Edit, you are at the point where you need a search engine for your tabs, you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs.
If I may ask, on what basis did you close all those tabs, did you read them all? What will you do with the rest?
Yes please! I've recently got interested in Recoll, which might not know what a tab is, but does search web history.
> you might as well close them and use the internet directly instead of cached in your own tabs
Caching is valuable. URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.
The Vimium extension for Firefox also happens to provide basic filtering of open tabs, although I've never tried it with anywhere near 1600. YMMV.
Other commenters have already mentioned Tree Style Tabs and similar extensions which can aid in grouping and managing things efficiently.
> URLs bit rot and their contents change. If you have a browser session that's old enough, the RAM contents are a saving grace.
This is a serious problem in my experience. To that end, Zotero is an invaluable research tool with browser extensions for (among other things) taking a snapshot of an open webpage. Its library exists externally to your browser though which might add friction to your workflow.
Can self host using
https://github.com/pirate/ArchiveBox
or pay a service like pinboard.
I can type github in the filter and then jump to the one tab I search or close all the tabs I don't need.
Also I'm not sure if it would be helpful for websites like github where I disable vimium to be able to use the website's hotkey functionality.
It's frustrating to hear anyone struggle with that in this day and age. I've been there myself. But there are technical solutions.
I haven't had to deal with tab anxiety in years.
My browser stack is Tree Style Tabs, Session Manager, Multiple Tab Handler, and Tab Group Plus.
I regularly wrangle clusters of tabs.
If I have a tree of tabs that is spawned from an HN story or something, I can drag it into a new window, and then export it to a tgmg file from Tab Group Manager, put the tab collection file in my repository, and put a reference to it in my knowledge base. I might also embed it in an rtfd file.
If I don't need that kind of structure, I can just use shift or ctrl to bulk select the tabs I want, and paste the urls into my knowledge base. And effortlessly restore the list of urls to a new session when I want.
I'm able to re-create not just specific urls, but the context that I browsed them in.
If it is months or years later, it is really helpful to have a tree or list of urls, and maybe some notes. That makes it so much easier re-inhabit my state of mind during that research session.
I doubted whether it would be worth perusing, but I'm really glad I did. I love being able to recall research threads I started years earlier.
Unfortunately, it takes some effort to get set up to digest lots of tabs. I wish that this was recognized as more of a problem. It is so idiosyncratic that we are using open browser tabs as a temporary database to store lists of urls. Browsers should combine history, tab management, and bookmarks. It makes no sense anymore for those features to be separate from each other.
- 0: Personal Links I must check every day; for example HN, Reddit and other accounts
- 1: Links I need every day for my work, like Slack
- !: Links which require immediate action (TODOs)
- W: Any links I actively follow - those are actually tabs. Under that, I keep folders for different issue topics.
Also I use the emacs org mode to keep a list of TODO links.
I figured that bookmarks, downloaded files, and open tabs for more than a day are mostly causing me remorse for not being able to ever get to those again. So I focus on tasks and use search to open what I need.
It's also fragile at browser startup, sometimes the list is empty or the tabs are in a flat list. When I switch to bookmarks and then back, it's fixed.
So, generally very fragile. Which is annoying since the CONCEPT is so essential.
Personally I only keep open tabs that I am actively working in, if I have more than ~15 I get less productive since I have to hunt through to fine the one I need. Several times a day I just clear out all my tabs aside from a couple pinned ones.
I mean, how can you not get lost? Do you realize the thing you are looking for is on tab 248 before lookin it up again?
At that point these are not tabs anymore they are a directory or a history. I think using tabs for that is totally inadequate.
Unfortunately, browsers tend to be lacking in that department. They have a list of closed tabs to restore, but limited to a ridiculously small number like 10. They have a bookmark system but it doesn't save the state of the page like a tab. They have a history but it fills up with crap too quickly.
An unlimited, easily searchable tab close history could make keeping lots of tabs unnecessary. It is much easier closing a tab when you know it won't be lost.
You're onto something here. I have a lot of tabs because it's a history of one thought to another. It's not just a set of tabs, it's a sequence of locations. Keeping them open is how I can remember to go back to them, how I can keep my state in them, and more.
I can envision a much better UX where your tabs become some sort of history entry where they are frozen in time (serialized to disk) and can be rehydrated. And you can easily scrub back to them even once they've been unloaded from memory and frozen. And you can create different sessions for different things, a window/session for today's HNing, one for today's work, one for play, etc. And you can reach back into historical sessions to load their state. And merge another day's session into today's because it had some outstanding tabs you wanted to get back to. And there'd be good ways to visualize this.
I know some things like tab groups and tab sessions exist. I personally use Firefox with tree tabs to get something like this. But there's more UX thought that could be put into it instead of just wondering why someone would want a bunch of tabs.
One of the main reasons I'm reluctant to close my browser and trash my tabs is because the exact sequence of tabs, what's open, the order they are in, the state on each one (like being paginated to page 58 in some in-browser book scan UI) is a snapshot of by brain and digital "desktop" at that moment. You're right, browsers do very little to help.
Mobile Firefox already has this. Desktop Firefox might have a version of it, but I'm not sure (sometimes I see a loading spinner on a gray background for a while).
I think you're totally on the right track. What I envision is the ability to drag a tree of tabs into a bookmarks folder to get back to it at another time.
Fundamentally tabs, bookmarks and history entries are all just references to URLs (with a bunch of metadata) anyway. It's weird to me that the UX of these hasn't really converged all that much yet.
For me it works like “memory palace” technique. Driven by addiction a graph structure with multiple root node starts to build up so I can follow traces of thoughts and contexts among tabs and windows.
IIRC people switched from IE to FF because IE had no concept of tabs.
Firefox has a built-in search engine for tab titles and URLs in its omnibar, which helps.
I came here to complain that, actually, you can't.
Or rather, it's surprisingly complicated to export a simple list of current tab URLs to a plain old text file.
You need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.
Why can't we just have:
about:tabs
... which is nothing but a one URL per line, text listing of all of our currently open tabs ? How simple and nice and useful would that be ?
Go searching for "how can I export tabs" or "how can I save tab urls" and you'll see thousands of people trying (usually in vain) to achieve this very, very simple thing.
about:tabs would be the easiest thing in the world.
Thanka for volunteering! Can you link me to your patch?
Consider this an official, public bounty. Expires 2020-12-31.
I don't have time to write this patch but I especially don't have time for the lame, tired suggestion that FOSS cannot be critiqued by anyone but the authors.
(The bounty is $1500 if you "jhardy54" write, and have accepted, the patch. Consider the extra $500 compensation for this unexpected loss of smug, righteous indignation.)
(I want to clarify because I've had a patch open for 4 months that's received no attention from maintainers.)
1. Tab groups: I have been an extensive user of tab groups in the past (when it was native in Firefox); it’s very helpful if your tabs cleave nicely into less than a dozen or so projects/themes, and you have no more than a few hundred tabs.
2. Tree style tabs: The extensions I’ve tried tend to be very slow and non-ergonomic for my use case.
3. The % trick: Didn’t know this; thanks!
4. Bookmarks: Yes, but browser bookmarks tend to be where information goes to die. It’s also very hard to organize in a useful way, or attach notes to it. How about some of the ideas in my parent comment, as a spiritual extension of bookmarks?
5. Amna: Sibling comment by @catchmeifyoucan. This is the first I’m hearing of Amna; seems quite interesting at first glance https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23780781
6. One-tab: Interesting, wasn’t aware!
(I’ll keep updating this comment instead of branching off my responses; hopefully useful at least as a distilled collection of suggestions)
Try Sidebery:
And then you can organise them somewhat into groups ?
I use tree style tabs with some custom theming to make it take up only enough room on the left to show the site favicon. It then opens up when I mouse-over.
I can't notice it when I have 10-100 tabs open. It's unbearable when I have 1000 (which happens more often than I would like to admit).
It should be noted, though, that my web browsing machine is an early 2013 MacBook Pro with 8GB of RAM; It's possible I wouldn't have noticed on a faster machine.
For example, there are many solutions to auto-suspend old tabs so they unload from memory.
I've tried lots of browser addons/extensions and tools over the years, but none offered proper salvation. I have a design in my head of what kind of tool I'd like, but like everyone else I have no time between work and everything else to build it.
Long ago I used to blame the tools, but these days I realize it's me. I put minimum 32 GB RAM into my boxes, and it's because of VMs and browsers.
To use % search, open a new tab and type "% stack" to find the tabs visiting stackoverflow.
Minimalism and other philosophies don't really translate over into digital spaces. I have as much "space" as I want and nothing gets in the way of anything else. I see no problems with my status quo since 2003.
I have saved my session files every couple weeks ever since Opera introduced tabs and sessions in version 5 back in the early 2000s. With these I made some plots back in 2017: http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2017.png and http://superkuh.com/number-of-tabs-vs-date-2003.png
I REALLY miss TabMixPlus, though... (a FF extension broken with the purge of XUL from Quantum)
This works great at home. At work I’m constantly fishing for which window some bit of information I currently need is in (though I’m not sure one window would fix that any better). So even MMMV.
Plus there’s whatever feature or bug fixes you were working on before that all started, and the research you were doing for a ticket you want to propose, and you have to get back to those when you’re done.
And somewhere there’s a window with this HN post you have to find again in order to respond.
'Junk Hoarders' -> 'Tab Hoarders'.
Maybe find a way to truly organize bookmarks and find a good bookmark manager plugin that lets you 'get to your stuff' as you need it.
Treetabs is useful for that kind of workflow, but very slow. I also use panorama tab groups.
No REPL, but hierarchical lists of tabs organized by domain, with the option to close en masse. Also shows duplicates.
I also have dozens of things I keep an eye on, so there's no way tabs across the top would help me at all.
Main things I find useful about TST:
- You lose horizontal space, not vertical. This is great because you can now read the titles. I also do some magic to get rid of the tabs across the top, so I get some space back vertically.
- You can collapse a given tree.
- You can suspend a tab or a tree. Let's face it, most of your 1600 tabs do not need to be using resources. With suspend you keep the title and place so you don't lose it from your brain, but it doesn't sit there and eat RAM and CPU.
- You can style the sidebar to your liking. I like to make sure mail and slack tabs are their own colour, because they tend to be project roots from which many other tabs are spawned, and when they're uncollapsed I want to visually separate a set of tabs from the next. I also highlight the current tab.
This is what I do when I need to look something back up and it works pretty great honestly.
It seems like it might be a difference between Firefox's behavior and Chrome's though, because any time I've used chrome the suggestions it fed me were autocomplete results from google search.
The great thing about Firefox's "Awesome bar" as I think it is (or was) called is that it looks through your history and ranks things based on frequency / recency of visiting.
So if I want to look up something, there's a good chance I can just start typing the word I remember from the page title and it will pull up the result for me.
- Sometimes I remember when I closed a tab more than when I opened a tab but its organized around open-time
- Once I start searching, I lose the context o time. I have a rough idea of terms and time and want to find something.
Firefox does let you select multiple tabs and bookmark your selection as a folder, it also lets you expand a folder of bookmarks as tabs. I don't use either feature though, as my tab use tends to be more around not closing a tab until I'm done with the task associated with it, by which time I've opened another dozen and working out which I can close is too much effort.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
If you just find yourself unable to close stuff you have read once and will never touch again you need to train yourself to use your tools more effectively.
If you strap enough engines to something it qualifies as a jet including a bike but it doesn't make it a reasonable means of transport.
I have a different group for any 'context' I often return to (or even a dump of 'researching random thing I may one day come back to'). Then I have one window open and I switch between contexts as needed and pick up from where I left off.
But for me at least, I've realized it's less about keeping content for later, and acts more akin to the conversational bridge "well, if it's important I'll remember it later" -- It just gives me permission to let the tabs go and move on, with a pretense that I'll maybe come back to them :)
An interface such as pearltrees would be a pretty good start, with visible links from topic to topic. The ability to collapse a group and all of its children, close a topic, annotate some tabs, full-text search, and maybe have them open again at a later date.
Maybe I'll get around to developing this at some point.
For instance, I am currently looking for accommodation, in addition to the usual stuff. I tend to open a (panorama) tab group for each sector or website, then a tab for each apartment, plus maybe a few more tabs for each to check on the map, pictures, contact forms, etc. I do not do that activity all the time, but need to leave that open to come back to it. I actually created a Firefox profile for this, but I'm using it to reply to this thread, so maybe the real issue is my with my ability to concentrate...
There is also at least a Chrome extension that lets you filter and close tabs by domain (name escapes me).
Personally, I usually prune a window with many open tabs, usually created after a search for a solution or workaround for a bug, down to the initial search(es) and any useful results, then bookmark any remaining tabs into a folder, in the hope that a future search for the same topic might provoke an auto-suggestion, and in the usually vain hope that I might someday curate all the folders for related topics into a coherent hierarchy.
Instead I have history that searches across all my work (news, python development, shopping, etc) and if I want to pause on some of it, without just leaving the tabs open, I have to manually delete and recreate the bookmarks to represent my current state.
If it's about train of thoughts: for each tab try formulating and writing down a question that came to your mind while reading it.
That is the creative takeaway and it might ease your mind enough to close the tab.
You know that you can bookmark and re-visit pages right?
FOMO just leads to anxiety.
Maybe we need some kind of page mark and index system?
The default interface sucks once you have more than 50 tabs. I wish there were easy REPL-ish programmatic access to the list/dict of tabs (so I could filter out all GitHub tabs, or close all stackoverflow tabs, etc) and that was a first class citizen in the browser interface. This is one reason I’m really excited about the Nyxt browser.
PS: Part of it might be FOMO, but part of it is also that these links represent certain threads of thought/exploration and are like bookmarks of things to revisit at a later time. Yes, in principle I could export the list of tabs to a text file, and begin anew, but that’s not a fully satisfactory solution. I think we need tools & interfaces to better (more holistically) accommodate people’s intellectual workflows; what we have today is geared much more towards consumption.
As an example: why can’t we easily group tabs into projects and have bidirectional sync between the browser and project related resources (Eg: Some markdown/org file, or sync with Evernote/Notion/Roam, etc) so that whenever I resume working on the project, I get a warm start with the context mapped out (continuing from the previous session). And I want a much tighter relationship between my tabs and my project notes (akin to bibliography of references), including annotations on webpages, etc. If we are to use the web more effectively, the ecosystem surrounding browsers needs to grow up and help us get there.