10 ms·

Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds

67 points by thecupisblue 4y ago

allarm 4y ago
If I happen to have a huge number of tabs open I usually just close them all without looking, but that’s just me I guess.
mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
No idea what this is since the URL is dead but it sounds like a joke based on the title...
- pininja 4y ago
  As someone with thousands of unsorted and duplicate tabs saved those “tab saver” chrome extensions, I was hoping for something I could use.
  - lairv 4y ago
    Couldn't read the article either but do people actually want to sort their tabs ? My tabs are approximately in a chronological order and I can find a specific tab based on that, sorting them would be a disaster Edit: oh ok it uses gpt-3 to sort by content, but even then I don't want my tabs to be shuffled in any ways..
  - thecupisblue 4y ago
    It will be usable for you soon - if you want, I can ping you with the repository so you can build it yourself.
- layer8 4y ago
  Maybe sorting on relevance using GPT-3 based assessment of page contents.
  - thecupisblue 4y ago
    It is, it's using it to sort tabs into categories based on the topic.
  - brokenmachine 4y ago
    So it loads every page, parses that, and then sorts?
  - salamo 4y ago
    It only sorts on the title as far as I can tell.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zelphirkalt 4y ago
Hm. Reading the heading, I am thinking: "What? Only 400 elements sorted? In a whole minute? What criteria did they look for to sort them?" It seems like a really low number of things to sort. If they added two zeros to that, maybe it would be impressive. In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.
- idsout 4y ago
  I thought the same thing, except adding 4 or 5 zeroes
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  > In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted. There's always gotta be that guy that will come up with the most unreasonable and unbelievable usage of any tool, just to show how special they are. No, you don't have 4,000 browser tabs open, nobody believes that. More on the topic, since the title mentions GPT, I imagine it sorts them based on the content, like categories.
  - idsout 4y ago
    Honestly I do on a regular basis. Also that doesn't sound like a lot for a browser to maintain. Imagine opening most links in a new tab. That's how it happens and that's me.
    - iLoveOncall 4y ago
      No you don't. As you can see from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g the browser becomes completely unusable with a few thousand tabs, and the experience is massively degraded way before that. You also would run out of RAM way before opening 4,000 tabs, with most consumer boards supporting only a maximum of 128GB of RAM.
      - brokenmachine 4y ago
sublinear 4y ago
I don't know what this is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it.
- idsout 4y ago
  Upvoted. Honest question. How did this make the front page of HN with 4 upvotes at the time?
  - bryanrasmussen 4y ago
    what don't things get moved to HN even with few upvotes and then disappear after a couple seconds? So with 4 upvotes could just be it was its turn to be put on the front page but 4 people had already voted. Also I thought there was some sort of thing that rewarded if you got a lot of votes quickly, like if you got 4 upvotes in a couple minutes it would probably push you to the front page and keep you there long enough to get more votes? However take all that with grain of salt because I have never actually tried to figure out how upvotes work, this was just my not trying to understand at all sort of soaked up ideas.
  - cryptoz 4y ago
    Used to be common to see links on front page with 3 votes, but it’s been a while I think since I’ve seen that.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
metadat 4y ago
Site is hugged to death / dead for now. Too bad there isn't a service which automatically queues all of hn/new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting. Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  The site is probably still busy sorting the incoming clients, lol. 400 in 60 seconds??
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    >400 in 60 seconds?? The bottleneck seems to be API token limit.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
andy_ppp 4y ago
I wish we could authenticate API access we pay ChatGPT (or anther AIs) for with peoples projects so they can avoid just immediately running out of API tokens (we’d be using our tokens not theirs). I don’t think you can expect every product that uses AI APIs to make rolling the API costs onto the consumer practical but some individuals might find it useful to throw a few of their API tokens at services for their particular use cases.
- jeffy90 4y ago
  That's an interesting idea. It'd be cool if ChatGPT gave a portion of the income to whatever 3rd party app we authenticated with as well So the workflow would be this: * pay 20$ a month for access to ChatGPT and receive API token * use my API token w/ 3rd party app * ChatGPT awards 3rd party app some portion of the 20$
  - throwaway4837 4y ago
    How does ChatGPT know to award the app? Could be a shitty idea, but I was thinking of a different way: 1. Pay $20/month for ChatGPT access, get personal API token 2. Sign up to 3rd party app a) Enter your API token into app b) Pay $3/month as a subscription You are then paying ChatGPT for using its engine, and paying the 3rd party apps only for their value-add, which they determine in their pricing. In theory, you should be able to view all activity associated with your API token (across all apps) in OpenAI's dashboard. So, we're one step closer to "one profile, many apps", and OpenAI can be the profile distributor. I like the idea of the user having their own AI profile, like an email, that other services can utilize. Just like it's up to the user to manage their email quota with Google, they would manage their AI quota with OpenAI.
    - andy_ppp 4y ago
      You can do all this with OpenId I think…
- redeux 4y ago
  I think you could do this if your app handles everything on the frontend, right? Just use local storage to hold the user’s API key. The Star History[1] does this for its GitHub star graphs. [1] https://star-history.com/ https://star-history.com/
Fudgel 4y ago
https://archive.md/kH2XH https://archive.md/kH2XH
n8henrie 4y ago
Spoiler: this is part 1, chrome / brave focused, no GPT3 or rust yet, just chrome APIs and JS. The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don't have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.
jeroenhd 4y ago
This article isn't about sorting a list in Javascript. This is about grouping tabs based on category. That requires extracting the topic of a tab title and marching similar topics together into a small list; not something you can do in Javascript as reliably as a language model can. 60 seconds is still quite some time for a reorder operation, but sorting through 400 tabs and giving them a somewhat intuitive position in the tab bar will take much longer than that. You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. Bookmarks suck for grouping things together, doing to requires a lot of clicks and drags to get the items all in the right place. Besides, with how lazy browsers load tabs these days and the built in ability to search for tabs straight from the address bar you don't really need to bother anyway. Everyone who's going "wtf sorting 400 items shouldn't take a minute why would you do this" clearly hasn't read the article. If you can't read the article because a site just got hugged to death, please with withhold your criticism until you've managed to find the article contents.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
  Why not just sort by domain name? Good enough for most cases, and would be more or less instant.
- sublinear 4y ago
  > You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. You can visually group tabs together with browser windows. You can then group windows together with workspaces. You can also just save all open tabs in the window as a folder of bookmarks named the current timestamp or whatever you're doing. It takes almost no time at all and prevents the chaos in the first place.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
rashidae 4y ago
I can’t subscribe to your email list!!! Please fix it. I loved your content
- thecupisblue 4y ago
  Thanks, didn't expect someone would sign up. Should be fixed now (or as soon as DNS propagates)!
extr 4y ago
My "browser stack" is based around Microsoft Edge. - Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly. - It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM. - It has the Workspaces [1] feature, basically creating cloud-saved tab groups. This only works when your account is tied to Azure for now (so only at work), but that's the only time I use it, so it's all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it's nice not to have to use one. - This hidden gem of a browser extension: Auto-Group Tabs [2]. Lots of extensions claim to do this, few do it well. It supports regex and pops tabs into groups extremely quickly/smoothly. It feels native. Combined with the vertical tabs feature, you get nice, easy to read, collapsable groups. The developer is super responsive and awesome. Honorable mention extensions I've tried but ultimately don't use anymore: - Tab Xpert [3] It's a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I've tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don't end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary. - Clutter Free [4] Keeps you from opening more than one of the same URL. Would be really useful, but I found it too disruptive to use daily. You don't realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that. I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven't moved over to using it by default yet though. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introducing-workspaces-in-edge-new-feature/td-p/2263507 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introduci... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/danncghahncanipdoajmakdbeaophenb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/da... [3] https://tabxpert.com/ https://tabxpert.com/ [4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-prevent-dupl/iipjdmnoigaobkamfhnojmglcdbnfaaf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-preve... [5] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/
salamo 4y ago
> The idea is simple: Give GPT3 a list of items and ask it to return a list of categories those items belong to. 60 seconds to sort 400 tabs is a hell of a price to pay. It needs to be worth it. Do you really need semantic search? Do you really need semantic search that queries a huge proprietary model? (A really cool feature that Chrome doesn't have would be the ability to search the content of the webpage as well.) What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that's not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option. The benefit of this approach is that you can do it in the browser, in real-time (or at least locally with a downloaded model). Even 400 tabs will be a piece of cake. Plus you won't need to proxy precious API calls to a service which may become unavailable or very expensive with no warning.
RobCodeSlayer 4y ago
An alternative to using GPT could be NLP Clustering. If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups within groups (idk if chrome supports that, but there’s extensions like Tree-Style Tab in Firefox that do)
vfclists 4y ago
For those who think 400 tabs is too much I have had over 800 tabs in some sessions, going back months with the help of TreeStyleTabs, which is probably the reason I still use Firefox. Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized. Combine that with the Firefox Addon Copy To Clipboard which enables you to maintain the tree structure when you copy a tab tree, in Markdown, Asciidoctor and Orgmode.

67 points by thecupisblue 4y ago

If I happen to have a huge number of tabs open I usually just close them all without looking, but that’s just me I guess.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago

No idea what this is since the URL is dead but it sounds like a joke based on the title...

pininja 4y ago
As someone with thousands of unsorted and duplicate tabs saved those “tab saver” chrome extensions, I was hoping for something I could use.
- lairv 4y ago
  Couldn't read the article either but do people actually want to sort their tabs ? My tabs are approximately in a chronological order and I can find a specific tab based on that, sorting them would be a disaster Edit: oh ok it uses gpt-3 to sort by content, but even then I don't want my tabs to be shuffled in any ways..
- thecupisblue 4y ago
  It will be usable for you soon - if you want, I can ping you with the repository so you can build it yourself.
layer8 4y ago
Maybe sorting on relevance using GPT-3 based assessment of page contents.
- thecupisblue 4y ago
  It is, it's using it to sort tabs into categories based on the topic.
- brokenmachine 4y ago
  So it loads every page, parses that, and then sorts?
- salamo 4y ago
  It only sorts on the title as far as I can tell.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

zelphirkalt 4y ago

Hm. Reading the heading, I am thinking: "What? Only 400 elements sorted? In a whole minute? What criteria did they look for to sort them?" It seems like a really low number of things to sort. If they added two zeros to that, maybe it would be impressive. In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.

idsout 4y ago
I thought the same thing, except adding 4 or 5 zeroes
iLoveOncall 4y ago
> In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted. There's always gotta be that guy that will come up with the most unreasonable and unbelievable usage of any tool, just to show how special they are. No, you don't have 4,000 browser tabs open, nobody believes that. More on the topic, since the title mentions GPT, I imagine it sorts them based on the content, like categories.
- idsout 4y ago
  Honestly I do on a regular basis. Also that doesn't sound like a lot for a browser to maintain. Imagine opening most links in a new tab. That's how it happens and that's me.
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    No you don't. As you can see from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g the browser becomes completely unusable with a few thousand tabs, and the experience is massively degraded way before that. You also would run out of RAM way before opening 4,000 tabs, with most consumer boards supporting only a maximum of 128GB of RAM.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago

sublinear 4y ago

I don't know what this is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it.

idsout 4y ago
Upvoted. Honest question. How did this make the front page of HN with 4 upvotes at the time?
- bryanrasmussen 4y ago
  what don't things get moved to HN even with few upvotes and then disappear after a couple seconds? So with 4 upvotes could just be it was its turn to be put on the front page but 4 people had already voted. Also I thought there was some sort of thing that rewarded if you got a lot of votes quickly, like if you got 4 upvotes in a couple minutes it would probably push you to the front page and keep you there long enough to get more votes? However take all that with grain of salt because I have never actually tried to figure out how upvotes work, this was just my not trying to understand at all sort of soaked up ideas.
- cryptoz 4y ago
  Used to be common to see links on front page with 3 votes, but it’s been a while I think since I’ve seen that.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

metadat 4y ago

Site is hugged to death / dead for now. Too bad there isn't a service which automatically queues all of hn/new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting. Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.

brokenmachine 4y ago
The site is probably still busy sorting the incoming clients, lol. 400 in 60 seconds??
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  >400 in 60 seconds?? The bottleneck seems to be API token limit.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

andy_ppp 4y ago

I wish we could authenticate API access we pay ChatGPT (or anther AIs) for with peoples projects so they can avoid just immediately running out of API tokens (we’d be using our tokens not theirs). I don’t think you can expect every product that uses AI APIs to make rolling the API costs onto the consumer practical but some individuals might find it useful to throw a few of their API tokens at services for their particular use cases.

jeffy90 4y ago
That's an interesting idea. It'd be cool if ChatGPT gave a portion of the income to whatever 3rd party app we authenticated with as well So the workflow would be this: * pay 20$ a month for access to ChatGPT and receive API token * use my API token w/ 3rd party app * ChatGPT awards 3rd party app some portion of the 20$
- throwaway4837 4y ago
  How does ChatGPT know to award the app? Could be a shitty idea, but I was thinking of a different way: 1. Pay $20/month for ChatGPT access, get personal API token 2. Sign up to 3rd party app a) Enter your API token into app b) Pay $3/month as a subscription You are then paying ChatGPT for using its engine, and paying the 3rd party apps only for their value-add, which they determine in their pricing. In theory, you should be able to view all activity associated with your API token (across all apps) in OpenAI's dashboard. So, we're one step closer to "one profile, many apps", and OpenAI can be the profile distributor. I like the idea of the user having their own AI profile, like an email, that other services can utilize. Just like it's up to the user to manage their email quota with Google, they would manage their AI quota with OpenAI.
  - andy_ppp 4y ago
    You can do all this with OpenId I think…
redeux 4y ago
I think you could do this if your app handles everything on the frontend, right? Just use local storage to hold the user’s API key. The Star History[1] does this for its GitHub star graphs. [1] https://star-history.com/ https://star-history.com/

Fudgel 4y ago

https://archive.md/kH2XH https://archive.md/kH2XH

n8henrie 4y ago

Spoiler: this is part 1, chrome / brave focused, no GPT3 or rust yet, just chrome APIs and JS. The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don't have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.

jeroenhd 4y ago

This article isn't about sorting a list in Javascript. This is about grouping tabs based on category. That requires extracting the topic of a tab title and marching similar topics together into a small list; not something you can do in Javascript as reliably as a language model can. 60 seconds is still quite some time for a reorder operation, but sorting through 400 tabs and giving them a somewhat intuitive position in the tab bar will take much longer than that. You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. Bookmarks suck for grouping things together, doing to requires a lot of clicks and drags to get the items all in the right place. Besides, with how lazy browsers load tabs these days and the built in ability to search for tabs straight from the address bar you don't really need to bother anyway. Everyone who's going "wtf sorting 400 items shouldn't take a minute why would you do this" clearly hasn't read the article. If you can't read the article because a site just got hugged to death, please with withhold your criticism until you've managed to find the article contents.

mtlmtlmtlmtl 4y ago
Why not just sort by domain name? Good enough for most cases, and would be more or less instant.
sublinear 4y ago
> You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. You can visually group tabs together with browser windows. You can then group windows together with workspaces. You can also just save all open tabs in the window as a folder of bookmarks named the current timestamp or whatever you're doing. It takes almost no time at all and prevents the chaos in the first place.
- Dylan16807 4y ago

rashidae 4y ago

I can’t subscribe to your email list!!! Please fix it. I loved your content

thecupisblue 4y ago
Thanks, didn't expect someone would sign up. Should be fixed now (or as soon as DNS propagates)!

extr 4y ago

My "browser stack" is based around Microsoft Edge. - Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly. - It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM. - It has the Workspaces [1] feature, basically creating cloud-saved tab groups. This only works when your account is tied to Azure for now (so only at work), but that's the only time I use it, so it's all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it's nice not to have to use one. - This hidden gem of a browser extension: Auto-Group Tabs [2]. Lots of extensions claim to do this, few do it well. It supports regex and pops tabs into groups extremely quickly/smoothly. It feels native. Combined with the vertical tabs feature, you get nice, easy to read, collapsable groups. The developer is super responsive and awesome. Honorable mention extensions I've tried but ultimately don't use anymore: - Tab Xpert [3] It's a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I've tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don't end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary. - Clutter Free [4] Keeps you from opening more than one of the same URL. Would be really useful, but I found it too disruptive to use daily. You don't realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that. I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven't moved over to using it by default yet though. [1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introducing-workspaces-in-edge-new-feature/td-p/2263507 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introduci... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/danncghahncanipdoajmakdbeaophenb?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/da... [3] https://tabxpert.com/ https://tabxpert.com/ [4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-prevent-dupl/iipjdmnoigaobkamfhnojmglcdbnfaaf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-preve... [5] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/

salamo 4y ago

> The idea is simple: Give GPT3 a list of items and ask it to return a list of categories those items belong to. 60 seconds to sort 400 tabs is a hell of a price to pay. It needs to be worth it. Do you really need semantic search? Do you really need semantic search that queries a huge proprietary model? (A really cool feature that Chrome doesn't have would be the ability to search the content of the webpage as well.) What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that's not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option. The benefit of this approach is that you can do it in the browser, in real-time (or at least locally with a downloaded model). Even 400 tabs will be a piece of cake. Plus you won't need to proxy precious API calls to a service which may become unavailable or very expensive with no warning.

RobCodeSlayer 4y ago

An alternative to using GPT could be NLP Clustering. If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups within groups (idk if chrome supports that, but there’s extensions like Tree-Style Tab in Firefox that do)

vfclists 4y ago

For those who think 400 tabs is too much I have had over 800 tabs in some sessions, going back months with the help of TreeStyleTabs, which is probably the reason I still use Firefox. Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized. Combine that with the Firefox Addon Copy To Clipboard which enables you to maintain the tree structure when you copy a tab tree, in Markdown, Asciidoctor and Orgmode.