It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks. If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever.
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.
In spite of your conntrarian phrasing you've kind of only sold me on tabs being a more advanced hypermedia bookmark than the simple bookmarks we've been given.
> 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.
> In spite of your conntrarian phrasing you've kind of only sold me on tabs being a more advanced hypermedia bookmark than the simple bookmarks we've been given.
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.
> in spite of being many 100's of tabs in on a mid-range 201X phone was an incredible saga of improving software architecture
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.
>- they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)
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.
Firefox does this when shutting down and starting back up. Tabs get "frozen" and "thawed" upon activation after startup.
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.
It also shows that people want transient bookmarks. They bookmark a few things they care about, but the rest is bookmarks for the next week or month, then they don't need it anymore.
Well sometimes I kill the browser (Firefox, Chrome) rather than closing it because upon starting it again it will automatically recreate the tabs. Where otherwise I lose everything.
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.
If you close it normally, restart it, and then do "reopen last closed tab" (cmd/ctrl+shift+t) it will open the entire last window you had open. Press multiple times to open all previous windows.
Sites like Facebook or Reddit do indeed do a full reload, but most sites I frequent do not. Nice to be able to pick up where I left. If I want updated content I just hit F5.
I think it rather depends on the page (some pages with lots of dynamically generated content might mark themselves as no-cache/no-store), and in any case if you don't use a tab long enough, sooner or later it'll be evicted from the browser cache.
You're almost there. To get what I and others have, take everything you described then add:
* 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.
> It seems like many people basically use open browser tabs as history/bookmarks
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.
I tried using Safari's reading list for this long ago, but it's too out-of-sight, out-of-mind and stuff went in there to be forgotten about. Tabs and windows are in my face cluttering up my screen the whole time, begging to be finished.
A friend of mine has 2000 tabs open. He says he uses it not only for history, but also the tabs remember the position of video playback in movies, series, etc. so he can continue from where he left.
If the tabs are remotely organized (by window), and you use a plugin to change the title of the window (it shows up with a title then in window managers), it's pretty much an instant on and context switch if you need to switch between projects, and leave them in a good stopping point, and can pick them up instantly from where you left off.
I often have used separate browsers for this. One for each project, one for personal, etc. Can work well too.
Sounds overkill: I am fairly sure all streaming services I have been using already keep position and in the first page have a list of shows you have started and might want to continue watching...
My preferred youtube frontend, freetube, also does that.
Yes please! Firefox used to have a fantastic feature where I could crash it, and it would have a tab that contained my previous session within it. It would be there forever, between restarts and restores. I could have a kind of chain of sessions. Sometimes, I would deliberately crash the browser because there were too many, but I still had this bunch of tabs which I wanted to be nearly active. At some point, they deleted the feature - you get one chance to restore your previous session, and after that poof - gone. (I think that decision was pure evil on their part - who goes around and decides to delete a users data? And what's wrong with letting me decide how much of my drive I want to dedicate to storing open tabs? But whatever.)
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.)
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.
>(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.
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"!! )
It's a great plugin. I just wish a few of my sites didn't have issues with Firefox... most of which can be easily addressed when it doesn't find a browser it's biased for.
Managing my tabs in Firefox mobile is such a pain in the ass. Couldn't agree more with needing a big improvement here.
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!
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.
This is a different set of users here. I assume most people on HN realize that it's spyware and a Trojan trust-proxy, and abandon it when feasible for one of the many other trust-proxies. The end game looks the same for every browser one way or the other, the trick is to sidestep the end game. Of course, that also results in Facebook and TikTok, but one can sweet-dream
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.
> Maybe if they just made history more obvious then that would change the equation.
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.
Save it + state as a bookmark sorted by days.allow nn to sort it topological " your obsession with frogs" finally on return to the topic "search frog" allow for a revisit of the past im chronologoc order giltered by topic similar to a search result.
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.
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.