Been years since I used tags in bookmarks, but on FF mobile I do often miss qutebrowser's quickmarks. I have a lot of stuff like "malw" to get to my MAL Watching list on my PC. My compromise on mobile is to use the bookmark titles kinda like a search or a description with keyboard stuffing, so maybe the default name of the bookmark is something generic like "MyAnimeList.net", I'll put "malw - " at the start of it, then next time I hit new tab and type malw out of habit it should come up. Not as good or reliable as a quickmark, but you could probably do something similar for a tag replacement. Bookmark some blog post about the Amiga, edit the title, throw in "retrocomputing diy technology blogpost hacking" or similar on either end, then when you type in "retrocomputing" later it should show up along your other stuff with that in the title. Might be more primitive but should do the trick.
ninkendo 8 hours ago [-]
Or a history item!
People forget about browser history. It’s super useful.
My technique: I open tabs just like anyone else, and when I feel like “that’s too many tabs”, I just close them all. Every one of them.
If I need them again? Open up the browser history. It’s searchable. It has everything. Use it!
kccqzy 8 hours ago [-]
At work I’m basically required to use Chrome and Chrome does not keep browser history beyond 90 days. That is useless. An open tab can easily last more than 90 days and survive restarts.
nor-and-or-not 3 hours ago [-]
You might like Tab Session Manager, which also lets you tag and search your saved window/tab sessions and annotates them with a date.
not very well, except you add a lot keywords to website title manually via bookmaeks
dylan604 7 hours ago [-]
Browser history is nothing but self incriminating evidence. Why would you keep it around?
Melonai 5 hours ago [-]
Why? I don't really have anything that dangerous, illegal, or weird open... And the browser history on my local machine is at most exposed to me and my fiancé, who I don't really care to hide it away from.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
You do you, I'll do me. I know I'm not the only one, otherwise, the option wouldn't even be available as a preference. Just because you can't think of a reason someone might want to use that option does not mean everyone else is the same level of unimaginative.
As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.
lazyasciiart 4 hours ago [-]
Damn, that’s a very defensive take for someone who started by asking why anyone would behave differently to them.
Barbing 4 hours ago [-]
> As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.
No obligation to share, certainly.
Curiosity is there in part because we may learn a valuable lesson - something those “with nothing to hide” [I know] might not’ve considered. (not a request, we can learn from others)
done_lurking 5 hours ago [-]
If authorities already have the means to access your browser history then deleting it won't accomplish anything. They can just install malware and see what you're browsing anyway.
taneq 3 hours ago [-]
In a remote hack or an evil maid attack, sure. If you get targeted for something, and your computer is confiscated and searched, the less ammunition stored there the better. With a large enough dataset (emails, web history, etc.) it’s pretty easy to cherry pick data points to build a narrative.
I don’t bother with this level of defensiveness but I can follow the reasoning.
skinfaxi 5 hours ago [-]
Are you against journaling for self-reflection?
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
I don't keep a diary if that's what you're asking, but it doesn't mean that I can't look back on things to help make decisions for future growth.
Not really sure how any of that has anything to do with leaving a browser history
Barbing 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps curious if the thinking extends to:
“[Any/most documentation of activity and behavior] is nothing but self incriminating evidence.”
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
We've all see the stories about people being forced to grant access at border crossings. This is a specific type of information they would love to see. Being in the habit of not storing it means you don't have to forget to do it at the random time you need to have it deleted. So when you do a full shut down before going through the airport, which you obviously do, your browser has already cleaned up for you.
I don't care if I think I've done nothing wrong. The jackbooted thugs at the border might have a different say so, and now you're screwed because you felt like your history was necessary. I trust no one, and I'm not even a freedom fighter.
NetMageSCW 3 hours ago [-]
Some times it really is paranoia.
fwip 5 hours ago [-]
Sometimes you want to go to a website a second time.
dylan604 5 hours ago [-]
I do it all the time
girvo 8 hours ago [-]
I use tabs as ephemeral bookmarks, yeah
Maybe there’s a better way
iugtmkbdfil834 9 hours ago [-]
Resource conservation ( memory ), attention conservation ( focus, change for additional distractions ) come to mind.
Basically puts an overlay on all timed out tabs, shows all timed out tabs so you can kill them all together, etc.
I want a better algorithm / heuristic that can semantically track what I'm doing.
I might eventually be brave enough to break out of tabs and let my windowing system handle everything.
cactusplant7374 7 hours ago [-]
It discourages and frustrates. So yes, it is useless in terms of modern browsing.
jdprgm 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think any browsers are really designed for the range of how many tabs people keep open.
I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.
It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.
CodesInChaos 37 minutes ago [-]
Get the "One Tab" extension. It closes all tabs, but saves a list, so it gets over the psychological hurdle of losing the open tabs.
ralnivar 3 hours ago [-]
Might be just me but I just close everything at the end of day to start a clean slate for next day (usually around 50). I also just use bookmarks for persistent autocomplete.
Helps wade through the backlog of tabs to "burndown" one by one or en-masse?
K0balt 3 hours ago [-]
This is bizarre to me. I close
Out my browser completely several times a day lol.
darknavi 2 hours ago [-]
My wife refuses to use bookmarks and instead uses open tabs. It drives me nuts.
spencer-p 3 hours ago [-]
Do you actually come back to a tab 2,000 tabs later?
Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.
jdprgm 3 hours ago [-]
I do come back to a non-trivial amount.
The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.
Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.
Jach 2 hours ago [-]
For youtube, sticking it on 'watch later' is one approach, or some other playlist. Even better, that way you can cronjob a script to save them locally. I'll leave youtube tabs for too long (despite this) and too often I've eventually returned and it's been removed. My other tab-shrinking habits are bookmark folders in the form "year-unread" and a local txt file where I loosely dump related URLs into pseudo-categories/sections.
SubNoize 2 hours ago [-]
This feels like a hoarders mentality. You don't have to answer this but do you hoard in any other aspects of life? There's nothing more therapeutic than closing tabs. Worst case, everything is in history and can be opened again.
jdprgm 1 hours ago [-]
No I don't think I do. I associate "hoarders" with reality tv and disastrously messy homes though which I can't relate to.
If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.
ramboldio 9 hours ago [-]
Related work: Trello allows 'aging' for tasks. One can set them to become more transparent over time or turn into stained 'pirate' paper.
"Originally, I was thinking about blocking users from closing their overgrown tabs until they slash all plants, but I thought it would be too annoying... "
I would ask that you please add this as an option :), might actually use it for that feature alone because I do accidentally close old tabs by accident without noticing that was meaning to keep open.
alanning 8 hours ago [-]
Fun project, but I also really liked the way she came up with it:
I was doing a little creative exercise the other day around the word "Overgrowth”…
Is this a common thing in the creative space? Seems like a fun activity
dylan604 4 hours ago [-]
People get inspired by seeing a new color, smelling a new scent, or hearing a new song. Inspiration comes in all shapes and forms. Makes me kind of sad that you seemingly haven't been inspired by something random in life yet.
20after4 1 hours ago [-]
You could combine this with tab unloading to save resources once a tab has gotten completely overgrown.
profsummergig 8 hours ago [-]
Chrome's "tab group" feature is awesome and it ended my issue with unaddressed and open tabs. It even works on Chrome for Android mobile.
newscracker 4 hours ago [-]
This is so cool! I wish for this to be available on Firefox, where I usually have multiple windows with each window having several tabs. The repository doesn’t make it clear if this works on non-Chrome/ium browsers.
Barbing 4 hours ago [-]
Related:
Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
It is absolutely! (But nobody better try putting this on my browser.)
SugarReflex 10 hours ago [-]
It doesn't do anything for shareholder value, but I love it.
bethekidyouwant 10 hours ago [-]
Unless you make ram
9 hours ago [-]
b33l 10 hours ago [-]
I like to throw cress seeds into unattended keyboards
asphodele 9 hours ago [-]
Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.
jakzurr 8 hours ago [-]
OK, now I'm having flashbacks of astronomy Macintosh lab, late at night, too much homework (early 90's).
Fell asleep in front of keyboard, woke up to "Can of Worms" screensaver (never seen it before), had a heck of a start, wondering what the sound was, and what all those things were crawling all over the screen???
Barbing 4 hours ago [-]
Can they really grow that fast?
paid_dot_expert 10 hours ago [-]
Cress is a word I haven't heard in decades. Got to get some cress!
Dwedit 7 hours ago [-]
I just use a tab suspender, I prefer having RAM over having something cute.
> Just for fun, you can pick your weapon of choice between the rusty machete, the chainsaw and the flamethrower.
tamimio 10 hours ago [-]
These useless programs are like what you used to see back in win98 or winxp with dancing monkey or scoopydoo walking all over your desktop windows, which I think later turned to human dancers before being used to distribute all sort of viruses.
"BonziBuddy was described as spyware[1] and adware,[2] and was discontinued in 2004 after Bonzi Software, Inc. faced lawsuits and fines regarding the software.[3]"
It's just a matter of time before something like a "Zoltar screensaver for Basecamp" becomes an IP siphon.
makmanalp 9 hours ago [-]
sheep.exe was not useless, I loved it. you take that back.
bbor 8 hours ago [-]
Woah, my interests! Anyone have any tips or favorite projects to share from procedural vine/flora generation? It's a fascinating space, and this extension seems to do surprisingly convincing job of it
johnea 9 hours ago [-]
I like it!
I have a ton of these tabs. I don't consider them "neglected" though.
Some things take years to come to fruition. You can't just go buy them at home despot.
Maybe younger people don't yet have an appreciation for things that assume an air of legacy and heritage after many years of "just sitting there".
When finally re-visited, they have a meaning that can only accumulate with the passage of significant time...
firstdib 8 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jasonpeacock 7 hours ago [-]
People who keep tabs open too long are the same as those who store files in the system trash.
At some point it’ll get flushed and you’ll only have yourself to blame…
zeroq 7 hours ago [-]
I'm one of those people.
I have serious ADHD and I often dive a rabbit hole for an idea for side project. Or research. Or combination of both. Most of my side projects you could categorize as spikes. There's no serious intent on delivering something of value for the world, just going from A to B and learning a thing or two on the run.
I'm like kerosene, I light up instantly, but the fire goes away very quickly. I can be researching a thing for 3 nights straight in my spare time to gather hooks and pieces of information... and then I get distracted and my focus goes somewhere else. And I'm left with 10 tabs that were suppose to kick start my idea.
To my own surprise I tend to go back to these ideas, but sometimes it takes me months, and sometimes, I keep these tabs on one of my devices, opened for months at a time. Sometimes I scrape them, adding links with notes to Obsidian.
Of course the amount of hoarded information vastly exceeds my throughput.
bertjk 7 hours ago [-]
And while initially you fear that you may have lost something valuable, you also immediately feel like a great burden has been lifted...
Rendered at 07:44:05 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
To put it another way, it helps me recognize which tabs I am using. And which I am saving for later without having to evaluate the content of the tab.
One tweak… the coverage percentage can it be adjustable? Max = 100% looses all information about the pages contents, except the title.
Also also… if the images can be made translucent… you can make old timey effects like yellowing and decay.
You can't use the old tab because all the plants. You open a new tab for the same page. Don't need to close any old tab for that.
versus what the operating system or browser can provide.
In fact, weren't bookmarks supposed to solve EXACTLY this? You'd just bookmark a website on any page then come back to it any time in the future.
But then websites wanted to be apps and stopped storing state in the URL...
But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.
Have session storage extensions ever caught up to where they were before firefox dumped XUL?
Oh yeah, you're right. I do sometimes need the Back button to retain its history, and sometimes duplicate tabs to start a new "breadcrumb" path.
Okay, okay, but what if! https://files.catbox.moe/4m6c5x.png
People forget about browser history. It’s super useful.
My technique: I open tabs just like anyone else, and when I feel like “that’s too many tabs”, I just close them all. Every one of them.
If I need them again? Open up the browser history. It’s searchable. It has everything. Use it!
https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/
not very well, except you add a lot keywords to website title manually via bookmaeks
As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.
No obligation to share, certainly.
Curiosity is there in part because we may learn a valuable lesson - something those “with nothing to hide” [I know] might not’ve considered. (not a request, we can learn from others)
I don’t bother with this level of defensiveness but I can follow the reasoning.
Not really sure how any of that has anything to do with leaving a browser history
“[Any/most documentation of activity and behavior] is nothing but self incriminating evidence.”
I don't care if I think I've done nothing wrong. The jackbooted thugs at the border might have a different say so, and now you're screwed because you felt like your history was necessary. I trust no one, and I'm not even a freedom fighter.
Maybe there’s a better way
https://github.com/echelon/browser-focus
I need to add screenshots.
Basically puts an overlay on all timed out tabs, shows all timed out tabs so you can kill them all together, etc.
I want a better algorithm / heuristic that can semantically track what I'm doing.
I might eventually be brave enough to break out of tabs and let my windowing system handle everything.
I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.
It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.
Would you mind giving this a shot and sharing your feedback? https://github.com/TheCodeArtist/firefox-tabs-review
Helps wade through the backlog of tabs to "burndown" one by one or en-masse?
Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.
The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.
Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.
If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.
https://trello.com/power-ups/55a5d917446f517774210012
I was doing a little creative exercise the other day around the word "Overgrowth”…
Is this a common thing in the creative space? Seems like a fun activity
Fell asleep in front of keyboard, woke up to "Can of Worms" screensaver (never seen it before), had a heck of a start, wondering what the sound was, and what all those things were crawling all over the screen???
"BonziBuddy was described as spyware[1] and adware,[2] and was discontinued in 2004 after Bonzi Software, Inc. faced lawsuits and fines regarding the software.[3]"
It's just a matter of time before something like a "Zoltar screensaver for Basecamp" becomes an IP siphon.
I have a ton of these tabs. I don't consider them "neglected" though.
Some things take years to come to fruition. You can't just go buy them at home despot.
Maybe younger people don't yet have an appreciation for things that assume an air of legacy and heritage after many years of "just sitting there".
When finally re-visited, they have a meaning that can only accumulate with the passage of significant time...
At some point it’ll get flushed and you’ll only have yourself to blame…
I have serious ADHD and I often dive a rabbit hole for an idea for side project. Or research. Or combination of both. Most of my side projects you could categorize as spikes. There's no serious intent on delivering something of value for the world, just going from A to B and learning a thing or two on the run.
I'm like kerosene, I light up instantly, but the fire goes away very quickly. I can be researching a thing for 3 nights straight in my spare time to gather hooks and pieces of information... and then I get distracted and my focus goes somewhere else. And I'm left with 10 tabs that were suppose to kick start my idea.
To my own surprise I tend to go back to these ideas, but sometimes it takes me months, and sometimes, I keep these tabs on one of my devices, opened for months at a time. Sometimes I scrape them, adding links with notes to Obsidian.
Of course the amount of hoarded information vastly exceeds my throughput.