This is superior to bookmarks, as the server respose is saved along with scroll position etc.
I've long wished I could actively trigger this similar to making a bookmark. Bonus if they saved some embeddings too so I could search the contents of the saved pages.
I'm on Windows if that makes any difference.
Remember, we’re taking about a Firefox restart, not the back button.
And I do keep a text file with interesting links, so I don't have to keep 100+ tabs open. Seems much easier to me to skimp through a text file looking for something I remembered seeing than using bookmarks.
It's good.
Edge already does that. (Well, you can make it do that.) I don't know about other browsers.
I literally cannot live^W browse without it.
The experience made me realise that what you describe is exactly what I'm trying to do. I have pages I care about. I want them findable when I get back to it, even if that means three years hence. And there are other pages which I just visited once, like a news article, or which occupied me for three weeks, like documentation for a problem I've now solved. The act of closing a tab is a communication to the web browser. I wish it would listen to it.
I could also do with a searchable, browsable list of open tabs. I was recently searching for a car. Then I bought one. So I need to go back and find all the tabs about cars and close them. I want a fully interactive window like an oldschool history window that lets me find all my open tabs about cars and close them, no matter which window they're in - unless I see that it's my car's user manual or my service schedule, in which case maybe I want to keep it open for the next five years.
On the other hand, when I learnt about % in the searchbox, it was a gamechanger. Finally I could find and reuse the tab that is open, instead of the way by default Firefox prioritises search results over open tabs.
(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign. What's the point? Because their designer couldn't handle the idea of a slightly smaller font each time an order of magnitude is exceeded? Why not let me live with the costs of my actions? Also, an easier way to manage tabs on Firefox mobile. But maybe just better tab management in general.)
Even simple things like putting already open tabs at the bottom of the list when typing in the address bar makes things more painful than it should be. I almost always want the matching open tab, put that first!
You can still get that behaviour by disabling all but your main search engine in settings. One of the first things I do on any install.
The "Tab Session Manager" add-on probably will address the majority of your gripes with firefox's inbuilt session manager :
- It backs up your last 10 (can be changed) sessions.
- You can save specifics sessions for perpetuity. In your example, you can save some or all of the windows under a single session named "Car". You can add/remove tabs/windows from it at any time from within the menu. And it is always there ready to be restored when you need.
- For the rest of my unorgranised miscellaneous tabs (like random hackernews articles), i send them to OneTab rather than save them in a session.
- Overall, very friction-less, intuitive UX.
Two (rather cumbersome) work-arounds : - Save all tabs as collection - will tell you how many tabs you have - The "Clear History" option also tells how many tabs you have currently. (Just don't accidentally click "Delete"!! )
As if Chrome is an abandoned project, as if people realize that it is spyware, and that using it gives enormous power to a company that is actively working against the trust of their users...
As if users have stopped using Chrome... what a sweet dream.
For me I'd say I use it as a To Do list. Open tabs are things I mean to get to, and when I'm done with it I will close it. Bookmarks are things I might need at some later date.
My preferred youtube frontend, freetube, also does that.
I often have used separate browsers for this. One for each project, one for personal, etc. Can work well too.
Session history presented as a list that loads the session in a new window if mid-clicked and/or expanded if left-clicked from which each tab could be imported in the current one would solve this problem. On Firefox there's a function to bookmark all tabs which roughly does a similar job but it's less immediate.
I despise this behavior, they also love to unload the tab with my mobile boarding pass that I so neatly prepared at home, and attempt to reload it when I'm trying to fumble in front of the TSA dude, and inevitably crap out because the session cookie has expired.
They should at least maintain a "last known good" screenshot.
OneTab for your readinglist/todo-list tabs TabSessionManager for your organized topical tabs
See my comment : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41158725
- they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
- they can keep some or all of the history context ("how did I get here?")
- they can keep some of the browsing context ("what else was I looking at, what other tabs are around this one?")
- they are a filter. Every useless site, popup, get's into the history (>"If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever.")
- they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history (they're always there)
> they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive. It's stunning how far we can get but wow, watching Chrome over the years claw it's way towards being fast to load & staying responsive, in spite of being many 100's of tabs in on a mid-range 201X phone was an incredible saga of improving software architecture. It got better and better.
There's whole means of backgrounding & persisting pages (and of preloading new pages) that's just amazing.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure I understand your phrasing.
> I'd also note that at 7500 tabs your computer almost certainly is not keeping those sessions alive
The person I was responding to was not talking specifically about the article, but "many people". And some people may use the tabs for one, more, or none of the reasons I listed. I was not trying to sell anything. I don't even think that tabs are a good product, only the best so far, with regard to those considerations.
Those tabs were and are just screenshots, and reload when clicked, you could realistically not have more than around 5 open at the same time without reloading.
in a way, yes. I'm one of these users. My 6000+ tabs with ~10 windows load in an unloaded state. I have addons that unload already-clicked-by-me tabs if I need the RAM or if some JS script is running wild on FF but I still might need that tab. I simply treat it as: I might come back to that topic later. 70-80% of the time I rarely do lol. or it takes me 2 years.
>they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history
it simply is easier to click on the list in the sidebar than having to go through a bookmark window and wait for the UI to load the tabs itself.
what's funny is, with Firefox, when I close a window with 1000 tabs and were to restore it, it takes Firefox way longer to restore that window than if I were to load my session from zero/Windows.
* Ability to unload tabs and prevent tabs from unloading, by domain (youtube) or picking from the context menu for one-offs. (Auto Tab Discard) (Unless it's changed since I got this addon, the built-in discarded tabs won't unload tabs, it only does anything when the browser is restarted, preventing all but the current tabs from loading)
* The left sidebar is actually a tree, where links opened in a new tab are automatically children of the tab they opened from. The whole thing becomes self-organizing with context, and the parent tabs can be expanded/collapsed. (Tree Style Tab)
* The left sidebar also auto-collapses to ~3 favicons in width (userChrome.css manual modification, originally copied from something shared online), so it works fine even without a wider screen.
* Addon for vim-style controls (Tridactyl), which in addition to everything else includes a way to search and jump to tabs by matching title and url.
I'm somewhere around 1500-2000 and it has replaced my bookmarks.
Firefox does have an excellent setup for multiple spaces, groups of tabs, etc.
I tried once on my old 2018 i9 macbook, and was able to get to 2100 tabs without needing a plugin to unload a tab.
Having tabs organized in groups for projects is really useful. Especially if it can be paired with a window manager to keep groups of tabs ready to go between multiple spaces/workspaces.
I believe browsers have had to adapt to this by basically converting tabs into auto-bookmarks that have advanced caching or something. So they automatically unload and have logic to determine when they are actually supposed to be active.
I wonder if eventually tabs, history, bookmarks, and tab groups will be completely merged into one flexible and intelligent feature.
On wider screens, a left sidebar might open by default with tabs stacked vertically.
Not sure but it seems like people don't use tabs as originally intended.
Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.