1. Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. )
2. Fav Icons meant they are no longer showing the Tab Description once you have a dozen tabs as they will shrink to Icons Size. So you either have normal Tabs or Tabs with Fav Icons, not both. ( This is new in Safari 14 )
3. Show Tab Overview will reload all the tabs, including those that were in idle / unload state. If you are a heavy tab user you should not do this. Having a hundred tabs reload will cause hundreds of GB of Data written to your SSD. Basically shortening its lifespan.
4. AFAIK ( I could be wrong ), Extensions still requires you to have an $99/ year developer account. Some of my favourite extensions are now either paid or can no longer be used.
"Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past."
Everyone has a story like this - from all of the browsers.
It seems like FF behaves better in this way now, but I still do silly things like rsync my home directory to a backup before every reboot/update. If I ever need these tab backups, I will have to do silly things like dissect them with JSON tools or monkey around with plists, etc.
Why, Why WHY can't we just have tabs:// ?
Plain text list of all URLs. Dead simple. Just pull up tabs:// and cut and paste. Or select all. Or whatever.
Lose-all-tabs bugs will always be with us - and a fix would be so simple ...
I agree that it should be easier to get a simple list, but I want to note that backing up the firefox tab data is one file, and it makes its own backup whenever you update.
Chrome on the other hand will deliberately reject and wipe your profile if you copy it to another computer.
Also "bookmark all tabs" serves roughly the same purpose as a dumb URL list for backup purposes, even if it's awkward to edit.
I do have a story like this for all the browsers, save one: Opera, from back when it had its own rendering engine. It's not that it never crashed, mind you - but, somehow, the tabs would always be back after. Makes me wonder just how much effort wend into the error shutdown code path to make sure everything is saved.
That's actually a nifty feature idea, but it seems like it could be easily abused with a little client-side JS for the sake of fingerprinting or analytics, unless it's treated similarly to chrome:// urls. You could probably whip up your own small browser extension to provide a simple formatted list of tabs, though.
As a UX designer, when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (and having a hundred tabs is clearly not how tabs were intended to be used), my question is: how is this UI failing them?
I think the problem is that people generally don’t know when they’ll return to a tab, so they leave it open, and that creating a bookmark is asking too much commitment for something potentially ephemeral.
A good system might be one that doesn’t automatically close tabs, as some extensions do, but collapses ones that have remained unused for a certain period into a set of temporary bookmarks. Recently accessed tabs stay in the bar, while stale ones are swept into an “old tabs” list that can be perused at the user’s convenience.
> when I see people using something in a way it wasn’t intended (...), my question is: how is this UI failing them?
This is a legitimate question, but not the only one in that situation. Another view, more in line with the unix philosophy, is that "using something in the intended way" is a meaningless concept. A tool must work always, no matter how it is used and abused.
Thus, instead of asking "how is this UI failing them?", you could be more pragmatic and ask "how can I optimize the UI so that this usage works correctly?"
As a non-programmer, this seems like an odd philosophy. If I use the claw side of a hammer to strike a nail, I’d expect that it is t going to work well. It seems like there’s a limit on “make the tool work regardless of the use case.”
A better comparison would be: Hammers are designed for striking nails, but some customers have figured out they work well for cracking walnuts, so as a hammer manufacturer we should avoid using toxic ingredients such as lead.
I think you misunderstand that some people treat tabs as bookmarks. Let's be honest - bookmark management is tedious in all browsers, so I would rather have tabs open with stuff that I want to browse later.
This is pretty funny because you're saying it's working as intended, but also saying the problem is that bookmark management is tedious. So fixing bookmark management would fix the tab problem.
I think many of us are also aware that saving a bookmark, whether in the browser or to something like pinboard.in, is an invitation to lose it in a back hole. Whereas if it's at least theoretically in "working memory" we want to keep it as a tab. But AFAIK there isn't a really good tool--and certainly not native to a browser as far as I can tell--that lets me quickly and easily rationalize all my tabs into coherent working sets. e.g. Project X, Project Y, email/calendar/etc., to read, and so forth.
TreeStyleTabs in Firefox (which is a great tool regardless of bookmarking), keeps track of parent/child relationships, you can drag & drop into subsets to create the relationship you're talking about, and has a "Bookmark this tree" feature, which would create a folder with subfolders with the top level named as you choose.
(I use the heck out of this, both for the extra vertical space that comes from hiding the top tab bar, and for the conceptual organization that it provides).
> I think the problem is that people generally don’t know when they’ll return to a tab, so they leave it open, and that creating a bookmark is asking too much commitment for something potentially ephemeral.
Safari's reading list is my solution to this. CMD+SHIFT+D adds the current tab to the reading list which is visible on a new tab page or in a side panel. Syncs across devices too. You just right click > delete to remove the item from the list when done.
Kind of but I think the implementation matters. I use this and bookmarks in very different ways. I can also add to it from the iOS share sheet so add links I see on the web/social media that I want to read later.
I think that's related. I think also for a lot of web pages, they have ephemeral state that would not be captured by a bookmark, so they get left open and accumulate. One can never know sometimes which page will succeed as a bookmark or just fail.
Tabs store context (history, cookies, container, etc, with tree-style tabs also parent & child tab relations) that bookmarks don't. I'm not sure about Safari (since I don't use a Mac) but on Firefox you can set up tab discarding (via extension) that unloads unused tabs. So there's a lot less incentive to use bookmarks when you can just leave a tab open forever. Really the only reason to use bookmarks instead of tabs is for synchronization across devices.
Tab sync usually doesn't maintain the same list of tabs on all devices like that - it just lets you see what you had opened elsewhere, and easily re-open it. My desktop and mobile browsing sessions are very different, as well - but I "move" tabs across devices all the time to continue some research etc.
Auto Tab Discard[1] does it automatically after a time. Tabs can be set to not get discarded, eg when form elements with changes are present, media is playing, tab is pinned, or just whitelisting.
I have 3088 tabs right now. I don't see how this is horrifying at all. I have a tab open for every dependency of every project I do, including one for every component of every electronics project I maintain. I have a tab for every webcomic I follow, a tab for every news page, a tab for every package that's on its way to me. It's like searchable, zero-effort bookmarks with state (including page scroll location) saved. Of course this is on firefox, and total suspender makes it easy to keep resource usage low. I have many years worth of state here, and if I didn't have this I don't see why I would even bother using a browser. It's like a personal knowledge base. Related tabs are clustered together in the list, I know approximately where things are in the list, I have two different search tools (% search and Tab Center Redux' own search box). I don't get why people keep trying to tell others that their workflow is bad ("horrifying") and they should feel bad. I don't care, this works, and nothing else compares.
How do you not get there? There’s no point in the “core gameplay loop” of browsing the web where you are encouraged to close a tab. They just disappear among the other ones and you don’t really have a reason to stop and think about whether you’re done with them. At some point there are hundreds.
I personally close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I see I have more than ~10 open, I purge them of all but the pinned tab(s) and maybe the left most 2-3 which is generally where I keep the tab I for the ticket I am actively working on.
On my personal machine, I'd be surprised if I ever get above 5 non-pinned tabs open. I open a tab, look at it, close it, rinse and repeat.
I have the same habits in my IDE and Finder windows and iTerm and Sublime (which I mostly use as a scratchpad). If I have more than a few open, I inherently think I am doing something wrong and go to clean it up.
Frankly, I've always viewed the "hundreds of tabs open" as a sorta hoarder mentality. You might need that tab in the future, so you don't ever close it. Even when it is obvious you will never need it, you still don't close it. Even when it makes finding other tabs unusually difficult, you still do not close it. It clearly has no benefit, but you're afraid or unwilling to close it (I use "you" in the general sense; not indicating you, tobr, specifically)
I close a tab when I want to stop thinking about it, and if I hit fifty tabs, I’m so distracted I don’t have time to think about any of them and just close the entire set.
Personally I close tabs as soon as I'm done with them. If I need it for later it goes into sorted bookmark folders or in a list of bookmarks right in front of me if I'm gonna need it sooner. If I ever get over 15 tabs I'm deep in research mode, but those will all be closed by the end of the day.
Ever since SSDs I also shut down my computer when I'm not using it so maybe I'm weird.
The only reason I'm using FF is TreeStyleTab. I seriously don't understand how people live without it. Right now I have 993 open tabs, sometimes I have 100, sometimes 2k - don't really care, but they are easily navigatable as a tree-like structure on the side of the screen.
Genuine question because our tab handling strategies seem to differ - how frequently do you return to a given tab? Do you keep them for reference in some way, or is it more out of concern of having to navigate back over again?
- First, bookmarks - if you bookmark something and close the tab, the bookmark stays there forver. If you bookmark something that you know you won't need later (e.g. after you finish researching something), then it adds a mental burden of having to clean it up later. When a lot of them accumulate, it's really hard to recall why exactly they were added in the first place and whether each one of them should be now removed or not.
- Open tabs are the opposite - if you close them, they're gone forever. So once you no longer need a certain tree of tabs (e.g., like above, you've finished researching something), you just dispose of the whole tree; if there's anything particularly valuable in there, you can add it to bookmarks.
So, e.g. if I'm doing house renovation I may have trees of tabs with hundreds of open tabs in them while researching something. Same when coding, if I'm investigating a particular topic I may have tons of open tabs that will eventually get closed all together.
In some rare cases, I keep a tab or a tree of tabs open just so I don't forget to navigate back to it in the foreseeable future (at which point it will likely get closed).
For example, I have a bunch of tabs for online grocery shops in recent months. These are for reference. Whenever I'm in the mood to check for delivery slots (which have become scarce), I click through each of them, login and check if there's a viable delivery slot available. The set of tabs is a reference to remind me of the list of 10 or so shops to check periodically. I might forget some of them otherwise, because they are not all ones I use regularly; they are only in the list to improve my chances when slots become hard to obtain.
Then I'll use the same tabs for convenience rather than reference. Muscle memory and visual location. If I found a slot, I might place an order in stages over a few days (one to book the slot, then adding items over the coming days if I realise I need something, finally to amend the order to fit my needs shortly before the delivery date). Then it's useful to have the tabs in use in a convenient location. Their visibility as a pinned tab also serves as a reminder until the shopping is finished (typically ~3-12 days) in case I forget to amend the order.
I have a similar thing going on with financial institutions. I have about 20 of these in use, counting both personal and business use (I run accounts of two businesses), banks, credit cards, and tax pages. From time to time I'll want to peruse them and check in on balances and pending tasks, occasionally download a statement. Then it's useful to have a list in one place, similar to with shops. without a list I'd probably miss one.
Both of the above could in theory be replaced by bookmarks, but there's a bunch of UX reasons why bookmarks don't work so well. One of them is that we really need a "live bookmarks folder" for each group. If I open another shop/institution tab, I need that to remain in the "persistent" set by default. Using a normal bookmark group, I'd open the group as tabs, then half an hour after I open something else, I'd have to remember to add that extra item to the bookmark group, and just that item. But after an hour of browsing and having visited maybe 250 pages, I'm likely to forget which open tabs are already in a bookmark group and which one's aren't. It's too much work to step through and compare item by item by hand when I'm done and need to move to another task, so I end up taking new "snapshot" bookmark groups rather than managing the existing bookmark set. This gets messy fast. In practice it's easier to just keep a set of tabs open, and delete the ones which are no longer required.
Also in my tabs are the articles (many from HN) that I collect into a knowledge base. Tabs aren't a great way to save these, but neither are bookmarks. Ideally I'd want something that saves them with tags and brief notes. For now, I send tabs from my active window over to a dedicate HN window, where they form a long queue of things to go through in a systematic batch at some point and group, sort, categorise, filter, and take notes on the salient points I want proper notes on. They are a kind of research multi-queue. You could think of them as a set of about 50 long-term tasks that are likely to take years to produce the results I want (which are for actual tech developments, not reminiscence). From time to time I'm tempted to batch convert these to bookmarks, but doing so makes them unusable because it loses scroll position and text highlight, so it's labour intensive having to take notes instead. I guess people use "web clipper" software for this kind of task. I haven't found something I'm happy with yet, but I haven't tried much either. I wouldn't be happy locking so much long term research into proprietary software though. On my phone, I use "Share to Orgzly" to capture such things, rather than tabs.
I have one window per "task" (like if I'm looking up how to do something using some API, I'll have a single window for that, with new tabs for API docs, some stackoverflow responses, etc), and when I'm done with the task I'll close the window.
Windows for "idle browsing" get closed the next day when I open up my computer and look at the tabs and think "well this sounds boring, let's see what new has happened overnight".
On my phone OTOH, the tabs just stack up until twice a year I just mass-close them all.
I think you pretty much nail it. Active Tabs for news, mail, Youtube kind of things. Open Tab List ( That is why I really wish Apple would implement Tab Listing instead of Tab ScreenShots Overview ) For reading list and getting back into, I use Bookmark for something like long term memory. But part of the problem are the links no longer works.
I really like the idea someone on HN purpose sometimes ago. Where all your visited webpage ( excluding images ) are saved on your SSD, and you can basically search it back like your memory.
I find it maddening too, but hey, it’s her phone. It’s only maddening in a “I wouldn’t personally do it that way” sense, so I don’t sweat it.
My wife even does it more extremely: when she opens a web site, she opens it in another tab, even if she already has that web site in an existing tab. So she ends up with hundreds of Facebook tabs, hundreds of shopping tabs at the same store, thousands overall. I don’t think she has ever deliberately closed a tab, and might not even know how. Safari’s UI makes it totally non-obvious how to do it, like how Apple makes it non-obvious how to kill apps.
This is essentially what I do as well (modulus Facebook). Sure, if I happen to see the open tab I need, I’ll switch to it. But you only see about a handful of tabs at the same time so it’s easier to just open a new one. I don’t see the value of going through and tending to my old tabs at all.
I'm like that, and I really do believe I have "grasped the basic file operations"; maybe I just have a better grasp of the basic concepts of search, but I guess that's not the case, either; I have it like this because it fits my needs and preferences and works better, quicker, smoother for me, and in my case it's the result of decades of refining the way I use computers. Other people have different needs and preferences and that's absolutely fine as well, as far as I'm concerned. My "messy desktop" approach seems to be almost unbearable to some few people, though, and some very few seem to find it so unbearable that they have been outright aggressive about this in the past, and I really don't get that at all. But in case someone who feels like that reads this, here's my rationale:
I pretty much never ever see my desktop. I see my screensaver all the time, desktop never. I use spaces to separate tasks I'm working on and arrange windows to fill the screen, and they pretty much always do. I use the desktop mostly as a drop-off area for whatever it is I momentarily need; I drag and drop stuff there all the time, like images from Firefox. There are some directories, but at most two layers deep I think. I do archive stuff from time to time, but there are pretty much always multiple desktop grids worth of stuff on there.
That works really well because I only ever interact with the desktop via Finder (where I can just type the beginning of a name or use the datetime column or Spotlight set to search current directory per default), CLI (which has fd, ag etc.) or file pickers, though I tend to drag-and-drop more than I use "open file" dialogs. Relying on those is much faster and more intuitive for me than thinking up some kind of organisation scheme for dozens of unrelated activities that don't seem to fit into a single scheme very well, and organising everything accordingly, when I'm in the "zone" and would rather not have to think about where to place this particular file. I find it hard to remember such schemes, but I pretty much always know when and how I created something, so a chronological view of everything at once is very helpful. Software work is somewhat more organised (~/workspace and a lot of git repos in there), and data sets are very neatly organised (it doesn't work any other way), but most other things live somewhere on the desktop (or in some kind of searchable cloud).
As I see it, as long as I find whatever I need quickly, which I do, why would I "tidy up" those imaginary "folder" things? It's not like they have much in common with physical ordering aids (like folders), where you have to structure things rigidly or else never find a thing, and even there, you often don't structure things very deeply – who puts physical folders inside folders inside folders? My hand tools are organized pretty neatly, but if I could just say "8mm wrench" in the direction of my toolbox and magically hold it in my hand, or magically have all my tools neatly arranged by name, date-of-purchase, type, or just say "wrench for that nut" and find it ... I daresay my toolbox would be a lot messier. Can't do that, so I must put in the work. Where I don't have to, and can keep the chaos out of sight, I won't.
Maybe this should be formalized, like automatically get open tabs into easily searchable persistent storage, whether they are called Bookmarks or not. Then they can be closed by prompting to "clean up".
Maybe even skip that manual step entirely. People use browser histories like emails now -- by searching, not by active organizing.
It's completely, totally and utterly different from browser history!
If I visit HN, browse a bunch of comment threads, and find something I want to come back to later, that's 1 tab but 20 history entries.
Same if I searched for something on Google and eventually found something I want to come back to later. Except that's 1 tab and 50 history entries.
To recover that state via history is practically impossible. It's a needle in a haystack. I've occasionally needed to do it, and it takes a long time.
(Compared with a tab, a bookmark doesn't work well either for something to come back to. Anything where there is a context, such as scroll position. Perhaps if bookmarks were better, keeping track of scroll position and allowing text to be highlighted or a note to be attached, and showing a thumbnail (scrolled to the right place), and retaining some temporal relationships between different pages. But I find bookmarks consisting of just a title and URL to be completely useless.)
I would propose that the issue is that browser history navigation is generally poorly designed, at least if you want to do something more sophisticated than hit “back” or search it as a set of URLs. It should be richer and store much more details about each entry.
I'm not sure how to improve history navigation to help with this, as the browser doesn't know which 1 in 20 history entries are worth finding again, and which are junk traversed on the way to something worth finding.
It can't figure it out from content search, because the junk is often the stuff that resulted from useful searches and was assessed by the user as not worth keeping. Keeping tabs is a signal from the user about which entries were useful. A form of curation. Without that signal, what is there?
However, I think bookmarks would be profoundly transformed from nearly useless to better than tabs by improvements to bookmark navigation, UX and a little extra context.
So I have to give credit to you for the idea - history navigation improvements might be transformative in a similar way.
It shouldn't even be a "hard" problem any more. Search and relevance are mature technologies. You do need to provide some features, but there are many: time spent interacting with tabs, was it a "terminus" in a navigation session, active user marking/tagging, signals from other users, other products, etc. It would be an excellent use of ML. The rest is capturing these in a user friendly product, though if it makes Megacorp no more ad money, I doubt anyone will work on it however useful it may be.
But browser history has way more stuff in it than matters. For example, I'll often have tabs open with documentation that was relevant to a project I'm working on. I want that, I don't want the 20 other search results I clicked on that were useless and I don't want to have other pages O had to navigate through to get to the right doc page.
Some people hate bookmarks. When you want to read something later you just keep that tab open until you have time to go back. I usually have 200-300 tabs open at any given time. Works great.
A set of a few hundred tabs, spread across a few windows, is like the bubbling organic head of a stream of temporal bookmarks. It would be great if there were some kind of time-based decay -- or ripening, depending on your perspective -- of open tabs into a more permanent bookmark-like arrangement, with spatial/proximity and window affinity cues. These could easily rehydrate to their live versions, or become fixed as "organic bookmarks" living alongside "affirmative" bookmarks and the normal, more ephemeral, uncurated browsing history.
I have had similar hundreds of tabs before, though I try to keep to a few dozen nowadays. The source tends to be a cluster of tabs (say 10) associated to a single subject, full of articles and tools I am using related to it. Frankly an obvious solution is to have a "rough-assortment ephemeral bookmark-group" where I can shift-select say 7 tabs at once and keep them for later, with an easy deletion cycle at will. And it would be good for this method to keep track of my local data of the tabs (scroll position, typed entries, ect.). Bookmarks (in Firefox at least) suck for this in contrast to just working directly with tabs, since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them, meanwhile the tabs are grouped together nicely alongside interest-groups I hold for them, and can scroll for what I want or type in the address-bar.
Definitely not a good solution for the local tab data problem, but for:
> since you need to bookmark each tab individually + name it + sort them
If you're already using Tree Style Tab on Firefox, there's a `Bookmark this tree` option that collapses the above workflow to just bookmarking the tree and naming a bookmark folder.
People need to learn to let go and just close tabs. It's freeing. If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. If it doesn't, no big deal. The benefits of not lugging around that baggage outweighs the potentially tiny productivity hit you take to look up the info again.
It’s funny how there’s a borderline moral judgement about things like this. It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox, unnamed layers in photoshop, or open windows or tabs or apps or whatever would say something about your character. No, to the extent that these things are even a problem at all, that’s a consequence of a design that fails to take actual human factors into account.
I was also going to draw parallels to the icons on the desktop. Hundreds of browser tabs open is the 2020 version of having hundreds of icons all crammed onto your Windows desktop.
That's not true, many applications have moved to the "constant save" model (and games too). For instance, you never ever save in Final Cut Pro anymore (I wish ProTools would go this route). There is no reason a browser can't persist your tab state, or your window state, window positions, etc to disk continually and always relaunch with the persisted state.
I agree that hoarding tabs is a bad practice that is hindering your productivity by slowing down your computer and causing distractions.
However it's definitely not true that it's easy to find things again after closing them. Search engines are terrible solution for trying to find a specific thing with broad categorical terms. All you will get are referral and affiliate websites that most definitely don't contain the most accurate, trustworthy, or up-to-date information.
I think at the moment, best information is discovered through recommendations of other people via twitter, slack, whatsapp groups, etc. But resurfacing that info later on is hard, so you need to act immediately.
My point is, when people find obscure things that will/might come handy soon or later, they tend to keep them open in the browser as a way of temporary storing them. First, because native bookmarks are a terrible solution where you quickly run out of space and keeping them organised is too much work. Second, because keeping them open serves as a visual reminder to get back to it (once bookmarked they are out of sight, out of mind).
This is precisely the reason why we developed Tablerone. It's an Chrome extension that serves as a bookmarking system (saving and organising entire sessions) and as a tab manager (easier navigation).
https://tabler.one/
By having an easily accessible and private space to store information you are still processing or intend to return later liberates you of the need to keep them open. As a result you get a concise timeline overview of your browsing history, that makes it much easier to later search through with broad categorical terms.
What's more FF History window is fully searchable, to the point that I am regularly (it seems) bringing up results from years past, and have actually restored my firefox profile from Time Machine to get my history back. The location bar search is more limited than the history window search (if nothing else it's easier to browse the results.)
> If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history.
This just isn't useful for the kinds of information retrieval I find myself doing, and I truly don't understand why people think that ought to be enough for everyone. Perhaps other people don't collect and combine large amounts of information into new artefacts as part of their regular online activity?
When I'm retaining state such as tabs, it's not so I can find the same information by searching for it.
It's so that I can go through information I have already found through searching and following links, which has passed my filter as the useful things I'll need for the next phase in processing, to do something useful with.
The important part isn't that the information is findable again by searching. The important part is that I've already half-catalogued what's useful once, and it's that cataloguing which is what I need to build on a second or third time.
All the "next phases" in processing typically take from a few days to a few months to complete.
To give a concrete example:
Recently I had to do some research on QUIC protocol and HTTP/3 for a job. In my searches I found various pages of particular interest that I should at some point extract information from, and add them as references to a report I'm writing. But there was no point adding them at the time to my report, because until I had found more documents and pages to read, I wouldn't know which ones were the best ones to include as references for someone else to use, and which ones to drop.
Also, that list of 100 represented things I would need to systematically check through again in my code implementation and report before dismissing them. By systematically, I don't mean in linear order, but I do mean complete.
So I ended up with about 100 tabs, expecting to go through them systematically later, and turn them into about 30 references for my report eventually. As the task would be completed in about 5 weeks (in parallel with a number of other jobs), those 100 tabs were context for that task for about 5 weeks.
If I deleted them "to reduce clutter", the fact I could find the information again by searching for it was pretty much useless. That would be starting my task all over again.
And if I bookmarked them, that would loses track of the scroll position, which meant I'd lose which page sections, headings, etc were the relevant item I was keeping to use, or decide not to use, in the final code and report.
Really I had only two options: Keep a lot of tabs open for this one task for a few weeks. Or write down a lot of notes as I went, intending to delete some of the notes eventually. I've tried both, and find keeping the tabs to take much less time and overhead compared with taking notes in the first round.
Now imagine I'm doing several research-like tasks like that overlapping in time, each of them taking a few weeks or a few months each. The overlap means that number is multiplied by the amount of concurrency, so it reaches several hundred or a thousand easily.
I'd love to use something better, but tabs are the thing I've found most effective so far. In the past I've taken more notes, and I found that led to a lot of time taking notes. It's like the difference between a more efficient or less efficient batch sorting algorithm for information discovery, indexing, merging and eventually selecting out the most relevant things.
People love to suggest alternatives. I'd love one because tabs do have many problems. But I've yet to find a good alternative which is actually helpful. Bookmarks are not because of lost context and poor UX for going through them (large thumbnails with retained scroll position and/or highlighted current section heading and/or tags/notes would be great). Deleting and searching again is useless. Taking notes at every stage is ok but labour intensive by comparison. I tried Org mode but it has the same problem as taking lots of notes. What else is there for organising work-in-progress information like this?
Trivial: you need to look something up, you follow a trail on wikipedia and you pretty quickly have 100 tabs.
I have OneTab for Firefox, which allows me to convert active tabs into a bookmark list. This helps the problem a lot because I can now park my active tabs.
There are people with thousands of tabs. ( Not all Loaded Of course ). Every time there are HN discussion about browser you will see those mentioning it. Most of them are on Firefox so I guess I might be the few who does that on Safari.
Combination of depth-first browsing and FOMO. The one thing that's serendipitous about it is that you might just get to that article you opened up last week after all
It's actually abnormal to actively throw away things. It's not how the brain works. Do you actively try to "forget" things? Very rarely.
We only need to throw away physical objects due to space constraints and rearrangement/search cost. Mental and virtual objects can decay away and there is no rearrangement cost when they are already organized by relevance.
My brain is constantly forgetting things. How many steps did it take you to go from your bed to your desk? What was the color of the car you last saw driving down the street? How many times have you blinked this last hour? What did you have for lunch on March 23rd? Its constantly filtering out things it doesn't think are interesting or important to me anymore, and it disappears from my consciousness.
That's exactly my point, it happens automatically by relevance ("how many times did it get recently refreshed"). It's not you going in to actively close out memory "tabs". All your "tabs" are open.
There’s literally a movement of affluent people to move into tiny houses. It may seem strange to some but maybe what’s abnormal is all this want for more more more is just marketing and one has to admit that they’ve fallen prey to it. I don’t like stuff and I loathe acquiring things. Getting rid of a car, for example changed my life for the better. Needing one in the future leads me anxious, no matter how much money car manufacturers spend to tell me I need to do just that to fit in with their status quo.
> Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. )
You can restore the old plist with this to get them back, if you had it backed up in Time Machine or something. It's annoying but it's saved me a couple times.
Nope, it was blank, because the Plist files have nothing in it. And I cant rescue it either. In Firefox they make lastsession.json and lastoeesion.bak where .bak was a backup and could be restored from within UI setting. I think they also had the .bak zipped somewhere in case all things fails, you can manually restore some part of it.
Although the frequency of that zip creation was something like daily so you still lose some part of tabs. There were additional guarantee they put in place so last session will never be overwritten again or blank out. But that was a very long time ago when I was still a heavy Firefox users and follows its development very closely. If I remember correctly those features development and debugging happened on Mozillazine.
> Fav Icons meant they are no longer showing the Tab Description once you have a dozen tabs as they will shrink to Icons Size. So you either have normal Tabs or Tabs with Fav Icons, not both. ( This is new in Safari 14 )
FYI, there is a way to get around this annoying new setting.
1. Enable Preferences -> Tabs -> Show website icons.
1. Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. )
>>
With Safari's switch to WebExtensions, I hope that the developer of OneTab (1) makes their extension available on Safari as well. I started using this extension on Firefox to get an additional layer of protection from an unexpected crash that corrupted tabs data. This was before the multiple backups approach that Firefox has adopted, which has all but eliminated tab data corruption. I continue using it because I like to see tabs in a list.
Same here. My extension these days approaches 3000 users across Chrome/Firefox, but only a fraction of those visit the donations link and send something. It just makes no sense to pay $99 to maybe get a few donations. I don't want to make this a paid extension and then spend time and money on marketing and hope that maybe I will one day break even. I just want the extension to be available to users, that's all!
1. Just lost a few hundred Tabs from last session. Not the first time this has happened to me on Safari. ( Firefox used to have this problem as well, they implemented multiple LastSession.json to combat the problem and it is basically a thing of the past. )
2. Fav Icons meant they are no longer showing the Tab Description once you have a dozen tabs as they will shrink to Icons Size. So you either have normal Tabs or Tabs with Fav Icons, not both. ( This is new in Safari 14 )
3. Show Tab Overview will reload all the tabs, including those that were in idle / unload state. If you are a heavy tab user you should not do this. Having a hundred tabs reload will cause hundreds of GB of Data written to your SSD. Basically shortening its lifespan.
4. AFAIK ( I could be wrong ), Extensions still requires you to have an $99/ year developer account. Some of my favourite extensions are now either paid or can no longer be used.
Apart from that, yes it is very good.