Hacker News Reader

Comment by bronz | Hacker News Reader

Just a warning, if you try this while using Safari it might crash and close all of your tabs somehow. And it might make it so that you can't reopen those tabs despite the fact that you have tabs set to be restored each session. And you may in fact experience the acute pain of losing a year's worth of painstakingly accumulated tabs. Not that this has happened to me.

View on HN

> a year's worth of painstakingly accumulated tabs.

You cannot be serious about this. This is like writing a thesis and just never closing office and never saving. A year?

I'm really sorry about that. I didn't know it was going to do that. I had seen that it was doing that in browsers on Android and specifically disabled it for mobile users to avoid such an awful experience. I had just assumed that Safari, being WebKit, would work just as well as the least common denominator of Chrome and Opera. Again, very sorry.

I guess that will teach me to start sneaking into my wife's computer bag and borrowing her Macbook to test these things.

No apologies are needed, nothing critical was lost :). Cool project BTW.

Safari has this feature called Reading List, you should look into it.

Reading List is annoying to use and inferior to tabs.

out of curiosity, why not use the bookmarking feature?

Because I cycle through a lot of tabs. Yes, some of them I leave up for months to pick away at, but others I finish in just a day. It's much easier to close tabs than to edit my bookmarks constantly. And losing those tabs isn't an issue because Safari can be made to reopen those tabs each session, even after unexpected shutdown or whatever. But then this happened. I need to write something that will back up my tabs.

I'm the same way, so I can relate to your pain. I've had this happen before with Chrome/Chromium with hundreds of tabs. I now use Firefox for two reasons: One, the UI is better than Chrome/Chromium with hundreds of tabs active, and two I now simply periodically clear out long term tabs when I no longer have an immediate need for them by bookmarking them.

My friends think I'm insane by keeping so many tabs open. Maybe I am. Maybe you are, too. Yet with as disorganized as it might seem to others, it works well for my particular usage patterns. (It also helps that I segregate news, work, misc. activities into different profiles, too.) The thing is that sometimes when you open something that you want to get back to at some indeterminate point in the future, you can do one of two things: Bookmark it and forget about it, possibly permanently; or keep it open and stumble upon it as you go through your tabs to categorize them and clean them out. Although these days, I mostly just dump everything into a dated but uncategorized list to go through in the future. Session Manager handles the rest in the event I do something stupid.

I imagine I'll catch some flak for sharing this, but it works well for me. My work-related browser sessions are usually better organized and important stuff gets saved more or less immediately. My "fun" generic browsing instances--not so much.

Wow, you really get it. You really hit the nail of the head about bookmarks. They are almost always completely forgotten. Tabs, however, are constantly groomed and sifted through and pruned. If I could have my way, I would take Safari with all it's nice features like sexy tab scrolling and tab view (these are major assets to the tab junkie) and reshape it into something entirely tab based. Instead of bookmarks, you would have long lived tabs. And all the tabs are categorized in whatever way the user wants. And tab view would actually allow you to manipulate tabs while viewing them (it is a fucking mystery to me why you can't do that). So it would be like having all your bookmarks and tabs mixed into one pot. And of course, bullet proof tab recovery features without the cloud. Jesus, maybe I should just write a Safari extension.

Brothers, I found you! Finally people who use tabbed browsing like me. Is there some forum for advanced tab browsing users? If not maybe we should make one. For me windows are tasks/areas of research. A task can last minutes, hours, days or even weeks. Inside windows there are groups and each group has a starting point(usually a google search) from which many tabs are generated and then checked individually. And than each tab grows its own history by following hyperlinks. And when a task is completed, the resulting pages are bookmarked into a folder.

> Is there some forum for advanced tab browsing users?

Not that I'm aware of, but there might be a support group. ;)

Joking aside, it's curious how much flak you can take from suggesting that you make extensive use of a feature that's built into the browser... everyone I know thinks I'm a bit odd when they see my Firefox sessions.

> For me windows are tasks/areas of research. A task can last minutes, hours, days or even weeks.

I really like this perspective, because it's deeply reflective of my usage patterns. For example, when I was learning Golang, I had a session opened exclusively for that, with all the respective documentation, some blogs, tutorials, and various odds and ends. Over time it evolved, certainly, but those tabs remained open for the duration that I needed them. It doesn't matter if it's a day, two days, or two months.

I have one Firefox profile configured to use Session Manager with various saved sessions based on whatever I'm working on. So, whenever I need a major context switch, I save the current session, then switch to the one I need. It allows me to pick up where I left off--even if there's 300+ tabs in that particular list. Though, I'm pretty bad about clearing some of those tabs out--oftentimes it's because I want to revisit whatever I was researching, even if it takes several months!

It sounds like you and I do about the same thing in that regard! Although, I've yet to learn the bookmarking technique. ;) Presently, for my generic browsing, I just dump everything into a dated folder. Everything else of interest that I don't want to inadvertently lose gets shunted into my unsorted bookmarks without a date under the pretense that I'll eventually categorize it (which I usually do). I think I'll have to try the categorization for tasks that are complete rather than simply bookmarking tabs individually and massacring the rest.

One of the extensions that is priceless to haw I do this is https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multiple-tab-...

The ability to shift select tabs and bookmark, move to a new window or close is amazing.

> Tabs, however, are constantly groomed and sifted through and pruned.

Exactly this (apologies for the 2-day delay!). This is exactly why I keep so many tabs open, because I can filter them and use them as a living browsing session. It also provides me with some amusement when I look through tabs opened weeks (sometimes months?) prior, because it gives me a snapshot into what I was thinking of/looking for during that window of history.

I'm really glad to find others who share my usage patterns. I don't feel so weird. :D

Aside: Just a week or two ago, I archived a bunch of tabs from a generic browsing session and I think the total came close to 980. Eeeek!

Firefox also has the very useful "Restore Previous Session" option under the "History" menu - perfect for when you close your browser by accident (in case of a crash Firefox reopens last tabs by default anyway).

The tabs are also "soft-loaded" meaning that you have to click on them to load the content, so you can find the offending tab and kill it to prevent crash from happening again.

I use "restore previous session" pretty extensively, personally, especially if I have multiple windows open. That said, I've very rarely had bad luck with it in prior versions of Firefox, occasionally discovering that it's trashed my sessions. Thus, even today, I still keep Session Manager installed as an insurance policy. (Though, I still backup ~/.mozilla pretty regularly too...)

> The tabs are also "soft-loaded" meaning that you have to click on them to load the content

I couldn't be happier since Mozilla switched to this mechanism. It means reloading a massive browsing instance isn't quite as resource intensive. Last I checked Chrome/Chromium, it STILL doesn't do this, which is infuriating and part of the reason I dumped using Chromium as my primary general browser.

There's nothing worse than when as few as 100 tabs can eat up ~2-3GiB RAM right after you start the browser...

Check out an extension called OneTab. You will LOVE it!

It looked very intriguing, and I installed it, but the reviews for the Firefox version are really terrible. Just a heads up in case someone should also install the addon, but not catch the bad reviews.

Gotta admit. I've been using Session Manager [1] for years. It's a bit clunky, but it works pretty well once you figure out the UI for saving tab sets. It appears the primary complaints also revolve around its poor UI, but hey, I'm used to it. ;)

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-manag...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com