- Selected text
- Current scroll position
- Partially-filled form fields (I try to avoid this, but it happens sometimes anyway)
- Pages with unbookmarkable modal popups
- The back-stack (and forward-stack), or the "trajectory" as you aptly put it
None of those are retained when you bookmark and close a tab. (In fact, not all of them are consistently retained when you restart the browser, either.)
When I leave a tab open for a long time, I almost always have a reason in mind for doing so. However, I can't always remember exactly what that reason was when I return to it, especially if it's been a while. That's the kind of information I'd like to store in a bookmark.
Because of this and other problems, I've often imagined some sort of non-linear visualization of your browsing history. This might look something like a git commit tree, with branches indicating when you opened a new tab from a link, along with other information and "tags" along the way. (One important aspect of this is that just like a VCS, you wouldn't lose your history stack when you hit back a few times and then click on another link within that same tab.) Theoretically, this could even store page states that normally aren't stored in a browser's history, e.g. filling form fields, scroll position, and so on. You could then view your bookmarks, tags, etc in that same interface, with a robust system for filtering and searching of course. Something like this could revolutionize the way I save and recall things online. Plus, I think it'd be pretty cool to be able to see your entire browsing history visualized like that.
Not to mention that creating a bookmark feels like a big decision. Something you want to keep for ages. While a Tab might be simply some a page in a reference manual.
My take on the problem is action-oriented browsing. I think that anything you clip or save or note down must have an intended action, now or in the future. Maybe you are saving a bookmark because you want to refer to it when you tackle some personal project you want to do someday/maybe. It must then be triggered by that project when you finally get to it. If you never get to it, the bookmark will die with the project, which is just as well.
Most bookmarks will never be accessed again, but you don't know which ones yet. It's the long tail principle. We don't have time to do everything we want, but in the spirit of GTD, ideally we'd like to map out all that we could want to do, so we can always (say, weekly) review our priorities and be ready to pivot into new directions if situations, or our minds, change.
Even if you are only saving a cute picture of a cat, it is still actionable. Why are you saving it? That's the key question. It may be because you want to show it to some people, so it should be triggered in your next interaction with each of those people, and then you're done with that bookmark and you can let go of it.
Articles that you want to read or reread should by triggered by a reading list, or by study plans for particular subjects, or even by a blog post you want to write on the ideas you read on several of these articles.
It's all about what should trigger that bookmark to come into your attention again. You shouldn't need to remember to check it back on your own, or you may well never do.
Woohoo! You're welcome :)
There's a Firefox extension called "toomanytabs" that tries to improve the "volatile bookmark" experience. Frankly, I think it should be called "notenoughtabs".
Btw, I have found that Opera can reliably handle 400+ open tabs simultaneously. The downside is that it's not Firefox. And Chrome took out vertical tabs in 2008 or something. bleh.
With real tab grouping in Chrome, including a feature to only load tabs when selected, I could finally make the switch from Firefox and the great "TabGroupsManager" addon.
Unfortunately, Chrome dev team decided that opening all tabs on startup is a good thing and marked intelligent lazy loading of tabs as "won't fix". I cannot find one good argument against this feature, unless it's extremely difficult technically (which is unlikely).
Source: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=105666
I leave a lot of tabs open too, all related to each other. There are usually two or three groups of related tabs. TreeStyleTab addon helps a lot with that, since the vertical tab list shows parent/child tab relationships and lets me move things in and out of hierarchies.
I don't even use FF's bookmarks anymore, which is a shame because I miss the address bar integration. I just use pinboard, which is basic but works.
I'm not sure how well the Dropzilla concept will work with a large number of bookmarks, or folders within folders, but I look forward to testing whatever they come up with.
The Tab Groups feature is really useful but it's also quite awfully done. I particularly hate the way it resizes and moves around groups when you resize the browser. Ideally, it should use an automated layout, similar to tiling window managers, where you have a fixed master area, and a stacking area for other recently used groups. It'd also be fairly handy if you could nest groups, or have multiple panoramas, for people like me who have too many tabs open to fit on the screen at once.
diff --git a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
index 40ebe27..0cb39b8 100644
--- a/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
+++ b/chrome/browser/sessions/session_restore.cc
@@ -995,6 +995,7 @@ class SessionRestoreImpl : public content::NotificationObserver {
GrantPermissionsForFile(id, *file, read_file_permissions);
}
+ schedule_load = false;
if (schedule_load)
tab_loader_->ScheduleLoad(&web_contents->GetController());
return web_contents;If I revisit them ~3 times or more - they get "committed" to my long term "repository" (aka bookmarked and mentally memorized).
I'm currently using chrome for Hacker News, reddit, and similar websites. For casual browsing. And FF is for serious browsing where keeping Tabs and large amounts of Tabs are more important.
My solution for tab syncing was creating symbolic links to my Dropbox to keep my Firefox user directory in sync across computers, and that comes with the added benefit of everything syncing, plugins, addons, customizations, settings etc. which accumulated in my computer through the years of Firefox use, which I can call at this point an UI fork of mainline Firefox. As long as you don’t open the same Firefox in two places, this solution works pretty well. A recounting of how I did it is available at my blog at this link: http://sublunarorb.it/post/34087338428/so-you-need-to-actual... but it’s aimed at casual users, so it’s a little bit chatty.
Was there a particular upgrade that addressed process management and/or memory leaks? I also wonder if it's an OS thing (I'm on OS X).
As for Firefox improvements -- FF7 (September 2011) fixed some big memory problems in the browser, and FF15 (August 2012) prevented a very common kind of leak caused by add-ons. But most of the other releases since FF7 have had minor memory consumption improvements. See https://blog.mozilla.org/nnethercote/category/memshrink/ for more (possibly too much) detail.
If you haven't tried Firefox for over a year and you regularly have 100s of tabs open, you should really try it again. If you have an existing profile, it might be worth using the "reset firefox" feature to make sure it doesn't have a bunch of unnecessary cruft in it -- see http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/reset-firefox-easily-fix....
christ
I'm on Windows 7, and in my experience the memory issues in Firefox haven't been completely resolved yet (though the Mozilla team are actively working on it). However, as a workaround I have found the Memory Fox add-on useful: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/memory-fox/
A few versions ago, they added a feature where tab contents are only reloaded on-demand, when clicked. You no longer have a big lag when opening up the browser with many tabs, and memory usage is quite reasonable.
4 seconds of googling shows this for Chrome
you should try the voice search, it's amzingly fast and got everything right that I asked it. I said "directions to cafe prage san francisco" and as soon as I finished the results came up and it talked back saying what it had found - traffic adjusted driving time and map. I tried "oracle stock price" and that showed and spoke the result back to me.
lots of cool features. its >50mb so you need to be on wifi to download it (for some reason)
http://support.google.com/websearch/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...
and this for firefox
http://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/restore-previous-session
For this rather unusual browsing habit, no other browser other than FF works for me. FF does fine even on my 512MB Pentium-M laptop, Chrome for instance will make such a box unusable . Am somewhat relieved/piqued to see that this behavior is not unique.
I have been asked to defend my habit many times, so here it is: I use open tabs as a volatile bookmark. Things that have been on the tab for long and have been revisited several times, I usually bookmark permanently.
The crucial capability that open tabs have but bookmarks dont, is that it stores the context (in particular the trajectory that I took to that page) as well as the link.
So its a combination of an in-your-face-reminder and a semantic call-cc function that I can resume when I want...and I just love it.
It helps to have a few add-ons. The load/unload on demand been moved into the browser, so its not so essential to have it as an add-on anymore. Well, FF only does load on demand, not the unload part, the latter helps especially on low memory m/c. Another helpful add-on is one that allows searching for text in open (but possibly unloaded) tabs. Yet another is Xmarks, with it I have access to the tabs and bookmarks from any location. I dont have to pay for xmarks, but I still do anyway.
And a heartfelt thanks to FF developers for taking care of the memory footprint and the leaks. FF gets a lot of unwarranted flak, but mostly, I think from users whose experience have been formed on really old FF versions. Although I have to admit I was very reluctant to upgrade from FF3.5 thinking the new versions wont tolerate such tab abuse. I have been pleasantly surprised.
@hnriot It was indeed months, though I must have had to restart a couple of times, but no more. Also I did not mean 30x24. I would frequently let the laptop hibernate when not in active use.
Forgot to mention I use noscript and flashblock, which helped elliminate a lot of the crashes and other resource consumption badness. Another reluctant admission, FF has been stabler on windows than on linux, so much so that I have a dedicated windows laptop just for browsing. Things might have changed though, I havent checked back since the time i elliminated all X based browsers from my linux box except dillo. Linux is my "serious" box, so as a byproduct I waste less time on the net when I am on it (...in theory)
@lukifer I was quite happy with 3.7 not so much with 4.* 8 and above have been nice to me, but all these were on a very stable XP installation. So it could be related to an OS specific build. Also the addons: flashblock, noscript and memoryfox must have played a part in the stability too.