I really like the idea of mining your own browsing history for insight. I think that the value of our browsing history is completely lost to us because the lack of tooling to make saving and searching more accessible.
My goal is to be able to use the Internet as normal, but have the extension automatically index and rank content I find important. For example, if I spend 5 minutes on a page that I went to after Hackernews, odds are I found that important so it should be considered in my history differently than other things.
The network effect of this data is pretty interesting too. It would be really cool to see what my friends, or other high trust, high signal, groups i am in find interesting. Being on a page where my mentor has stared, annotated, shared this before will probably give me pause and make me consider this page more deeply.
I'm curious if anybody else has any notes to share.
wow! this is awesome. I keep a daily journal with logseq and it feels similar to this. I like the idea of distilling someone’s day of browsing down to only relevant bits.
Safari is doing this great with profiles and tab groups. The profiles help you have multiple workspaces where different sessions are start so you don’t have to sign out and sign in for different accounts all the time. And every profile has a tab group which is a collection of tabs. All that synced across all of your iDevices.
You are right - but I don't count their implementation because it is incredibly lacking in basic functionality. Notice how the vertical "tabs" don't have a close X and the annoying padding that cuts off the tab name to replace it with "... "
Also, every time I open Safari, I have to manually click the ... and "Show tabs on sidebar" - for each tab group!
This is a total half assed implementation - I seriously doubt there are many who will use it in its current form.
I am using a similar extension Session Sync, but it exists only for Firefox and has an ability to sync sessions. It just saves sessions as bookmark folders, and sync is done natively by Firefox Account Sync. Despite the last update was in 2019, it still works pretty well.
As I can see from changelog, sessionic also supports sync [3]. It would be nice if it is added to description/readme.
Related: I used OneTab a while a few years ago, until i shared a tab with a friend (via e-mail if i remember correct), and later found out that OneTab lists shared tabs of all users publicly on some webserver, even searchable by Search engines. You cannot disable this.
Unfortunately I can not find any session manager that can compete with Session Buddy:
* Tab Session Manager loads ALL of the sessions when you bring up the interface, in my case causing it to consume all of the CPU for a good couple of minutes.
* Tab Session Manager does not present me with currently open incognito windows and tabs.
* Sessionic opens tabs in NEW normal (not-incognito) windows when you click on them.
In contrast, I can simply and quickly open Session Buddy and be greeted with a full page (so not just a pop up window) overview of currently open windows and their tabs, when I click on one of them, I'm taken to that tab in that window. If I click on a tab which isn't open (in a previously saved session), then the tab opens in an incognito window.
Seems that only Session Buddy has this behavior currently.
Session buddy for some reason ends up w/fairly high processor usage, especially if you keep the session page open. I created a local fork that stripped out tracking, slowing down updates, and automatically closing the session page and it it works much better for my needs.
Interesting, I haven't really noticed much of the resource usage (maybe because I leave the session page open in the background?), but I'll keep a close eye on it.
Tangentially: Do you know what kind of tracking it does? Like does it send all of your tabs to the mothership for instance?
It would be nice if they made a video demoing how to use this.
I like the idea but don't really get how this particular extension is used. When you save sessions is there a way to modify them later? or is it assumed you'll delete them and save again each time you change them?
It doesn't get synced anywhere - "cross-browser" in this case means that the extension works in multiple different browsers, but you still have to manually export/import sessions between them.
I think the question is regarding how it syncs across browsers (FF & chrome). I don't understand how this is possible for an extension, without some remote storage
Maybe something like a distributed DB where each different browser is a DB to sync with the other Browsers/Db’s ? I know this can be achievable with Tauri (a standalone app) and gunjs in a relatively straightforward way
I’ll never understand people who hoard tabs. Every time I’m done with something, I can close all the tabs in a few seconds. A single search can generate 15 tabs, and then after the solution is found I close them all. Anything I can’t handle now is pinned or added to Read Later, depending on the urgency.
Same goes with the files on my desktop (which is also the download folder). Select all, delete. Multiple times a day.
The tabs pile up, not because I hoard them, but because the task has not been finished yet. I start researching a thing, or troubleshoot a problem, and I dig for some time.
This digging generally routes me to places of internet not found or shown by my search engine of choice, hence if I close that set of tabs, I'll lose another half day to find them.
However, I can't touch that set of tabs, because a small or another big, more urgent thing gets in the way. I move that tab set to another window and start over. When the task at hand completed, these tabs/windows are closed.
The ones that piled over? Save that Windows's session, label it "X Research", and go on.
What that research or task ends, some tasks got bookmarked, others got closed, and the saved session is deleted.
Internet is much deeper when compared to 00s, and the most valuable information is not on the first page of Google/Kagi/whatever most of the time. Hence the apparent hoarding.
In Firefox anyway there’s a feature to “bookmark all open tabs” which I use for this scenario. It creates a bookmark folder with everything you have open.
History is an unorganized pile of stuff, I wouldn't be able to find things I once had open possibly months ago - if I'm not lucky I can't even remember what page titles to search for.
In my tab bar things are organized into groups that I collapse when I'm not actively using. Thus I can easily find those GitHub issues, discussion forum posts, datasheets, or whatever else I was looking at when I last worked on e.g. my brother's keyboard USB conversion, which sadly had to be put on hold due to other life stuff.
This could be replicated with bookmarks, but I have no reason to use bookmarks when my tab bar already works the way I want it to.
TreeStyleTabs in Firefox has a feature to bookmark the whole tree you've built. I find that very useful for a similar workflow as you. And keeping the tree structure is important because it lets me back up a level or two in case there were more resources to explore that I've not.
While both are belligerently user hostile, History is the only feature set worse than Bookmarks.
Safari live updates the displayed history if you reopen a link.
Which resets your cursor.
Bulk deleting selected entries deletes. each. and. every. single. entry. one. at. a. time. It can take minutes to delete 100s of entries.
With a bunch of entries selected, to bulk delete them, it's common to accidentally unintentionally reopen them.
There's no way to filter noise entries. Like search results and shopping carts.
Using a treetable, with each visited domain as a top level node, would be spiffy. Double extra bonus points for cascading trees mirroring the URL. As God intended.
Yeah, but that’s not beyond the memory of the average person. Usually phrases like “I remember a time before” prefix something that most people weren’t alive for.
That all said, it’s still longer than I thought. Time flys!
It’s hard to understand the “I have a hundred tabs open” usage pattern because the same people constantly complain that they have too many tabs open.
It’s logical to not understand other people’s workflows when they themselves complain about their own workflow frequently and vocally (not on HN, but where I work it’s a frequent comment whenever anyone is getting ready to screenshare something)
People complain about all sorts of stuff that’s of their own making:
- “The house is a mess”
- “I eat too much junk food / takeaways”
- “I’m so hungover”
Etc
A lot of the time it’s more a just small talk, rather than a genuine complaint. Or in the case of tabs during a screen share, a way of filling an uncomfortable silence while they’re getting set up for a meeting.
I have ~350 tabs open across 12 thematically titled FF windows. I am not complaining about the # of open tabs - my complaint is that stock browsers suck and that I have to install a bunch of extensions from random sources to get to workflow happiness.
If you have more than 12 tabs open concurrently, vertical tabs are a hard requirement. There isn't even a workable vertical tabs solution for Chrome or Safari. Ironically, Edge and Orion have it out of the box. At least Mozilla has validated Sidebury, but they still make it a big pain to turn off the damn default horizontal tabs.
Products are designed with a certain workflow in mind. Back when people would open a website at a time, nobody needed tabs. Now everyone uses tabs, but relatively no one needs to organize their tabs. It’s acceptable that browser don’t make their UI extra complex for a vocal minority.
It's definitely true that it's very common to have a lot of tabs open, my mother's iPad has 99+ tabs open at all times, but that's not because she needs them.
Browser vendors have dealt with that by adding a "tab expiration" setting, where tabs can be deleted after a certain amount of days. I think it's a fantastic idea, just like a self-emptying trash bin.
Unless your job is specifically to collect information, then you probably don't have time to comb through everything you find online. While it's easy to want to catalog everything, the sanest option is to default on our digital debts frequently.
I visit HackerNews and immediately see a few posts I find interesting and open them in background tabs. I'm scared to just read one and then go back to the home page, because it might have disappeared or changed the title or something like that. Then I read one or two of the open tabs, get distracted and do something else. That nets +3-+5 tabs. Repeat the same on reddit and YouTube. The fear of hitting the back button is much worse on those sites.
The other kind of tab-explosion is when I am doing something specific, like researching some topic and open tabs end up being stuff that I deemed worth reading or that remains a to-read. And often enough I don't come back to them and they just sit around. As soon as even more tabs have piled up to make them disappear across the tab bar, they are almost lost in my open tabs forever.
Also I am not addicted to heroin, but I can understand that people can get there and can't get out. I keep a very clean apartment, but I understand that not everyone can. I go to the gym 5-6 times a week, but I understand that not everyone can. I consider it part of becoming an adult to understand that not everyone finds it easy to do things you yourself find easy to do.
I'll emphasize a point you alluded to: tab hoarding is driven partly by the algorithmic instability of served content. If pages didn't refresh on the platform's whims, users could navigate back and forth to hub pages, like they used to. Now, it's unlikely that Youtube or Twitter's feed pages will be the same even two minutes apart, and they're designed to serve you content that you enjoy. The only way to ensure that you have access to that content is to immediately open every link that seems halfway interesting; otherwise, they're liable to disappear into the ether, never to be found again.
That the modern web is designed to encourage addiction and OCD is not my fault.
I actually find grouping tabs into one tab in the UI and then color coding helps ADD people who see all the work piled up. But in reality most tabs are either distractions or we dont return to them for a long time until other tasks are done.
I think chrome has this. Grouping can manage the clutter at the least if not solve the problem of diverted attention.
Tabs are not files. If you need to save things, use bookmarks. If you don’t, don’t keep clutter around. Do you still keep all the files in the download folder since 2013?
> - harder navigation as now I need an extra "bookmarks" UI instead of existing tab lista
This is an HN thread about an extension that offers extra UI to save, manage your tabs. It's evident that the one-line-of-tabs UI is not enough for your use case.
Bookmarks already definitely have better UX for organization, they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
> Did you notice the word 'sessions' in the title? That's for organizing
My point is that you can store your "sessions" in a bookmarks folder. Browsers have made it excessively easy to "save all tabs" and "open all bookmarks" already. "Saving a tab session" is literally indistinguishable from "Saving all tabs as bookmarks", you're just duplicating a native browser feature by installing a 3rd party extension that has access to your entire browser history.
> This is an HN thread about an extension that offers extra UI to save, manage your tabs.
But your misunderstanding was much broader, and I'm responding to that. This extension is bad since it doesn't allow auto-sync, but that's not relevant to your promotion of bookmarks
> Bookmarks already definitely have better UX for organization, they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
only if you ignore the issues that make them worse UX for organizations that I've already mentioned in the list, specifically
> losing that order when you regroup tabs during continuous work
This is a critical difference between "retain your working SESSION at the latest point your worked on it" and "Saving all tabs as bookmarks" that you just ignore
also,
> they can even be renamed, tagged, searched… natively!
How to you add multiple tags in Safari ... natively?
Bookmarks work fine for saving tabs if you open everything in one window. Starts failing miserably once you want to save a set of windows and their tabs.
FWIW, I am able to keep tabs organized in Safari because it has tab groups. But my Firefox sessions always explode because there is no such feature, creating a self perpetuating problem of disorganization begetting more disorganization.
You might be interested in the Firefox Extension "Tree Style Tab".
I can't live without it and refuse to use any browser that can't offer any similar experience.
Yeah I’m the same. As soon as I’m done with a tab I’ll close it, I’d rather close something and reopen it than have a bunch of sites open for no good reason.
Open tabs are not books, they’re mail. You deal with it and discard what you don’t need. Heck we even have browser history to find what we saw in the past.
Searching for stuff in your history is just as painful as searching from scratch. It doesn’t discern from the stuff that was worth revisiting from the stuff you opened and then closed again because it was garbage.
Which means you then need a browser plugin to manage your history more effectively. And then someone else will say “I don’t understand people who are constantly search for stuff in their history…” followed by them describing their workflow as if it’s the only way to effectively manage data on a computer. ;)
At first, I was disappointed that it doesn’t support Safari but then I realized Safari does this even better with tab groups.
Still, it would have been nice to be able to sync them with other browsers (e.g. from Safari to Firefox). I guess “cross-browser” means “the author’s favourite browsers”.
I always start my day with an empty browser window, otherwise I immediately become distracted by the no longer relevant tabs of yesterday. I have opposite problems: it is impossible to make Firefox forget its session after reboot or shutting down the computer.
I don't think this is exactly the workflow you're asking for, but there exists an extension that creates a folder structure that you can interact with using OS tools such as bash.
It's still WIP but I've been building a browser extension for this on GitHub here: https://github.com/lunabrain-ai/lunabrain
My goal is to be able to use the Internet as normal, but have the extension automatically index and rank content I find important. For example, if I spend 5 minutes on a page that I went to after Hackernews, odds are I found that important so it should be considered in my history differently than other things.
The network effect of this data is pretty interesting too. It would be really cool to see what my friends, or other high trust, high signal, groups i am in find interesting. Being on a page where my mentor has stared, annotated, shared this before will probably give me pause and make me consider this page more deeply.
I'm curious if anybody else has any notes to share.