumes less memory per open tab isn't a solution at all if you want to use Chrome's features.
That's exactly what it is, a read-it-later list. Browsers don't have a good mechanism for that. Not open tabs, which continually consume memory and CPU resources until you get around to them. And not bookmarks either, which are meant for permanent storage, subject to the clunkiness of navigating a folder structure and explicitly performing every add and delete operation.
So in a sense, One-Tab is indeed a memory saver. Not by really reducing Chrome's memory usage, but by plugging the workflow gap that induces users to use Chrome in a way that consumes enormous amounts of memory. (And the selling tactic sure worked, seeing as there's 200 posts on it here in two hours.)
This and lost input in text-boxes is what it lacks to become useful. Also localStorage is limited and this limit cannot be raised, so someone with enormous amount of memory could prove that OneTab is not reliable, contrary to how it is advertised. To fix that it has to use indexedDB and require unlimitedStorage. (Well, we still require enough free space on disk, but it's the same with localStorage.)
Anyone willing to record screencast how OneTab fails at handling million tabs? :)
The install button has to call the chrome.webstore.install API for instant installation, so if it were a hovered link it would not show anything particularly descriptive.
Looks great and I would definitely put it to use, but on Ubuntu with Chrome 22.0.1229.94, I get "Installation failed either due to cancelling the dialog box or because you already have the extension installed" when installing from your web page. When I try to do it from the web store, I get "There was a problem adding the item to Chrome. Please refresh the page and try again".
I love the simplicity. At the risk of adding complexity, there's this Chrome extension I used to love and use all the time called JoinTabs, that unfortunately started shipping with some nasty malware. It did this very simple thing of collecting all the tabs in all your open windows and putting them in one window. Since OneTab only seems to work on the tabs in a single window, is there any way to combine these useful features?
Isn't 95% reduction claim a bit too bold? It is widely known that standard measurement of Google Chrome's memory consumption with task manager is wrong because it doesn't take data sharing between processes into consideration. How was the 95% figure produced?
This is the same question I have. Memory usage is notoriously tricky to measure because of shared libraries and the like. So a simple figure like 95% doesn't end up meaning much at the end of the day. chrome://memory may be a good place to start.
Ninja edit: note the disclaimer at the bottom of chrome://memory:
(Note: Due to memory sharing between processes,
summing memory usage does not give total memory usage.)
He has 21 tabs opened, by reducing it to 1 tab, he has saved 20/21 lots of memory, ~~ 95% saved.
Assumptions: each tab uses same memory; no shared memory (or shared memory equally divided between all tabs), every user has around 20 tabs open given the first 2 assumptions hold true.
I got 16GB+ RAM for a reason: To use it. Nice extension, but I'd rather have the stuff in memory instead of reading it from disk on need. Haven't happened in years that I felt the need to free RAM.
Suggestion: could you make the list flow upwards when the user clicks the X to close a tab? This way the user doesn't have to move the mouse to close multiple tabs quickly. Basically it's the same behavior as Chrome, just vertical.
Thats alright. A single chrome tab is regularly >150MiB, and thats for plain sites!
(edit: this seems to measure the size of the installer binary. I think you wanted to link https://areweslimyet.com/ which shows Firefox using <512MiB with 30 tabs for popular websites open)
You just link to a graph showing the sizes of the Firefox binary on various platforms across different versions. It has nothing to do with RAM.
Firefox definitely wins out in memory with more tabs because Chrome's process-per-tab model accumulates overhead for every process, while Firefox's tabs are more lean.
Chrome actually already has this built in, too. If you close your window, you'll get a browsable "x tabs" entry in your browsing history. An additional 20-30 MB of memory could be saved by not installing this extension.
So do bookmarks. And this overlap becomes obvious as people inevitably ask for Chrome or OneTab to allow them to cluster tabs by topic/project -- because a linear scan is never going to 'work' for people who leave enough tabs open that it becomes a 'problem'.
The underlying problem here is workflow.
People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will or not; that's another discussion.) And they're not bookmarking, because bookmarking begs organizational overhead, which leads to its own mess. (neither tags nor folders are great or sufficient)
And who knows if a bookmark will still point to the content you intended, when you finally get back to it?
So the problem is ultimately that bookmarking is broken, both for quick reference and longer-term storage. So why not fix that?
Why not a system where bookmarking a site saves a copy to a (cloud-stored) cache. [1] And then searches can be done on the content in that cache. And hits can be served both from the cache, and a simultaneously downloaded 'live' result, available with a toggle. [2]
So that one can bookmark a brag-post about a neat jquery-enabled dropdown list and not have to worry about categorizing it, nor whether or not it will be there in a year, and be confident that they can refer to it again with a simple search of any of the key words that occur to them. [3]
[1] Because one can never know what will happen to content online (changes, broken links, takedowns, etc) and doing a federated search across thousands of bookmarked sites looking for 'jquery dropdown' is going to be a nightmare.
[2] Room here for a great feature of non-trivial difficulty: change-detection and display of diffs (if any) rendered in-line.
[3] Or even searching by meta-data such as date-of-bookmark, location or source-device. "That thing I was reading on my phone last spring, when I was stuck in Chicago on business..." can be surprisingly useful when searching.
Thinking on this more, the cloud-stored cache would wind up eventually being a subset of google's whole-internet-database. From which you could run a pretty awesome search service.
Because it wouldn't consist of randomly spidered or submitted noise. It would only be things explicitly identified as useful or interesting.
And you could rank by how many people bookmarked it, when the bookmarks happened, who they are, etc -- alongside already-useful PageRank attributes.
It'd be like +1 data, but the +1 would have meaning behind it.
Until the SEO optimizers and bot nets themselves start bookmarking their own spammy noise in this cache too. Then we're back to the usual arms race of trying to identify quality content and providers pointing to other quality content and providers while all the junk vendors are trying to masquerade as quality.
Is there a lot of SEO that relies on 'like' or '+1' spam?
Because that's the more apt comparison. Particularly when you consider the implementation of even a trivial 'karma' system.
The very creation of a network of mannequins would seem to run counter to the big goal of most SEO (traffic, now) as the mannequins would require months-to-years of seemingly-valid traffic of build-up to become relevant and then a very slow-and-cautious release of bookmarks to the desired spam to even attempt to avoid detection and thus nullification of all the preceding effort.
And the user-expectation of such a search would be heavily weighted to prior personal activity [1]. So even if mannequins were successfully pumping bookmarks to promote some site that just scraped stack-exchange, if you and I were bookmarking stack-exchange, we should always get the real links bubbling to the top.
[1] Yes, this would raise a lot of the same "echo chamber" concerns that people have with Google search, but if it matches the user expectation, I don't see a problem with it.
1. I bookmark lots of sites but rarely go back to them (mainly because it's hard to find what I'm looking for)
2. Sometimes I spend ages looking through my history to find something I remember seeing but didn't bookmark
3. I leave dozens of tabs open because I think I'm going to refer back to them but 50% of the time never do. The order and which window they were grouped with is info I need for context.
So I want -
1. a full-text search of history or bookmarks (I haven't decided which)
2. someway to really quickly convert my open tabs to history/bookmarks
3. A psychic computer that knows when I meant to bookmark something ;-)
I know some extensions can help with this but I've never found the ideal one yet. Suggestions appreciated.
Tracking history would bound right into the 'creepy' range of data collection IMO. But if you were fine with that, it's not hard to imagine such a solution tracking how much time you spent on a given page and using that to make an educated guess that you 'meant' to bookmark it. Or at least weight search results accordingly.
Though the logistics of cloud-storing every single page every user visits would quickly become non-trivial.
And your want #2 seems like a simple UI task. IE already has/had a "bookmark all open tabs"-style menu option -- and I thought the others did too, but I'm not seeing it at the moment.
It's only creepy if it's retained or used against my wishes. In a fantasy world of free data storage, the ability to have a complete history of my life and an ability to search it instantly is incredibly useful. And yes - incredibly dangerous but I'd like the option.
In passing, one reason bookmarking is broken is that "infinite pages" usually don't return you to where you were, as they should, but to the top of the page.
"Infinite pages" are also breaking search. Google finds a hit but you die of boredom before you can actually scroll down that far....
I wouldn't be too quick to blame Chrome. What if each open background tab is running a computation/upload that requires the DOM? What if you're listening to music in the background? Point is, Chrome can't just arbitrarily decide to pause execution and free up memory for background tabs.
Me, I'm a documentation-holic. I need to have all the references for whatever project I'm working on a single click away. Sometimes that will be working with a very specific library, so there's no point in replacing my entire bookmarks bar with all the documentation links for that. I'd normally just leave everything in tabs, and when I run out of memory when I need to launch a memory-heavy app, I'd go to Chrome's Task Manager and kill those tabs. So this is a godsend for me.
There are very few cases where I actually want tabs running in the background, and I'd be happy to add those cases to a whitelist in exchange for Chrome not eating my computer.
But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.
If something like that was implemented, I would hope that it would be turned off by default and hidden away under the "here be dragons" section of Chrome's settings.
It should be noted that Chrome has a built-in "Bookmark All Tabs" button which will bookmark all tabs in the window into a folder... This extension doesn't seem to add any functionality on top of that.
I sorely miss a "save all open tabs into one bookmark file".
End of the day: save it to your project folder where all other project files live. Later when you work on the project again: double click to reopen all your tabs.
"Bookmark All Tabs" is nearly there, but I also tend to forget about it if I don't see it.
For instance, your workflow doesn't work for me because "bookmark" in my life pretty much means "lose this page in my junk drawer of pages that I'll probably never read again, but I might if I'm ever stranded on an island with nothing but my cached bookmarks."
So I have a completely different workflow that you'd probably find equally extraneous, but it works for me.
Agreed. There is no bonus here. Now if you can hot switch between tabs, or rather use some key shortcuts to better manage the switching, that would bee good.
I wouldn't mind having a side tray or list of temporary bookmarks that I could easily add to, restore from, or remove. Then I would have 3 or 4 active tabs and about 15 inactive tabs and could swap between them easily.
I know it is possible with shift + cmd + D, as one commenter pointed out, to bookmark all tabs temporarily but that would get cumbersome if you were constantly changing out tabs.
Not sure why I can't figure this out, but how can I just place one tab into the list? When I click on the icon everything gets collapsed and then I have to open each individual page (or all of them at once).
297 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadA bit of feedback: I was just typing this comment and hit the button, obviously the comment was lost and had to type it again. Would be great if if checked for focused inputs or textareas or something before closing that tab, or that it restores the tabs them with the content.
Another idea I can think of is to "close" all the tabs that are NOT the one you currently are in, or "close" all the tabs on the right of the current one.
Anyway, thanks
Would it not be more secure and safer to render this on some sort of local page?
Don't really see the need for this information to go to a third party server.
> Your tab URLs are never transmitted or disclosed to either the OneTab developers or any other party, and icons for tab URL domains are generated by Google. The only exception to this is if you intentionally click on our 'share as a web page' feature that allows you to upload your list of tabs into a web page in order to share them with others. Tabs are never shared unless you specifically use the 'share as a web page' button.
The only way the one-tab servers know about your tabs is if you click to 'share as a web page', which transmits your tabs to our servers to create a web page you can share with others.
Apologies.
Which information is sent to OneTab?
A few FAQs:
1. The OneTab tab persists even if you close your web browser. 2. If you ever close your OneTab tab, this doesn't lose your tabs. You can always get it back by clicking the blue extension icon. 3. Your tabs are never sent to our servers unless you press the button to 'share as a web page'.
What happens if I click it, close it's list tab, open some new tabs and click it again? Does the old list get overwritten? Is there any way to get it back?
If you accidentally close your OneTab tab, it will reappear when you click the blue extension icon or when you restart your web browser.
I had six windows open each with some tabs related to a specific task. Used OneTab on one window and then tried to use it on another and it looks like the window just closed. Took me a minute to release the OneTab tab was on another window and another to find the right window. Not sure if this needs to be fixed or anything but maybe allowing a OneTab tab on each open window would be less confusing.
As for the suggestion, it would be nice to be able to give each tab group a name instead of just showing the number of tabs. Could be useful on the shared web page as well.
Thanks again!
Opening a new tab by holding Control instead of right click->new tab opens the page, decreases the tab count in that group, but leaves the entry on the page. Fixed with a refresh.
I find it very strange that a tool exists to reduce chrome's memory footprint by closing tabs. This does not seem to be the right solution to any problem I can think of.
If memory consumption is what bugs you, maybe you should use a browser that consumes less memory per open tab.
If the number of open tabs is what bugs you, then you are probably using tabs as temporary bookmarks. There should be tools especially for this job. Some sort of "read-it-later" list comes to mind.
"one-tab" looks like some sort of read-it-later list that is labeled as a memory saver. Fascinating.
So in a sense, One-Tab is indeed a memory saver. Not by really reducing Chrome's memory usage, but by plugging the workflow gap that induces users to use Chrome in a way that consumes enormous amounts of memory. (And the selling tactic sure worked, seeing as there's 200 posts on it here in two hours.)
Anyone willing to record screencast how OneTab fails at handling million tabs? :)
If the extension install is not working for you, it should start working later today once Google's webstore servers have updated
1. bookmark all tabs ⇧⌘D
2. in the file dialog create a new folder e.g. "foo"
3. (later) with Bookmarks > foo menu open, select "Open All Bookmarks in New Window"
Voilà
Thanks for sharing, though!
Ninja edit: note the disclaimer at the bottom of chrome://memory:
Assumptions: each tab uses same memory; no shared memory (or shared memory equally divided between all tabs), every user has around 20 tabs open given the first 2 assumptions hold true.
To me, the 95% is a magic number.
I refuse to compromise on functionality because Chrome can't get its memory deal together.
(edit: this seems to measure the size of the installer binary. I think you wanted to link https://areweslimyet.com/ which shows Firefox using <512MiB with 30 tabs for popular websites open)
Firefox definitely wins out in memory with more tabs because Chrome's process-per-tab model accumulates overhead for every process, while Firefox's tabs are more lean.
The underlying problem here is workflow.
People are leaving tabs open as a reminder of things to which they intend to return. (Regardless of whether they will or not; that's another discussion.) And they're not bookmarking, because bookmarking begs organizational overhead, which leads to its own mess. (neither tags nor folders are great or sufficient)
And who knows if a bookmark will still point to the content you intended, when you finally get back to it?
So the problem is ultimately that bookmarking is broken, both for quick reference and longer-term storage. So why not fix that?
Why not a system where bookmarking a site saves a copy to a (cloud-stored) cache. [1] And then searches can be done on the content in that cache. And hits can be served both from the cache, and a simultaneously downloaded 'live' result, available with a toggle. [2]
So that one can bookmark a brag-post about a neat jquery-enabled dropdown list and not have to worry about categorizing it, nor whether or not it will be there in a year, and be confident that they can refer to it again with a simple search of any of the key words that occur to them. [3]
[1] Because one can never know what will happen to content online (changes, broken links, takedowns, etc) and doing a federated search across thousands of bookmarked sites looking for 'jquery dropdown' is going to be a nightmare.
[2] Room here for a great feature of non-trivial difficulty: change-detection and display of diffs (if any) rendered in-line.
[3] Or even searching by meta-data such as date-of-bookmark, location or source-device. "That thing I was reading on my phone last spring, when I was stuck in Chicago on business..." can be surprisingly useful when searching.
Because it wouldn't consist of randomly spidered or submitted noise. It would only be things explicitly identified as useful or interesting.
And you could rank by how many people bookmarked it, when the bookmarks happened, who they are, etc -- alongside already-useful PageRank attributes.
It'd be like +1 data, but the +1 would have meaning behind it.
The very creation of a network of mannequins would seem to run counter to the big goal of most SEO (traffic, now) as the mannequins would require months-to-years of seemingly-valid traffic of build-up to become relevant and then a very slow-and-cautious release of bookmarks to the desired spam to even attempt to avoid detection and thus nullification of all the preceding effort.
And the user-expectation of such a search would be heavily weighted to prior personal activity [1]. So even if mannequins were successfully pumping bookmarks to promote some site that just scraped stack-exchange, if you and I were bookmarking stack-exchange, we should always get the real links bubbling to the top.
[1] Yes, this would raise a lot of the same "echo chamber" concerns that people have with Google search, but if it matches the user expectation, I don't see a problem with it.
1. I bookmark lots of sites but rarely go back to them (mainly because it's hard to find what I'm looking for)
2. Sometimes I spend ages looking through my history to find something I remember seeing but didn't bookmark
3. I leave dozens of tabs open because I think I'm going to refer back to them but 50% of the time never do. The order and which window they were grouped with is info I need for context.
So I want -
1. a full-text search of history or bookmarks (I haven't decided which)
2. someway to really quickly convert my open tabs to history/bookmarks
3. A psychic computer that knows when I meant to bookmark something ;-)
I know some extensions can help with this but I've never found the ideal one yet. Suggestions appreciated.
Though the logistics of cloud-storing every single page every user visits would quickly become non-trivial.
And your want #2 seems like a simple UI task. IE already has/had a "bookmark all open tabs"-style menu option -- and I thought the others did too, but I'm not seeing it at the moment.
https://kippt.com http://pinboard.in
Pinboard already has archiving, Kippt archiving is in beta.
Still, there's room for improvement.
"Infinite pages" are also breaking search. Google finds a hit but you die of boredom before you can actually scroll down that far....
Me, I'm a documentation-holic. I need to have all the references for whatever project I'm working on a single click away. Sometimes that will be working with a very specific library, so there's no point in replacing my entire bookmarks bar with all the documentation links for that. I'd normally just leave everything in tabs, and when I run out of memory when I need to launch a memory-heavy app, I'd go to Chrome's Task Manager and kill those tabs. So this is a godsend for me.
But as long as no browser does that, OP's option looks like a huge timesaver for me.
End of the day: save it to your project folder where all other project files live. Later when you work on the project again: double click to reopen all your tabs.
"Bookmark All Tabs" is nearly there, but I also tend to forget about it if I don't see it.
For instance, your workflow doesn't work for me because "bookmark" in my life pretty much means "lose this page in my junk drawer of pages that I'll probably never read again, but I might if I'm ever stranded on an island with nothing but my cached bookmarks."
So I have a completely different workflow that you'd probably find equally extraneous, but it works for me.
I wouldn't mind having a side tray or list of temporary bookmarks that I could easily add to, restore from, or remove. Then I would have 3 or 4 active tabs and about 15 inactive tabs and could swap between them easily.
I know it is possible with shift + cmd + D, as one commenter pointed out, to bookmark all tabs temporarily but that would get cumbersome if you were constantly changing out tabs.
Open-sourced here: https://github.com/jsvine/tab-bankrupter
As the name suggests, it's aimed more at the mental — rather than computational — weight of tabs.