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Comment by zetanor | Hacker News Reader

If you have tabs sitting there unused for days, isn't that just a bookmark?

Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable. Firefox mobile doesn't even allow you to tag new bookmarks.

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.

> Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable.

Okay, okay, but what if! https://files.catbox.moe/4m6c5x.png

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!

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.

> An open tab can easily last more than 90 days and survive restarts.

This fills me with horror. Different strokes I guess.

For example at work I open a tab with the bug tracker page whenever I start a project. For large projects this easily takes many months to complete. Then I close the tab when the project is done and launched. Roughly speaking one open tab = one TODO item.

You might like Tab Session Manager, which also lets you tag and search your saved window/tab sessions and annotates them with a date.

https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/

Nah, my point is that having tons of tabs open literally clouds my mind, like being in a messy room. Closing the tabs feels like I'm tidying up. History exists so that I can still go back to a tab if I really need it, which makes it less "scary" to simply start from a clean slate.

At some point it can get up to a few gigs and need pruning. But knowing you can just close a window with 50+ tabs and not loose anything is super cool

> It’s searchable.

not very well, except you add a lot keywords to website title manually via bookmaeks

Browser history is nothing but self incriminating evidence. Why would you keep it around?

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.

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.

Damn, that’s a very defensive take for someone who started by asking why anyone would behave differently to them.

> 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 generally do anything "incriminating" that would need to stay out of my browser history, and even if I did, clearing your local browser history isn't going to mean much: If it's truly criminal stuff you're talking about, all the websites you use are likely subpoena-able anyway and they'll get your "history" one way or another.

For mildly "incriminating" stuff that isn't illegal, just use an Incognito window. :-)

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.

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.

I would've thought it paranoia that such things would happen in the west, but given the insanity in the UK in recent years (1) maybe it's not. Seems pretty common to get arrested in the UK for posting memes.

1: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/free-speech-dispatch/uk-teen...

In that case, full disk encryption is the only effective mitigation. As far as I know, there isn't a legal way to make you decrypt a personal device.

At border crossings they can deny you entry into the country if you refuse to allow your devices to be searched. Even if you're a US citizen re-entering the US, you will be denied entry if you don't comply. So while that can't force you they have pretty strong power of coercion, to the point where you're forced for all practical purposes.

Unfortunately this is true, border crossings are a special case and I'm still not sure what the best approach is for that. I imagine you would have to mail your device to the destination before you cross or just leave it at home. Alternatively, store the encrypted data in the cloud, download it at the destination, then wipe it from the device when you're done.

Sometimes you want to go to a website a second time.

I do it all the time

Are you against journaling for self-reflection?

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

Perhaps curious if the thinking extends to:

“[Any/most documentation of activity and behavior] is nothing but self incriminating evidence.”

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.

Some times it really is paranoia.

To be fair, it seems like we have no rights at borders and I think I read searches are way up or something.

Unfortunately might be safer to have inoffensive browser history rather than none if I had to speculate.

If we are going down the rabbit hole - I like to use groups as my "tookmarks" or "babs" so to speak. They act like both and help to keep things organized by project. Bookmarks are for permanent things, e.g. for work it might be direct deep links to things for the service(s) your team operates, and groups for projects e.g. this quarter we are adding spinners to the fidgets, and then regular tabs for the ephemeral, e.g. googling why ain't Docker decking the ducks.

I use tabs as ephemeral bookmarks, yeah

Maybe there’s a better way

I had the same habit, so I built an extension for it: tabs you haven't touched in a while get auto-archived after a certain period of time, and you can search the archive later.

There's a free tier, and a paid plan for heavier use. You can try it out here: https://tabsprompt.com

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