to help manage this i created a "speed dial" extension and use it basically as a visual bookmark manager. the advantage to tabs in a list is that they are easy to reference visually, and like any bookmark can be sorted and arranged into folders. for example i have one for technical references, various research topics, etc that i plan to come back to. and its easy to pop one off the list to maintain them. check it out if youre curious, its open source!

https://github.com/conceptualspace/yet-another-speed-dial

Those of you trying to curate large amounts of link should get together and create a public index of all that content. You could call the site yoohoo or something ;-)

I unironically think social bookmarking is a missing product. Not because it doesn't exist, but because nothing has gained enough mindshare and momentum to be dominant and widely used.

StumbleUpon used to be a kind of answer to this. I'd love to have it back, particularly if the contents could be curated (eg "show me a random link which has been featured on the front page of HN or lobste.rs in the last month")

If somebody can figure out a note/link app that becomes as easy to manage when you're adding your first note as when you're adding your thousandth note then such services will stop dying out.

Yes, I loved that era of the web!

delicio.us was pretty great in it’s day

Yes! One of the other comments got to the crux of this: nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for this. I think it's a shame.

i don't think any of the things I've liked that found a sustainable business model remained the way I liked them either

The problem is not to be dominant, it is that there was no money to be made in this type of website. These sites come and go, it is very difficult to monetize them.

Agreed entirely. I guess I saw the two things as linked - if you get enough network effects, there must be some way to make money - but perhaps Twitter has shown us that this is not the case.

I think it's great that there's no giant making money on top of this concept. It lets people do whatever they want to store and share links :)

Yes but it means there is no one thing that all the people I want to follow all use. Everyone ends up in their own sandbox. Network effects are really useful and positive sum, I think.

And there are very few things like Wikipedia that both have the benefit of being dominant and not monetized. Are there any other examples at all?

I’m very close to having an old Delicious style site ready. Do you think people would pay $1 a month?

Not at first, at least, in my opinion, if crowdsourcing is what makes it useful. If the network effects are what makes a product useful, a subscription fee pushes against the growth of that network.

Yeah, what I'm foreseeing is public and private links, tagging and the ability to search for links by page description, tags and user. The subscription fee would mainly be for hosting costs and an eventual commensurate salary. Even if the site were to gain traction I wouldn't be interested in selling ads based on user base size.

I'm willing to incur some hosting costs for a beta period but I won't fund the service for long without revenue if the hosting costs are prohibitive as I'm not really interested in selling it later for someone else to monetize with ads.

Depends what you get beside storing links I suppose (cached version of content, super smart search function not limited to og: and metadata tags, super privacy, bridges to-do app maybe ?, android app + ff ext. + chr. ext. + apple thingies for ubiquitous access to links, etc.). I could see myself dropping ~10bucks a year like for bitwarden.

How is it different from https://pinboard.in (besides $1/ mo)?

Beyond some differing features and interface, there wouldn't be much difference.

They pay pinboard enough for idlewords (HN user) to live off it, and buy Delicious when they went broke.

Delicious once sold to yahoo! For 15 million, bought for 35k.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14463102

Delicious spending twice as much as pinboard in running costs in 2017.

There are some detailed blog posts from the time about running costs somewhere.

I already do: raindrop.io

so they need a different model for funding

Folksonomies was one of the terms used back in the day when delicio.us was one of the current hotnesses. I still use pinboard and it's handy. But, like RSS, this sort of thing mostly appeals to researchers/analysts/journalists/etc. The average person mostly doesn't care about saving and even loosely organizing a lot of information.

Pinterest?

I don't think so? But Pinterest makes no sense to me so maybe it is this and I just don't get it?

Isn’t that Reddit ?

Nope.

Del.icio.us was a big deal ~15 years ago. I made a Mac client for it (Pukka) that sold pretty well and the service was much talked-about in tech circles, not just for researchers. This was in the early era of social networking as a whole ("Web 2.0") as well as this idea of "wisdom of crowds" for emergent context to bubble up from public tagging.

Yep. I was there for and loved all that era. But nobody ever figured out a sustainable business model for it. Pity.

I know it's not exactly what you're describing but a somewhat comparable option is https://www.are.na

Friend of mine is always surprised when we discuss something and 20 seconds later I send him an article I once read about it. He has asked multiple times what I use to store all these links. It's Google. I just use Google to find the article again based on what I remember from it.

This doesn't always work though and can lead to a frustrating half hour of searching that ends in disappointment.

Even more frustrating when you can't quite remember the content of the article you can't find, although you're sure you found it fascinating when you read it at the time...

I hate it when that happens, more often that not i remember the visuals of the site, then i try to find it in my browser history like a sucker.

I have yet to find a solution for this.

One solution is I screenshot all the sites i visit, extract their colors, and create a searchable index. Nice side project idea I guess.

Install a web proxy (is Squid a thing anymore? It used to be the proxy server), configure your web browser(s) to use it, and have the proxy save all its content so you know where to search for a "known item search."

Seems like a nice companion to run on a pi-hole.

If I had a dollar for every topic I've read about and found fascinating and can hardly describe with any more detail than that ...

In information retrieval, this is known as a "known item search".

Sue Dumais from Microsoft Research and her team wrote a seminal paper on this entitled "Stuff I've Seen".

It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

> It is surprising that modern browsers innovate so little - for example they do not have a mode that searches only URLs you have previously visited, which would obviously massively help with known item search.

What's worse, they don't have a useful list of those URLs anyway[0], not anymore - both Chrome and Firefox have some ridiculously short and (AFAIK) not configurable window of browsing history. At this point they could do away with the history tab completely, as it's perfectly calibrated to be useless: the links are dropped just as they cross the threshold between "likely still have it open in a tab" and "what was that thing I saw the other day?".

--

[0] - Locally. I'm sure Google has it on their servers, but it's meant to help advertisers, not users.

This. Why does my browser not keep history forever, I surely have space for it? Why doesn’t it archive every page it can? And build a full-text index of every page so that I can be reasonably sure I can lay my hands on something I’ve seen, even if the original is now gone. I can only conclude that the people working on browsers aren’t interested in what goes on in a browser.

It's a truly unbelievable state of affairs. Browsers are THE app, but I cannot even ask nicely to store my own history?

I so badly want an extension to store all my phone and computer browser history, just URLs and Page Titles for all time so I can search it. How does this not exist? Much less be built in... Page text would be even better, but all I know that have attempted this have failed.

Memex solves this problem.

Allows you to search your history or bookmarks by page content, not just title.

https://memex.garden/

> This doesn't always work

The problem is with when it doesn't work: when it's the least convenient and the most irritating. For popular content it doesn't matter if you forget a precise word used there, you'll get to it soon enough. But for specific, niche content - which is the most valuable to me most of the time - even if you get all the keywords right you might not find what you're looking for on Google. The reasons range from the keywords being too generic to the site being no longer online and it's really frustrating when it happens.

OneTab and bookmarks are not an answer because they don't save the content. I tried Joplin + Web Clipper which does, but it works on a single-tab basis, and when I have 200 tabs open sending them all to Joplin manually takes ages... and then Joplin slows down to a crawl when you're done.

I have experienced that for sure.

Reminds me though I have also experienced “I swear there is a word that sounds like “bla” that means xyz” and spend 30+ min trying to find it in dictionaries and it just doesn’t exist. Funny how the mind works.

I've used this website for years, for just that purpose. Can't believe it's still up, actually.

https://chir.ag/projects/tip-of-my-tongue/

didn't there exist a browser toolbar called stumble upon that allowed people to share interesting links

We've re-invented dmoz[1]. Now someone just has to slap AI and blockchain on the idea, and they could raise for a "modern" dmoz.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ

Hoarding data does not have to be a negative thing necessarily. Might I suggest checking out https://archive.org/about/. Create an account and install the browser extension.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/wayback-machine/fp...

WARNING: archiving can be habit forming.

I think this is a great answer to the issue of needing a service to manage archives.

Now the issue to me is how to convince folks it is worthwhile

There is likely no single good answer. Personally I break the issue into the long and short term. Long term (100s 1000s of years) the answer seems somewhat obvious. Preservation of information can be useful to future generations. Short term our societies are experiencing rapid change. Many things are built and soon discarded based on factors other than utility. So preserving the knowledge is useful for the minority of people that found those things useful. Also there is intentional mass truth distortion amplified by technology occurring. Preservation of the original sources of information is the first line of defense against it.

Or Google!

Fellow ADHDr here, also living the many tabs life.

I highly recommend the Sidebery addon (Firefox). Not just tree style tabs, but tree style tabs with customizable panels so you can sort everything out quite tidily. I'm able to manage hundreds of tabs without mess, and prune through them on a weekly basis seeing what needs to be bookmarked or can be safely forgotten.

Delete all the tabs now and watch the world continue.

I don't know if you use firefox and tree-style tabs (unlikely, but far more likely here than anywhere else.) If you do, there's an extension for tree-style tabs (an extension for the extension) called "Fade Old Tabs." It allows you to color tabs based on how long it's been since they were accessed. You do this by setting a age range for tabs to be painted gray. Tabs not accessed since the beginning of that range are panted dark gray, and tabs accessed after the range are not colored at all.

So if you have 700 tabs and 600 of them you haven't opened in a month, you'll see them and it might make a difference in your habits. It also makes it easier to surf your open tabs when you're bored, rather than surfing randomly and adding new tabs.

Thank you for sharing "Fade Old Tabs". I have the same problem with OP and have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows. That is after a big purge I did earlier this year where it was 2000+. Tree Style Tabs crashed a lot before but it has been quite good in recent memory.

I have a hard time closing out what is essentially my thought process to finding a solution or doing research. Along the way I close out dead branches. What remains is either a solution or where I have left off. I think my mental barrier is what it represents: my time capital sunk. The issue is working around this many tabs and managing it; a time sink in itself to fix.

Started documenting completed solutions in Obsidian and I've found that if I can't get over my lazy barrier to even enter it in, it's probably not important. Just have to keep working on improving and refining the way I think and approach this.

> have 1200+ tabs open across 4 firefox windows

does research get you to have so many open? How do you manage it all? I've only just started using Sidebery but I try to keep my tabs at a reasonable 100-200 open.

If OP is anything like me, they 'manage' the old tabs by thinking "Oh that's neat I'll leave it open so I can come back to it' and...never do that.

I fall into this trap as well. My solution to mitigate my tab hoarding has been to set up a blank GitHub repo and use the discussions/issues to just continually post links, descriptions, and notes in a thread format.

Then I can just keep commenting to myself. It seems to help break up topic binges that I go on. Plus I like with GitHub it’s all markdown-based so I can throw images, files and whatever else I need in a session in there to keep it all encompassing.

Ever thought of productizing that idea? Sort of a personal threaded wiki that you can send bookmarks to?

So you'd use git in a similar way you'd use obsidian, just with the ability to sync online and share easily/collaborate.

My solution is to shutdown my PCs every day.

I do this as well.

I have a Python script which I can use to kill all chrome.exe so that next time the machine boots, chrome offers me to restore the tabs which where open before the crash.

I only use this when I know that the tabs are really important and I need to continue using them the next day. Else Chrome starts with a single custom startpage which contains links and as well as views to Jira projects (like a to-do list via the Jira API). And during the day I bookmark all tabs I find important and clean up. But it's usually around 4 windows with each around 10 - 20 tabs which accumulate during the day, in addition to dedicated browser profiles which serve specific purposes, like email or developer consoles.

I do the same thing without Python. ctrl + shift + t opens previous tabs and windows.

Doesn't work for me, Firefox restores tabs from before restart. I could turn it off, but it invariably comes helpful for when Firefox (or the PC) crashes.

My current solution is that, through a stroke of luck and a lot of pent up frustration, I've managed to habituate the following behavior:

WHEN I notice I've been procrastinating for too long, OR I'm getting anxious about so many "open loops" in the browser, OR I lose track of specific tabs I know are open and spend more than two seconds looking for it, THEN I find the last Actually Important tab (usually somewhere between the third and the tenth from the left), right-click on it, select "close tabs to the right", and confirm the closure of 100-200 tabs.

I do this a few times on a typical week; because its habituated, I do it fast enough that the FOMO of "but I actually wanted to read that, and that, and that" doesn't have time to kick in.

I wrote a little webext to help me find tabs in a visual way grouped by window. middle click closes the tab and left click brings the tab you click on to the forefront. It's simple but something I use many times every day.

feel free to try it out:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

I end up not managing it at all and it becomes a second brain. Links also rot when revisiting to recall info which is another problem. I use % in the address bar to find the tab what I'm looking for.

I like exhaustive deep dives so will explore as many sources as I can find, until my attention wanes, or I find a solution.

Have signed up for Readwise beta which will hopefully help me to add a layer to store/consume information before it info gets committed to Obsidian. Other link/article aggregators have not been successful for me as it just becomes another repository to manage.

Will have to look into sidebery, haven't seen that before!

People have hundreds of tabs open at the same time?? I get anxiety if it goes above 12 or 15... The times when I just close them all and start opening firefox with no previous tabs are so relieving to me.

I have started opening new windows based on tasks; everything related to that task is on that window. Once the task is done, I close the window so all the tabs go with it. Quite satisfying to close a window with 30-40 tabs. Chrome also allows naming windows so I name each window according to the task.

This is a valuable reply because it describes my own experience so well. Thank you.

lol a OneTab newbie, eh?

I've used OneTab (and then switched to BetterOneTab). Been using it for about 5 years or so. I have dozens of exported "backup" files, because after a certain amount of saved tabs, the extension stops working. You can't save any new ones. I've lost maybe 100 tabs so far by adding them to OneTab only to discover I was at my limit and nothing got saved. It then stops allowing deletions (they come back after refreshing the extension page). So I have to export my hundreds or even thousands of tabs, uninstall the extension, and then reinstall it. And then I keep hoarding.

I have a real bad case of digital tsundoku. Even as I type this, I have roughly 80 links from HN opened, two dozen or so Twitter tabs, probably 30 YouTube tabs, and then a healthy heap of other miscellaneous sites. I know I will never get through this infinite backlog. Even if I were to squirrel myself away and do nothing but open each tab, digest its contents, and move on to the next, it would probably take me years. And I would be so burnt out I wouldn't be digesting well enough. Plus, most of that information is probably, at least slightly, outdated.

...Oh well, time to open up another dozen 3-hour long YouTube "mini" docs about niche subjects I have no engagement in.

In case anyone else is looking into browser options, I can't recommend https://arc.net/ more highly. I never thought I'd move away from Chrome, but then again, I never considered that they'd gather so much users that they can't make fundamental UX improvements any more without massive friction.

Arc is just better for me in terms of staying organized. Everyone seems to have their own favorite feature, but "Spaces" are the killer feature for me.

Am I seeing this correctly that arc.net doesn't provide any information about this supposed super browser at all and instead just links to a sign-up form where I need to provide my email address? Yeah, no, not doing that.

It hasn't been released officially yet, only as an invite-only preview so I don't think they mind if they turn away users at this point that don't know what they're getting into (an alpha). There are plenty of youtube videos if you're curious about the actual features.

Arc definitely has some features that I really like. Wish they would've released it on other platforms too as I'm not always using my Mac for everything that I do day-to-day.

I have over 24000 frickign tabs on OneTab saved lol

https://tabula.civitat.es/images/2023/01/06/8krQ.png

I may have a problem.

Re... restore all !

i'd be interested in how many are dead links now. i'm nowhere near (hovering around 500 at the moment) and when i frequently do a healthcheck i see that most are already dead. are you archiving (using archive's wayback machine or something?) to ensure they're alive when you need them? for some definition of need lol

Most of these tabs are "Oh these are interesting, I'll save it and read it later this evening by restoring them."

Repeat next morning.

...the restoring part doesn't happen.

Please export the tabs, before one tab crashes on you. I’m amazed you made it till 24k without it crashing, low-k tabs are enough on my laptop to crash it. (Though my laptop is from 2015 so that might also factor in.)

Isn't that 24000 bookmarks and not "tabs" - a tab (to me) means an open tab in the browser.

I mean sure. a "tab" that you've hibernated in the background (on browsers that support it) is just a bookmark as well, realistically speaking.

Except I can hit restore all...

OneTab for me is a solution to my problem:

What ends up there is what I know isn't important enough to bookmark, but I kinda feel like I should read. Having OneTab makes me feel like it's ok to close the tabs, knowing full well I'll never, ever look for most of them again...

It's an comfort blanket.

I know I'm fooling myself, and I'm perfectly happy with that.

My hope at this point is for some AI to analyze my 75.000+ links and tell me what I may have forgotten which I should really be aware of, and give me a summary of it. Possibly even let me know if new discussions on certain technologies have been trending currently on topics which I Ve dealt with.

Yeah, I keep fantasizing about doing a custom indexer for all of my different data for a similar purpose as that... One day...

Interesting idea.... I have been idly working on an web crawler / indexing / organizing system that uses NLP etc to sort of solve the OP's problem(s) - if you don't mind, could you send me an email about your needs? See my HN account for contact info.

I got over tab hoarding by adding a shortcut to onetab to archive the current tab. Now I freely archive the tabs knowing it’s recoverable, problem solved for me.

> adding a shortcut to onetab to archive the current tab

How do you achieve that?

Windows > Tabs every single time. What helped me most was a good window manager:

• A single floating window acting as an opener*

• windows are always arranged in the case of tiling wms.

• In the case of Firefox user.css can help u remove the tab bar entirely. And opening in windows rather than tabs can be configured.

• I built my own window fuzzy searcher for finding windows.

The effect is compulsory need to close windows asap but keep a couple of windows forever that are actually for doing work. In my case :

• newsboat > firefox. • Cmus > firefox. • Aerc > firefox. • Irssi > firefox.

The list goes on and on.

The benefit is this: every job has it’s own window.

Note that still it is 100% the case that when not in “production/building” mode the default is consuming. This setup merely helps heighten awareness to the fact.

Hope it helps!

* lf, ranger, nnn are all good choices.

I do the same, but right now I just keep tabmanager.io on my right screen to show a grid of all my windows. Some which I save for later, e.g. switching between projects.

700 open tabs... Try 7000.... I have tabs all the way back from 2014 open right now on one of my firefox instances (probably have ~15 Firefox windows open across devices rn) which I have migrated between multiple machines along with my user profile, and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now.

> and I'm telling you I'm gonna get to them any day now

I feel this deeply

The compromise I found was just to dump them into my bookmarking service. If I really really need to find that thing again, it's saved somewhere. 99% of the time it's just digital ephemera and I try to let it go and close the tab.

I have 272x tabs open, 170x in my main window. I have been using Tab Session Manager to save and then close windows. Try it, you can always restore the window later.

(the x in the numbers is because the display overflows haha)

How much ram does that take? I find Firefox problematic after around 10 tabs.

Don't know, not enough to cause trouble on my 16GB Mac Mini m1, with 10 other apps open as well.

Firefox doesn't load inactive tabs after a restart. They're just low overhead database entries.

Tab Session Manager is essential, as all of us Firefox users know how bad Firefox is at randomly trashing your tab sessions. I've nearly given myself a heart attack a few times over the years.

I think the zero inbox folks would have a heart attack. Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long!

I usually have max 100 open, but I reboot all the time (for power mgmt reasons) and use OneTab so that seems to solve my hoarding tendencies. That and keeping searchable local notes / using history / bookmarking the really good ones that I'll also never read.

I keep zero inbox at work as much as I can and have a couple of hundred tabs open on various desktops (91 tabs on this mobile alone; far more on desktop).

To me they're just different organisational methods that work well in different contexts.

> Impressive you can maintain the tab state that long!

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m... is absolutely crucial.

Very impressive.

I think it could be solved better browsers history. One idea - star pages - not adding to favorites, just marking them so that you could browse history of those separately. It could also show list of the latest stars in the new tab window for example.

Currently bookmarks, in firefox at least, as far as I can tell, cannot be even browsed by date.

I said screw it and am building a PWA and suite of bookmarklets/extensions. Idk what else to do, I have to escape this nightmare.

I started offloading my "I'm SURE I'll read this tab at one point" to pinboard.in

I can not read them from there too and they won't take up resources from my computer =)

> it's what happens when my focus is on consuming rather than producing ... while allowing my insatiable curiosity and love of learning to remain undirected.

This really spoke to me - I find it to be a really positive way of framing the frustration I often feel with myself when I just can't get focused on work. Because at the end of the day, the clicking through links or reading up on something tangential to the result I want is driven by the same things that make me want to be creative in the first place.

I recently read The Millionaire Fastlane - which is a book I have seriously mixed feelings about - but one of the things that I thought was good in it was the advice to focus on being a producer rather than a consumer. I like this framing of the dichotomy, thanks for sharing your thoughts!

I would be easy if it was that easy.

Being productive is important, though. The Billionaire Fastlane, however, will tell you that you need a broader view to come up with a great idea.

After all the (healthy) idea behind learning and information aggregation in the first place would be that you learn all that stuff to be better prepared towards taking the right (intelligent and educated) actions.

So there might be an individual balance that you have to find/develop and keep up. The trivial solutions at the edges never seem to satisfy.

That's a good point! I didn't mean to imply that the book says that dedication to learning or producing is enough in and of itself. Just to say that one of the things I agreed with in the book is that it's better to be a producer than a consumer.

Overall, I enjoyed the book, and thought some of the advice in there was really good. One thing I thought was valuable was something I think you're getting at in your post - which is that ideas that have the potential to make big money quickly have a combination of scale and reach and magnitude.

As a younger guy, I thought that the way people got rich was to get a good job and save lots of money (think doctor, lawyer, engineer). But as I entered the workforce I started to understand that actual rich people I encountered almost exclusively got wealthy through owning or being pretty high up in a business.

One thing that reading Millionaire Fastlane helped me crystallize is that serious wealth creation isn't an inherent property of all businesses, and that plenty of self owned businesses don't pay as well as a regular job, and even create more work for their owners than a job would. And that businesses that can create real wealth (read: "can make someone rich") have to have that scale and reach.

Overall I felt the read was worth my time, even if there are some things about it that I didn't love.

Guilty as charged, closed 2022 w/ 6k+ on 2 [onetab]s. Jon Blow said "often if you just keep observing the pattern, it will naturally give you the ability to break out of it" so let's find out. Good case study though.

I'm regularly starting a custom firefox extension to manage them ~700..800 tabs (my average) but then I choke and the cycle repeat :)

Happy to know other have this problem.

ps: to Mozilla Firefox team, kudos on handling that much .. I've used firefox with 1200 open tabs (all kinds of complexity) and it still work ok on my old machine. That said one can notice a clear change in lag after 300-400 but well I won't complain :)

It's mildly ironic that it is now 9 days later and I still have this thread open in a tab so I can 'get to it later'. Sigh.

Well, at least we're getting through them eventually :)