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Comment by colordrops | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with you here. I don't understand why tabs, bookmarks, and history aren't just merged into one feature. History needs to be less ephemeral, but more easily editable. Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content, as well as a knob that dials up or down the number of visible tabs/history items, and they'd fall off with disuse. You could pin some to the top of history if you absolutely didn't want the tab to disappear, though that could encourage the same problem that currently exists, which is accumulation of tabs.

This sort of feature along with trees and or groups would be killer.

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> Then you could add some sort of ctrl-p style fuzzy search that includes both url and content.

Try focusing the URL bar in Firefox and prefixing your query with '%'. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/address-bar-autocomplet... shows more prefixes like this. It does not search the content of the page, but is super useful still.

You need a space after the '%', which always confused and annoyed me. But TIL: the special character doesn't need to be a prefix! It only needs to be separated from other characters using a space. Makes much more sense now.

Apparently you don't! I just tested that on 76.0 (64-bit) on Windows, and it works without a space.

The worst part is that % cannot search across containers

I'm baffled how firefox hasn't figured this out yet

Here's the bug [1]; apparently someone made it so on purpose [2].

In related issues, I'd like switch to tab to be consistent so that ctrl-clicking on an awesomebar result always opens it in a new tab, instead of depending on whether it found a tab or not.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858

[2] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1287866

> apparently someone made it so on purpose [2]

This is terribly unfortunate, given that there are many active bugs associated with this: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1479858 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1500991 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1538069

I've read the thread you linked and I still don't understand their reasoning for this.

THIS!

I just wanted to post the same thought- I want tabs, bookmarks and history to be connected to the context of the tasks I am doing- sometimes I am investigating a problem and open 20 tabs and I want my browser to record this (perhaps how long I stayed on the site) and present this info to me in an intelligent way.

I've though about this a lot and the big problems in the way of this are state and loading time. The state is a problem because keeping a tab open is the only way to preserve most of its state (scrolling, forms, etc.) and the loading time to cold-load a page makes bookmarks much less appealing for things that are related to what I'm currently doing. After those two issues are fixed, the rest is just UI.

I think Edge has some pretty neat UI for this kind of thing with whatever that button on the top left of the tab bar is called, but I haven't actually used it much since everything else about Edge is a hot mess.

If we could somehow dump the whole tab state to disk and restore it later, that would basically solve both of the above problems. But looking at the memory footprint of modern browsers, I doubt that's practical.

State is why we use tabs instead of history. A lot of this thread is about what to do with tabs once they are opened, not analyzing why they open the way they do.

Back is unreliable. The page might reload, dynamic pages like reddit will generate new results or reorder them. The safe thing to do is click all links in new tabs and then come back to the original link page. Right clicking the back and forth buttons hides a ton of relevant information thats not visible without a context menu, AND its broken into two context menus. I have to remember which button to right click.

Even on a google search, its easier to middle click all 10 results and then close 9 tabs once i dismiss them than it is to click back 10 times and try navigating between each step. And if i run into a site i like, now im in the sticky situation of wanting the current tab open, and the previous tab in history open. Which one do i want to inherit the navigation history? Thats part of the reason its easier to ignore history near completely (only using it for specific linear non branching navigation.) Its significantly less thinking, mouse movement, and task switching. Step 1 open all links, step 2 analyze links. Not a back and forth.

I open tabs to replace all history navigation. I keep tabs open as short term bookmarks until they can be closed or bookmarked.

This exactly. Just a quick comment; If you /duplicate/ a Tab, it inherits the history. This is pretty useful sometimes.

Yes! All of these things are fundamentally just references to web pages (URLs, perhaps, with a little bit of exta state).

A properly designed framework would make it really easy to just save a "session" (tab sub-tree for one purpose) for later, sync it, or archive it.

This, combined with automatic archival. I hate coming back to a tab I’ve opened months ago, only to see that the content has disappeared.

Do you have a solution for automatic archival? I'd like to have every single page I've been to archived, with awesome search. I've so often wanted to find a page I remember to have read, but simply cannot find it anymore. The archive would be "my known subset of the internet", a checkbox that sadly is missing in Google.

I don’t think my history in firefox is very ephemeral. It still remembers sites I opened years back.

Chrome is 90 days

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