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Comment by marci | Hacker News Reader

Tabs aren't history, nor bookmarks:

- they keep sessions (a)live (audio/video, chat, where you stop reading)

- they can keep some or all of the history context ("how did I get here?")

- they can keep some of the browsing context ("what else was I looking at, what other tabs are around this one?")

- they are a filter. Every useless site, popup, get's into the history (>"If they don't close it, they want to remember it forever.")

- they (at least on desktop) have better ux than bookmarks and history (they're always there)

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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 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.

> 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.

>- 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.

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