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People need to learn to let go and just close tabs. It's freeing. If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surfac

by dntrkv 6y ago

People need to learn to let go and just close tabs. It's freeing. If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. If it doesn't, no big deal. The benefits of not lugging around that baggage outweighs the potentially tiny productivity hit you take to look up the info again.

tobr 6y ago
It’s funny how there’s a borderline moral judgement about things like this. It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox, unnamed layers in photoshop, or open windows or tabs or apps or whatever would say something about your character. No, to the extent that these things are even a problem at all, that’s a consequence of a design that fails to take actual human factors into account.
- ryandrake 6y ago
  I was also going to draw parallels to the icons on the desktop. Hundreds of browser tabs open is the 2020 version of having hundreds of icons all crammed onto your Windows desktop.
- mr_toad 6y ago
  > It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox Not really. Desktop icons and email are persisted to non volatile storage. Expecting windows and tabs to persist in the exact state you left them as if they were real world objects is just not how computers work.
  - spopejoy 6y ago
    That's not true, many applications have moved to the "constant save" model (and games too). For instance, you never ever save in Final Cut Pro anymore (I wish ProTools would go this route). There is no reason a browser can't persist your tab state, or your window state, window positions, etc to disk continually and always relaunch with the persisted state.
gowld 6y ago
History has far too many pages to browse, and doesn't have full-test search.
- hackstack 6y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but does not Firefox supply full-text search on your history, bookmarks, and open tabs when you type stuff in the address bar? I believe Chrome does the same?
  - spopejoy 6y ago
    What's more FF History window is fully searchable, to the point that I am regularly (it seems) bringing up results from years past, and have actually restored my firefox profile from Time Machine to get my history back. The location bar search is more limited than the history window search (if nothing else it's easier to browse the results.)
jlokier 6y ago
> If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. This just isn't useful for the kinds of information retrieval I find myself doing, and I truly don't understand why people think that ought to be enough for everyone. Perhaps other people don't collect and combine large amounts of information into new artefacts as part of their regular online activity? When I'm retaining state such as tabs, it's not so I can find the same information by searching for it. It's so that I can go through information I have already found through searching and following links, which has passed my filter as the useful things I'll need for the next phase in processing, to do something useful with. The important part isn't that the information is findable again by searching. The important part is that I've already half-catalogued what's useful once, and it's that cataloguing which is what I need to build on a second or third time. All the "next phases" in processing typically take from a few days to a few months to complete. To give a concrete example: Recently I had to do some research on QUIC protocol and HTTP/3 for a job. In my searches I found various pages of particular interest that I should at some point extract information from, and add them as references to a report I'm writing. But there was no point adding them at the time to my report, because until I had found more documents and pages to read, I wouldn't know which ones were the best ones to include as references for someone else to use, and which ones to drop. Also, that list of 100 represented things I would need to systematically check through again in my code implementation and report before dismissing them. By systematically, I don't mean in linear order, but I do mean complete. So I ended up with about 100 tabs, expecting to go through them systematically later, and turn them into about 30 references for my report eventually. As the task would be completed in about 5 weeks (in parallel with a number of other jobs), those 100 tabs were context for that task for about 5 weeks. If I deleted them "to reduce clutter", the fact I could find the information again by searching for it was pretty much useless. That would be starting my task all over again. And if I bookmarked them, that would loses track of the scroll position, which meant I'd lose which page sections, headings, etc were the relevant item I was keeping to use, or decide not to use, in the final code and report. Really I had only two options: Keep a lot of tabs open for this one task for a few weeks. Or write down a lot of notes as I went, intending to delete some of the notes eventually. I've tried both, and find keeping the tabs to take much less time and overhead compared with taking notes in the first round. Now imagine I'm doing several research-like tasks like that overlapping in time, each of them taking a few weeks or a few months each. The overlap means that number is multiplied by the amount of concurrency, so it reaches several hundred or a thousand easily. I'd love to use something better, but tabs are the thing I've found most effective so far. In the past I've taken more notes, and I found that led to a lot of time taking notes. It's like the difference between a more efficient or less efficient batch sorting algorithm for information discovery, indexing, merging and eventually selecting out the most relevant things. People love to suggest alternatives. I'd love one because tabs do have many problems. But I've yet to find a good alternative which is actually helpful. Bookmarks are not because of lost context and poor UX for going through them (large thumbnails with retained scroll position and/or highlighted current section heading and/or tags/notes would be great). Deleting and searching again is useless. Taking notes at every stage is ok but labour intensive by comparison. I tried Org mode but it has the same problem as taking lots of notes. What else is there for organising work-in-progress information like this?
natannikolic 6y ago
I agree that hoarding tabs is a bad practice that is hindering your productivity by slowing down your computer and causing distractions. However it's definitely not true that it's easy to find things again after closing them. Search engines are terrible solution for trying to find a specific thing with broad categorical terms. All you will get are referral and affiliate websites that most definitely don't contain the most accurate, trustworthy, or up-to-date information. I think at the moment, best information is discovered through recommendations of other people via twitter, slack, whatsapp groups, etc. But resurfacing that info later on is hard, so you need to act immediately. My point is, when people find obscure things that will/might come handy soon or later, they tend to keep them open in the browser as a way of temporary storing them. First, because native bookmarks are a terrible solution where you quickly run out of space and keeping them organised is too much work. Second, because keeping them open serves as a visual reminder to get back to it (once bookmarked they are out of sight, out of mind). This is precisely the reason why we developed Tablerone. It's an Chrome extension that serves as a bookmarking system (saving and organising entire sessions) and as a tab manager (easier navigation). https://tabler.one/ https://tabler.one/ By having an easily accessible and private space to store information you are still processing or intend to return later liberates you of the need to keep them open. As a result you get a concise timeline overview of your browsing history, that makes it much easier to later search through with broad categorical terms. I'm very eager to hear what you think about this.

by dntrkv 6y ago

tobr 6y ago

It’s funny how there’s a borderline moral judgement about things like this. It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox, unnamed layers in photoshop, or open windows or tabs or apps or whatever would say something about your character. No, to the extent that these things are even a problem at all, that’s a consequence of a design that fails to take actual human factors into account.

ryandrake 6y ago
I was also going to draw parallels to the icons on the desktop. Hundreds of browser tabs open is the 2020 version of having hundreds of icons all crammed onto your Windows desktop.
mr_toad 6y ago
> It’s as if having many files on your desktop, emails in your inbox Not really. Desktop icons and email are persisted to non volatile storage. Expecting windows and tabs to persist in the exact state you left them as if they were real world objects is just not how computers work.
- spopejoy 6y ago
  That's not true, many applications have moved to the "constant save" model (and games too). For instance, you never ever save in Final Cut Pro anymore (I wish ProTools would go this route). There is no reason a browser can't persist your tab state, or your window state, window positions, etc to disk continually and always relaunch with the persisted state.

gowld 6y ago

History has far too many pages to browse, and doesn't have full-test search.

hackstack 6y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but does not Firefox supply full-text search on your history, bookmarks, and open tabs when you type stuff in the address bar? I believe Chrome does the same?
- spopejoy 6y ago
  What's more FF History window is fully searchable, to the point that I am regularly (it seems) bringing up results from years past, and have actually restored my firefox profile from Time Machine to get my history back. The location bar search is more limited than the history window search (if nothing else it's easier to browse the results.)

jlokier 6y ago

> If you need the info again, typing some related words into the address bar will usually surface the results from your history. This just isn't useful for the kinds of information retrieval I find myself doing, and I truly don't understand why people think that ought to be enough for everyone. Perhaps other people don't collect and combine large amounts of information into new artefacts as part of their regular online activity? When I'm retaining state such as tabs, it's not so I can find the same information by searching for it. It's so that I can go through information I have already found through searching and following links, which has passed my filter as the useful things I'll need for the next phase in processing, to do something useful with. The important part isn't that the information is findable again by searching. The important part is that I've already half-catalogued what's useful once, and it's that cataloguing which is what I need to build on a second or third time. All the "next phases" in processing typically take from a few days to a few months to complete. To give a concrete example: Recently I had to do some research on QUIC protocol and HTTP/3 for a job. In my searches I found various pages of particular interest that I should at some point extract information from, and add them as references to a report I'm writing. But there was no point adding them at the time to my report, because until I had found more documents and pages to read, I wouldn't know which ones were the best ones to include as references for someone else to use, and which ones to drop. Also, that list of 100 represented things I would need to systematically check through again in my code implementation and report before dismissing them. By systematically, I don't mean in linear order, but I do mean complete. So I ended up with about 100 tabs, expecting to go through them systematically later, and turn them into about 30 references for my report eventually. As the task would be completed in about 5 weeks (in parallel with a number of other jobs), those 100 tabs were context for that task for about 5 weeks. If I deleted them "to reduce clutter", the fact I could find the information again by searching for it was pretty much useless. That would be starting my task all over again. And if I bookmarked them, that would loses track of the scroll position, which meant I'd lose which page sections, headings, etc were the relevant item I was keeping to use, or decide not to use, in the final code and report. Really I had only two options: Keep a lot of tabs open for this one task for a few weeks. Or write down a lot of notes as I went, intending to delete some of the notes eventually. I've tried both, and find keeping the tabs to take much less time and overhead compared with taking notes in the first round. Now imagine I'm doing several research-like tasks like that overlapping in time, each of them taking a few weeks or a few months each. The overlap means that number is multiplied by the amount of concurrency, so it reaches several hundred or a thousand easily. I'd love to use something better, but tabs are the thing I've found most effective so far. In the past I've taken more notes, and I found that led to a lot of time taking notes. It's like the difference between a more efficient or less efficient batch sorting algorithm for information discovery, indexing, merging and eventually selecting out the most relevant things. People love to suggest alternatives. I'd love one because tabs do have many problems. But I've yet to find a good alternative which is actually helpful. Bookmarks are not because of lost context and poor UX for going through them (large thumbnails with retained scroll position and/or highlighted current section heading and/or tags/notes would be great). Deleting and searching again is useless. Taking notes at every stage is ok but labour intensive by comparison. I tried Org mode but it has the same problem as taking lots of notes. What else is there for organising work-in-progress information like this?

natannikolic 6y ago

I agree that hoarding tabs is a bad practice that is hindering your productivity by slowing down your computer and causing distractions. However it's definitely not true that it's easy to find things again after closing them. Search engines are terrible solution for trying to find a specific thing with broad categorical terms. All you will get are referral and affiliate websites that most definitely don't contain the most accurate, trustworthy, or up-to-date information. I think at the moment, best information is discovered through recommendations of other people via twitter, slack, whatsapp groups, etc. But resurfacing that info later on is hard, so you need to act immediately. My point is, when people find obscure things that will/might come handy soon or later, they tend to keep them open in the browser as a way of temporary storing them. First, because native bookmarks are a terrible solution where you quickly run out of space and keeping them organised is too much work. Second, because keeping them open serves as a visual reminder to get back to it (once bookmarked they are out of sight, out of mind). This is precisely the reason why we developed Tablerone. It's an Chrome extension that serves as a bookmarking system (saving and organising entire sessions) and as a tab manager (easier navigation). https://tabler.one/ https://tabler.one/ By having an easily accessible and private space to store information you are still processing or intend to return later liberates you of the need to keep them open. As a result you get a concise timeline overview of your browsing history, that makes it much easier to later search through with broad categorical terms. I'm very eager to hear what you think about this.