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For the same reason you might cajole others to perform regular backups. People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or a

by ohazi 9y ago

For the same reason you might cajole others to perform regular backups. People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism. Very few people actually have two hundred tabs open for a single train of thought. When you do this, you're one crash + failed recovery away from losing those pages forever. Yes, you can go through your history and try to recreate the list, but let's be honest here -- Most of those tabs were from six months ago. Finding and opening those pages manually is going to suck.

oh_sigh 9y ago
If people use tabs as bookmarks, perhaps it is because something is wrong with bookmarks.
- ohazi 9y ago
  I completely agree. It should be way easier to "braindump" a window full of tabs into a folder of bookmarks. There are browser extensions for this. Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.
  - Others 9y ago
    Chrome has that first feature. Right click on a tab, and click "Bookmark All Tabs..."
    - ohazi 9y ago
      The bookmarking interface in chrome could use a facelift. The fact that I have to come up with a name for the folder and think about where to put it makes this less than ideal. Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.
veridies 9y ago
Yes, but that's why I have a backup; if recovery fails, I'll just restore my Firefox config files. I've done it before. I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.
greedo 9y ago
When Chrome crashes, or when I reboot my Mac, it reopens the previously existing tabs.
- ohazi 9y ago
  It usually does this. Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with. It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
  - y4mi 9y ago
    urm, chrome does exactly that? its almost 10 windows i think. closing a window with 10 tabs still counts as a single entry. The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.
    - ohazi 9y ago
      This still doesn't do what I want. If I have 5 windows open with 5-20 tabs each, and force a crash, I can recover them via this menu. It's tedious because I have to do them one by one, but it works. But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank. I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.
  - jmontano 9y ago
    > It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse. This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox
pkamb 9y ago
When my Chrome tabs crash unrecoverably it's a huge relief! Tens or Hundreds of things I wanted to read later, but weren't truly important. Too bad, but now I can use Chrome comfortably again.
gmiller123456 9y ago
>People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism". As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it. Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched. I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.

by ohazi 9y ago

oh_sigh 9y ago

If people use tabs as bookmarks, perhaps it is because something is wrong with bookmarks.

ohazi 9y ago
I completely agree. It should be way easier to "braindump" a window full of tabs into a folder of bookmarks. There are browser extensions for this. Alternatively, browsers could start treating window + tab lists as less ephemeral, and make it easy to restore window + tab combinations at any time, regardless of whether the browser thinks it crashed recently.
- Others 9y ago
  Chrome has that first feature. Right click on a tab, and click "Bookmark All Tabs..."
  - ohazi 9y ago
    The bookmarking interface in chrome could use a facelift. The fact that I have to come up with a name for the folder and think about where to put it makes this less than ideal. Extensions like OneTab make this sort of dump a one button affair, which makes the process easier when you also have ten windows open. It also keeps them separate from your longer term bookmarks, which is nice.

veridies 9y ago

Yes, but that's why I have a backup; if recovery fails, I'll just restore my Firefox config files. I've done it before. I also fail to see how preemptively closing my tabs so that they don't accidentally get lost helps me any.

greedo 9y ago

When Chrome crashes, or when I reboot my Mac, it reopens the previously existing tabs.

ohazi 9y ago
It usually does this. Sometimes it fails, or Chrome crashes a second time after relaunching, but before you were able to restore the tabs, causing the next restore to open a blank window instead of your tabs from two crashes ago. This happens more often than I'm comfortable with. It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse.
- y4mi 9y ago
  urm, chrome does exactly that? its almost 10 windows i think. closing a window with 10 tabs still counts as a single entry. The menu is nested into history and works on successive crashes.
  - ohazi 9y ago
    This still doesn't do what I want. If I have 5 windows open with 5-20 tabs each, and force a crash, I can recover them via this menu. It's tedious because I have to do them one by one, but it works. But if I crash chrome, relaunch, don't recover or open a different set of tabs before recovering, then force a crash again, the menu is blank. I'm not going to rely on something this finicky. Compare this to history -- it's there, in chronological order, until you clear it. That's how this should work.
- jmontano 9y ago
  > It would be really nice if browsers kept a history of your last N window + tab sets and allowed you to restore them whenever you wanted, rather than only the last one, and only after it thinks it crashed. Because when it gets this wrong, you usually have no recourse. This is possible using Tab Mixer Plus extension for Firefox

pkamb 9y ago

When my Chrome tabs crash unrecoverably it's a huge relief! Tens or Hundreds of things I wanted to read later, but weren't truly important. Too bad, but now I can use Chrome comfortably again.

gmiller123456 9y ago

>People who have too many tabs open are almost always using their tabs as bookmarks, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism We can reverse the logic in your statement and it makes just as much sense. "People who have too many bookmarks are almost always using their bookmarks as tabs, or as an "I want to read this later" mechanism". As a self proclaimed "tabs as a read it later" user, I do so because I've never found a better "read it later" mechanism. Maybe bookmarks work for you, but I find them mostly useless. For me, tabs are mostly self organizing with similar topics in the same window, and similar windows are close together on the taskbar. And I can reorganize them without opening some other UI to do it. And, the main benefit is, closing a tab removes it from my "read it later" queue. With a bookmark you have to go find it in your bookmarks list by name, possibly among other similarly named, mostly unorganized bookmarks and do a couple more mouse clicks and movements to delete it. Before tabs, I'm sure all of us tabbers used bookmarks as a "read it later" mechanism. And although I probably do have some 6+ month old tabs, my del.icio.us queue of "toread" items spanned years. And that's a conservative estimate because I haven't used it in years and there's still articles on the list I haven't touched. I absolutely welcome alternatives, but bookmarks isn't the answer for me.