4 ms·

I don't get what people have against bookmarks.

dredmorbius 4y ago
This may help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=tabs%20bookmarks%20state%20context&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- a_shovel 4y ago
  I see. There's no problem with having a couple dozen tabs up at a time when you're only looking at a couple of them, especially if they have incomplete forms, or have a certain ctrl-F term highlighted, or are for Stack Overflow. I've done that plenty of times myself. What I'm doubting is that someone could have 500 examples of this simultaneously, or 2000. That 830th Stack Overflow page is for a problem you solved months ago, you don't need that, and you certainly don't need the page version from months ago with the scroll position preserved. People dream of situations like this, where keeping that tab open for years finally pays off, but realistically it's not likely to happen. You can close that half-filled out order form, it's okay. If you've left it open for a week, it's probably not that urgent. Bookmark the site and come back later. Also, a while back I had a 5 gig memory leak from leaving Firefox open for a few days. I don't think that's normal, but who knows.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    There are a small but significant number of people, of whom many work with and produce complex works and ideas, who seem to be mega-tab users, with 100s or even 1,000s of open tabs. I suspect many also disable telemetry and similar mechanisms on browsers, leading to a strong discounting of their actual numbers, to say nothing of the rather harder problem of identifying their actual significance and usefulness. The web browser itself is being torn in several directions, one being as a general application platform (itself running on numerous platforms, from desktop to mobile devices), another as an information or document-management tool. There's some argument that the first role is poorly served. I'm rather more concerned with the second, which also fails miserably. For all that our computers and mobile devices are supposed to be information management tools ... they perform miserably at this task. There are very few tools which both organise and present information (Zotero and Calibre seem to be amongst the best), and those perform poorly for Web content --- their chief strength is with static document formats such as PDF and ePub. Another affordance of physical document management which no online experience seems to offer is the ability to organise and arrange information quickly by simple physical arrancement. My books and hardcopy articles can be placed on shelves, piled in stacks, slipsheeted or foldered for quick organisation. Even turning sheets or cards at 90 degree angles provides quick structuring. Digital files offer speed and scale, but lack much of this immediate tangibility. There's also the convenience of garbage collection: Entire shelves or stacks can be picked up and discarded when they are of no further use. Browser tabs, especially when using a tree-style extension, do provide a quick-and-dirty physical arrangement. It's not a direct analogue of paper methods, but comes close, and believe it or not, does reasonably structure even a very large set of tabs and pages, well into the 100s or low 1,000s, from personal experience.

This may help: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=tabs%20bookmarks%20state%20context&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

a_shovel 4y ago
I see. There's no problem with having a couple dozen tabs up at a time when you're only looking at a couple of them, especially if they have incomplete forms, or have a certain ctrl-F term highlighted, or are for Stack Overflow. I've done that plenty of times myself. What I'm doubting is that someone could have 500 examples of this simultaneously, or 2000. That 830th Stack Overflow page is for a problem you solved months ago, you don't need that, and you certainly don't need the page version from months ago with the scroll position preserved. People dream of situations like this, where keeping that tab open for years finally pays off, but realistically it's not likely to happen. You can close that half-filled out order form, it's okay. If you've left it open for a week, it's probably not that urgent. Bookmark the site and come back later. Also, a while back I had a 5 gig memory leak from leaving Firefox open for a few days. I don't think that's normal, but who knows.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  There are a small but significant number of people, of whom many work with and produce complex works and ideas, who seem to be mega-tab users, with 100s or even 1,000s of open tabs. I suspect many also disable telemetry and similar mechanisms on browsers, leading to a strong discounting of their actual numbers, to say nothing of the rather harder problem of identifying their actual significance and usefulness. The web browser itself is being torn in several directions, one being as a general application platform (itself running on numerous platforms, from desktop to mobile devices), another as an information or document-management tool. There's some argument that the first role is poorly served. I'm rather more concerned with the second, which also fails miserably. For all that our computers and mobile devices are supposed to be information management tools ... they perform miserably at this task. There are very few tools which both organise and present information (Zotero and Calibre seem to be amongst the best), and those perform poorly for Web content --- their chief strength is with static document formats such as PDF and ePub. Another affordance of physical document management which no online experience seems to offer is the ability to organise and arrange information quickly by simple physical arrancement. My books and hardcopy articles can be placed on shelves, piled in stacks, slipsheeted or foldered for quick organisation. Even turning sheets or cards at 90 degree angles provides quick structuring. Digital files offer speed and scale, but lack much of this immediate tangibility. There's also the convenience of garbage collection: Entire shelves or stacks can be picked up and discarded when they are of no further use. Browser tabs, especially when using a tree-style extension, do provide a quick-and-dirty physical arrangement. It's not a direct analogue of paper methods, but comes close, and believe it or not, does reasonably structure even a very large set of tabs and pages, well into the 100s or low 1,000s, from personal experience.