4 ms·

Maybe this should be formalized, like automatically get open tabs into easily searchable persistent storage, whether they are called Bookmarks or not. Then they

Maybe this should be formalized, like automatically get open tabs into easily searchable persistent storage, whether they are called Bookmarks or not. Then they can be closed by prompting to "clean up". Maybe even skip that manual step entirely. People use browser histories like emails now -- by searching, not by active organizing.

tobr 6y ago
I was about to say, you just described browser history!
- ajmurmann 6y ago
  But browser history has way more stuff in it than matters. For example, I'll often have tabs open with documentation that was relevant to a project I'm working on. I want that, I don't want the 20 other search results I clicked on that were useless and I don't want to have other pages O had to navigate through to get to the right doc page.
- jlokier 6y ago
  It's completely, totally and utterly different from browser history! If I visit HN, browse a bunch of comment threads, and find something I want to come back to later, that's 1 tab but 20 history entries. Same if I searched for something on Google and eventually found something I want to come back to later. Except that's 1 tab and 50 history entries. To recover that state via history is practically impossible. It's a needle in a haystack. I've occasionally needed to do it, and it takes a long time. (Compared with a tab, a bookmark doesn't work well either for something to come back to. Anything where there is a context, such as scroll position. Perhaps if bookmarks were better, keeping track of scroll position and allowing text to be highlighted or a note to be attached, and showing a thumbnail (scrolled to the right place), and retaining some temporal relationships between different pages. But I find bookmarks consisting of just a title and URL to be completely useless.)
  - tobr 6y ago
    I would propose that the issue is that browser history navigation is generally poorly designed, at least if you want to do something more sophisticated than hit “back” or search it as a set of URLs. It should be richer and store much more details about each entry.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      I'm not sure how to improve history navigation to help with this, as the browser doesn't know which 1 in 20 history entries are worth finding again, and which are junk traversed on the way to something worth finding. It can't figure it out from content search, because the junk is often the stuff that resulted from useful searches and was assessed by the user as not worth keeping. Keeping tabs is a signal from the user about which entries were useful. A form of curation. Without that signal, what is there? However, I think bookmarks would be profoundly transformed from nearly useless to better than tabs by improvements to bookmark navigation, UX and a little extra context. So I have to give credit to you for the idea - history navigation improvements might be transformative in a similar way.
      - pishpash 6y ago
        It shouldn't even be a "hard" problem any more. Search and relevance are mature technologies. You do need to provide some features, but there are many: time spent interacting with tabs, was it a "terminus" in a navigation session, active user marking/tagging, signals from other users, other products, etc. It would be an excellent use of ML. The rest is capturing these in a user friendly product, though if it makes Megacorp no more ad money, I doubt anyone will work on it however useful it may be.
      - ideologysec 6y ago
        Something like this, evolved, perhaps? https://getmemex.com/ https://getmemex.com/

tobr 6y ago

I was about to say, you just described browser history!

ajmurmann 6y ago
But browser history has way more stuff in it than matters. For example, I'll often have tabs open with documentation that was relevant to a project I'm working on. I want that, I don't want the 20 other search results I clicked on that were useless and I don't want to have other pages O had to navigate through to get to the right doc page.
jlokier 6y ago
It's completely, totally and utterly different from browser history! If I visit HN, browse a bunch of comment threads, and find something I want to come back to later, that's 1 tab but 20 history entries. Same if I searched for something on Google and eventually found something I want to come back to later. Except that's 1 tab and 50 history entries. To recover that state via history is practically impossible. It's a needle in a haystack. I've occasionally needed to do it, and it takes a long time. (Compared with a tab, a bookmark doesn't work well either for something to come back to. Anything where there is a context, such as scroll position. Perhaps if bookmarks were better, keeping track of scroll position and allowing text to be highlighted or a note to be attached, and showing a thumbnail (scrolled to the right place), and retaining some temporal relationships between different pages. But I find bookmarks consisting of just a title and URL to be completely useless.)
- tobr 6y ago
  I would propose that the issue is that browser history navigation is generally poorly designed, at least if you want to do something more sophisticated than hit “back” or search it as a set of URLs. It should be richer and store much more details about each entry.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    I'm not sure how to improve history navigation to help with this, as the browser doesn't know which 1 in 20 history entries are worth finding again, and which are junk traversed on the way to something worth finding. It can't figure it out from content search, because the junk is often the stuff that resulted from useful searches and was assessed by the user as not worth keeping. Keeping tabs is a signal from the user about which entries were useful. A form of curation. Without that signal, what is there? However, I think bookmarks would be profoundly transformed from nearly useless to better than tabs by improvements to bookmark navigation, UX and a little extra context. So I have to give credit to you for the idea - history navigation improvements might be transformative in a similar way.
    - pishpash 6y ago
      It shouldn't even be a "hard" problem any more. Search and relevance are mature technologies. You do need to provide some features, but there are many: time spent interacting with tabs, was it a "terminus" in a navigation session, active user marking/tagging, signals from other users, other products, etc. It would be an excellent use of ML. The rest is capturing these in a user friendly product, though if it makes Megacorp no more ad money, I doubt anyone will work on it however useful it may be.
    - ideologysec 6y ago
      Something like this, evolved, perhaps? https://getmemex.com/ https://getmemex.com/