7 ms·

Firefox View slowly getting more features, nice. I hope one day it supports the very real use case of using/abusing browser tabs as bookmarks. I know I am not

Firefox View slowly getting more features, nice. I hope one day it supports the very real use case of using/abusing browser tabs as bookmarks. I know I am not the only one who keeps lots of windows with currently almost 100 tabs open. Windows represent certain topics, which I finish in a day, in in months, or sometimes never - but still they re-open everytime I open Firefox. I know there are add-ons to help with "tab overflow", but native support would be better.

spuzz 2y ago
I hope it never optimizes around this. There are a million ways to organize information and "leaving it all over the fuckin place in case I ever need it" is not an organization method, it's the absence of one. Then again I do love seeing people have fifteen million tabs open, it helps me set my expectations about what they can handle.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >Then again I do love seeing people have fifteen million tabs open, it helps me set my expectations about what they can handle. What do you mean by this? Are you implying they can't handle something? Or can? And how did you come to that conclusion?
- eviks 2y ago
  How come 'Windows represent certain topics' didn't fit the million?
causi 2y ago
People wouldn't have to do that if they implemented "progressive bookmarks". I want to be able to bookmark a top-level web page and then later when I click the bookmark go back to the last page I was on, on that site.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
enriquto 2y ago
> abusing browser tabs as bookmarks This is not really abuse, it's very natural. Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be one and the same thing.
- doubled112 2y ago
  I don't like this idea. I can see how others would though. I have a really hard time getting back into things. Any state a thing remembers is the opposite of helpful. For example, I don't suspend laptops, I turn them off. It'd be a waste of time closing what I was doing before because I don't remember where I was earlier and it's easier to start over. Browser tabs are a current state. If I will want to use it multiple times, I use a bookmark. History is for the rare time I think "wait, I swear I read that earlier". It isn't just computing, I forget where I was in books and games sometimes and start over too. I can't be the only one.
  - safety1st 2y ago
    I feel like I start to lose focus when I have more than a few tabs open. When I see people with dozens of tabs open I get a little panicky. I want to focus on the task at hand and if I want to recall an old site I'll use bookmarks and history for that, not bloat my active session state.
    - b112 2y ago
      Uh. Afraid to say this, but I've had more than 1000 tabs open. It's useful too. One time I remembered doing something, found the tab. Sure, it was a 6 year old tab, but it was helpful.
      - doubled112 2y ago
        This doesn't sound too much different than my garage, really. Just junk and half finished projects piled up. That might be useful some day. toss I get why it'd be useful, and stretching the capabilities like that means that browsers get more and more useful and efficient. It just doesn't work for me, and that's alright. If you can open 1000 tabs, my 10 are no problem!
Mathnerd314 2y ago
I have tried add-ons, but for me, the native workflow of selecting tabs with ctrl, right click to bookmark them to a folder and then close them all, and then later opening them from the bookmark manager is good enough. They added multi-select around Firefox 63 and it has improved this workflow to be pretty enjoyable.
- a_subsystem 2y ago
  * in the address bar (that is: 'star' 'space') will put you in bookmark search. I use tags prolifically and can search for keywords here and it works pretty well.
  - Mathnerd314 2y ago
    I guess I was not clear - what I do in the bookmarks manager is go into a folder, and select and open them in groups of 20 or so, then delete them as bookmarks. So bookmarks are sort of like "tab cold storage" for me. So for me tagging them would be wasted work since they will eventually be deleted regardless. I also do use bookmarks for the awesomebar but it is mainly so they are prioritized in normal autocomplete.
TillE 2y ago
I don't know if there have been any real studies about this, but I certainly hear about a ton of people with a million open tabs and very few who productively use bookmarks in any significant way. My theory is that bookmarks are a failed concept, putting something out of sight but not in a useful system, so it's guaranteed to be forgotten. If I really need to save an important link, it goes in a notebook which is far more flexible.
- Semaphor 2y ago
  I love bookmarks, they are simple and just work. I have a few pinned tabs I want always open, and 5-15 tabs for current things. And the way browsers are designed, this works very well, so I rarely have reasons to write about it. But the people who don’t like bookmarks and want tabs for organization have to work against the browser, so they are far more likely to write about their issues.
- godelski 2y ago
  I like bookmarks, but you're right about the retrieval problem. I think this is one of the actual problems LMs (not even LLMs) could help resolve. Semantic tagging and generating auto-tags can really help in the retrieval process. Because I do pull things back up but even the placing in the correct place to "live" task isn't straight forward. Because to actually be organized, your bookmarks need depth in their categories. Not to mention the whole issue of selecting a URL, dragging it over the toolbar, holding it over a folder, and then battling dragging it into the next frame that's showing the contents of that folder and all the menu disappearing because I went 0.5 pixels out of bounds (god, who designs these? Same people who design window edges? You really want me to grab a 1 pixel line on a 4k monitor?!) The reason I end up tab hoarding is because these are temporary bookmarks. Things I might want to but don't know yet if I want to long term store (because the bigger your bookmark library is, the more difficult it is to find things! Major flaw). Or things I'm concurrently working on (tab groups help here). A classic example of the latter is when debugging I might be tracing down an error and do not yet know if I can leave a SO post or doc closed because I haven't resolved the issue yet and there's a good chance I come back. So I can easily solve a bug and that frees up 10+ tabs. Maybe I'm doing it wrong
- 2y ago
olejorgenb 2y ago
I like the the https://josh-berry.github.io/tab-stash/ https://josh-berry.github.io/tab-stash/ extension. Not exactly what you want, but IMO a very well-done extension in that space. Firefox handle lots of tabs very well though since the tabs are lazily loaded. Only issue is that the session system once in a while mess up and you lose everything.
- lionelw 2y ago
  Just adding this here: I created a multi-window management addon Winger[0] which lets you treat windows as 'tab groups', and it has a stashing feature (windows <-> bookmark folders / tabs <-> bookmarks) similar to Tab Stash. Despite the ostensible scope overlap, I know there's at least one person (not me) who uses both, setting Winger's stash home folder to be the same as Tab Stash's to achieve a manner of integration. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winger/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winger/
  - Cyuonut 2y ago
    Now you know a second one.
MisterTea 2y ago
I hate lots of tabs with a burning passion. The whole 100+ tabs open mess is simply due to no one bothering to solve bookmarking properly. Of course I do keep a few tabs open for long lengths, I avoid growing the count past 20 or so. If a website is worth saving, I put the link in a text file with the page title and maybe some keywords if the title isn't relevant to the subject. Usually that is enough to find the link with a quick grep. Kill the tabs
eviks 2y ago
Indeed, Vivaldi's workspaces is just great for this (although unsynced) as it allows you to maintain your work in the same "visual" place you usually organize your pages - in the tab row! But this also allows you to close any window and restore it freely without losing that information/alignment
k8svet 2y ago
I can't help myself... Firefox View poorly duplicates functionality found in other places of the browser already. Meanwhile, the rest of the product just languishes. Here's a fun thought: You have Firefox Android setup to sync with your Mozilla account. You have made the questionable decision to have 300 tabs loaded into that session. You made further questionable decisions to place your phone on a precipice about a ceramic tile floor. Cut to a few hours later, you're performing "new Android phone setup". How do you recover those tabs? (No no no, there's three different ways of viewing Synced Tabs in Firefox Desktop and none of them let you bulk save as bookmarks; and no, Firefox for Android can't replicate them over or help you at all either). The answer, after 6 years of users asking about this, is to enable internal debug features and run a user script from some Gist on GitHub. .... seriously. Meanwhile in addition to the new, disjoint Firefox View, there's the disjoint hodge-podge of functionality duplicated between the sidebar, library view, and Firefox Account "menu". Firefox's product development and vision is one of the most infuriating of any product, open source or otherwise, that I use. Also, the new Firefox View has the same completely BAFFLING padding that the settings and addon pages have expect its /not even consistent/!!? Just shrink the browser window and watch as 90% of websites out their properly adapt and adjust, but nope! not Firefox's own internal "new" pages.
- solnyshok 2y ago
  you can "open all tabs from other device here" to bring all tabs from your mobile to your PC
godelski 2y ago
There's only a few more things I really want from a browser and I'll admit, at this point most things are minor. - Tab groups: I handle this by Simple Tab Groups[0], which how it seems to do this is by bookmarks. I think something like this is a godsend for tab hoarders like us (100? Gotta pump up those numbers!). Making native would be really nice and would be great to containerize them. Especially across devices and accounts (I never want to use my Firefox account on a work computer. I wish send would come back so I can send tabs and links between different devices. Or maybe like "partnered" or "containered" accounts because we all have multiple machines we want to not just share everything across, but I'm digressing). Grouping tabs by projects or tasks really helps manage so you don't get a ton of orphaned tabs. You can just close the group when you complete. - Duplicate Tab Closer[1]. For the tab hoarder, this is such a critical addon. When treating tabs like temporary bookmarks (which is why we hoard?), you may run into a tab again and not having dupes really prevents things from exploding. I just wish I had a bit more control/explanantions and could interact with the tab groups. - Auto Tab Discard[2]: "caches" tabs so they aren't actively running or taking up your ram. I wish it actually cached though because this more seems like it just bookmarks because you reload the page when you come back rather than quickly pull a cache. I know because sometimes a page will go down and I have lost it I know us tab hoarders aren't a big market share, but I think these types of tools, if made native, could also really help a lot of other people. I'd really love the idea of being able to sync specific tab groups across containerized accounts, so I can do things like share a group of tabs between home and work machines. IDK, what do others think? What do you use to manage tab hoarding? My hardest problem is properly purging[side note] [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duplicate-tabs-closer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duplicate-tab... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... [side note] this is an extra problem on mobile. Often I don't realize I'm opening new tabs because when I just open the browser sometimes it drops me in the last one and sometimes I'm on the "home page" (new tab). So I get orphaned tabs this way. And on mobile it is even harder to group and deal with "inactive" tabs. Which for me are frequently research papers. And we all know Zotero and Mendeley are shit. Seriously, why can't I easily load them into my ipad and mark up those documents, share marked or unmarked, attach notes or communal share? Do the creators do research? Sorry, off topic again.
Anthony-G 2y ago
I also suffer from “tab overflow” so I convert them to bookmarks. Unlike tabs, bookmarks use minimal browser resources – just an entry in an SQLite database. Every so often, I use Ctrl-Shift-D to save all the tabs in the current window to their own folder in Bookmarks. I follow this with Ctrl-Shift-W which closes all the tabs in the current window. I repeat this for each browser window containing multiple tabs. That way, the tabs that had been open are stored in a loosely organised way and are easily retrieved if I ever feel the need to. More often than not, I won’t look at them again but they’re there if I want to.

spuzz 2y ago

I hope it never optimizes around this. There are a million ways to organize information and "leaving it all over the fuckin place in case I ever need it" is not an organization method, it's the absence of one. Then again I do love seeing people have fifteen million tabs open, it helps me set my expectations about what they can handle.

ziddoap 2y ago
>Then again I do love seeing people have fifteen million tabs open, it helps me set my expectations about what they can handle. What do you mean by this? Are you implying they can't handle something? Or can? And how did you come to that conclusion?
eviks 2y ago
How come 'Windows represent certain topics' didn't fit the million?

causi 2y ago

People wouldn't have to do that if they implemented "progressive bookmarks". I want to be able to bookmark a top-level web page and then later when I click the bookmark go back to the last page I was on, on that site.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

enriquto 2y ago

> abusing browser tabs as bookmarks This is not really abuse, it's very natural. Tabs, bookmarks and browser history should be one and the same thing.

doubled112 2y ago
I don't like this idea. I can see how others would though. I have a really hard time getting back into things. Any state a thing remembers is the opposite of helpful. For example, I don't suspend laptops, I turn them off. It'd be a waste of time closing what I was doing before because I don't remember where I was earlier and it's easier to start over. Browser tabs are a current state. If I will want to use it multiple times, I use a bookmark. History is for the rare time I think "wait, I swear I read that earlier". It isn't just computing, I forget where I was in books and games sometimes and start over too. I can't be the only one.
- safety1st 2y ago
  I feel like I start to lose focus when I have more than a few tabs open. When I see people with dozens of tabs open I get a little panicky. I want to focus on the task at hand and if I want to recall an old site I'll use bookmarks and history for that, not bloat my active session state.
  - b112 2y ago
    Uh. Afraid to say this, but I've had more than 1000 tabs open. It's useful too. One time I remembered doing something, found the tab. Sure, it was a 6 year old tab, but it was helpful.
    - doubled112 2y ago
      This doesn't sound too much different than my garage, really. Just junk and half finished projects piled up. That might be useful some day. toss I get why it'd be useful, and stretching the capabilities like that means that browsers get more and more useful and efficient. It just doesn't work for me, and that's alright. If you can open 1000 tabs, my 10 are no problem!

Mathnerd314 2y ago

I have tried add-ons, but for me, the native workflow of selecting tabs with ctrl, right click to bookmark them to a folder and then close them all, and then later opening them from the bookmark manager is good enough. They added multi-select around Firefox 63 and it has improved this workflow to be pretty enjoyable.

a_subsystem 2y ago
* in the address bar (that is: 'star' 'space') will put you in bookmark search. I use tags prolifically and can search for keywords here and it works pretty well.
- Mathnerd314 2y ago
  I guess I was not clear - what I do in the bookmarks manager is go into a folder, and select and open them in groups of 20 or so, then delete them as bookmarks. So bookmarks are sort of like "tab cold storage" for me. So for me tagging them would be wasted work since they will eventually be deleted regardless. I also do use bookmarks for the awesomebar but it is mainly so they are prioritized in normal autocomplete.

TillE 2y ago

I don't know if there have been any real studies about this, but I certainly hear about a ton of people with a million open tabs and very few who productively use bookmarks in any significant way. My theory is that bookmarks are a failed concept, putting something out of sight but not in a useful system, so it's guaranteed to be forgotten. If I really need to save an important link, it goes in a notebook which is far more flexible.

Semaphor 2y ago
I love bookmarks, they are simple and just work. I have a few pinned tabs I want always open, and 5-15 tabs for current things. And the way browsers are designed, this works very well, so I rarely have reasons to write about it. But the people who don’t like bookmarks and want tabs for organization have to work against the browser, so they are far more likely to write about their issues.
godelski 2y ago
I like bookmarks, but you're right about the retrieval problem. I think this is one of the actual problems LMs (not even LLMs) could help resolve. Semantic tagging and generating auto-tags can really help in the retrieval process. Because I do pull things back up but even the placing in the correct place to "live" task isn't straight forward. Because to actually be organized, your bookmarks need depth in their categories. Not to mention the whole issue of selecting a URL, dragging it over the toolbar, holding it over a folder, and then battling dragging it into the next frame that's showing the contents of that folder and all the menu disappearing because I went 0.5 pixels out of bounds (god, who designs these? Same people who design window edges? You really want me to grab a 1 pixel line on a 4k monitor?!) The reason I end up tab hoarding is because these are temporary bookmarks. Things I might want to but don't know yet if I want to long term store (because the bigger your bookmark library is, the more difficult it is to find things! Major flaw). Or things I'm concurrently working on (tab groups help here). A classic example of the latter is when debugging I might be tracing down an error and do not yet know if I can leave a SO post or doc closed because I haven't resolved the issue yet and there's a good chance I come back. So I can easily solve a bug and that frees up 10+ tabs. Maybe I'm doing it wrong
2y ago

olejorgenb 2y ago

I like the the https://josh-berry.github.io/tab-stash/ https://josh-berry.github.io/tab-stash/ extension. Not exactly what you want, but IMO a very well-done extension in that space. Firefox handle lots of tabs very well though since the tabs are lazily loaded. Only issue is that the session system once in a while mess up and you lose everything.

lionelw 2y ago
Just adding this here: I created a multi-window management addon Winger[0] which lets you treat windows as 'tab groups', and it has a stashing feature (windows <-> bookmark folders / tabs <-> bookmarks) similar to Tab Stash. Despite the ostensible scope overlap, I know there's at least one person (not me) who uses both, setting Winger's stash home folder to be the same as Tab Stash's to achieve a manner of integration. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winger/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/winger/
- Cyuonut 2y ago
  Now you know a second one.

MisterTea 2y ago

I hate lots of tabs with a burning passion. The whole 100+ tabs open mess is simply due to no one bothering to solve bookmarking properly. Of course I do keep a few tabs open for long lengths, I avoid growing the count past 20 or so. If a website is worth saving, I put the link in a text file with the page title and maybe some keywords if the title isn't relevant to the subject. Usually that is enough to find the link with a quick grep. Kill the tabs

eviks 2y ago

Indeed, Vivaldi's workspaces is just great for this (although unsynced) as it allows you to maintain your work in the same "visual" place you usually organize your pages - in the tab row! But this also allows you to close any window and restore it freely without losing that information/alignment

k8svet 2y ago

I can't help myself... Firefox View poorly duplicates functionality found in other places of the browser already. Meanwhile, the rest of the product just languishes. Here's a fun thought: You have Firefox Android setup to sync with your Mozilla account. You have made the questionable decision to have 300 tabs loaded into that session. You made further questionable decisions to place your phone on a precipice about a ceramic tile floor. Cut to a few hours later, you're performing "new Android phone setup". How do you recover those tabs? (No no no, there's three different ways of viewing Synced Tabs in Firefox Desktop and none of them let you bulk save as bookmarks; and no, Firefox for Android can't replicate them over or help you at all either). The answer, after 6 years of users asking about this, is to enable internal debug features and run a user script from some Gist on GitHub. .... seriously. Meanwhile in addition to the new, disjoint Firefox View, there's the disjoint hodge-podge of functionality duplicated between the sidebar, library view, and Firefox Account "menu". Firefox's product development and vision is one of the most infuriating of any product, open source or otherwise, that I use. Also, the new Firefox View has the same completely BAFFLING padding that the settings and addon pages have expect its /not even consistent/!!? Just shrink the browser window and watch as 90% of websites out their properly adapt and adjust, but nope! not Firefox's own internal "new" pages.

solnyshok 2y ago
you can "open all tabs from other device here" to bring all tabs from your mobile to your PC

godelski 2y ago

There's only a few more things I really want from a browser and I'll admit, at this point most things are minor. - Tab groups: I handle this by Simple Tab Groups[0], which how it seems to do this is by bookmarks. I think something like this is a godsend for tab hoarders like us (100? Gotta pump up those numbers!). Making native would be really nice and would be great to containerize them. Especially across devices and accounts (I never want to use my Firefox account on a work computer. I wish send would come back so I can send tabs and links between different devices. Or maybe like "partnered" or "containered" accounts because we all have multiple machines we want to not just share everything across, but I'm digressing). Grouping tabs by projects or tasks really helps manage so you don't get a ton of orphaned tabs. You can just close the group when you complete. - Duplicate Tab Closer[1]. For the tab hoarder, this is such a critical addon. When treating tabs like temporary bookmarks (which is why we hoard?), you may run into a tab again and not having dupes really prevents things from exploding. I just wish I had a bit more control/explanantions and could interact with the tab groups. - Auto Tab Discard[2]: "caches" tabs so they aren't actively running or taking up your ram. I wish it actually cached though because this more seems like it just bookmarks because you reload the page when you come back rather than quickly pull a cache. I know because sometimes a page will go down and I have lost it I know us tab hoarders aren't a big market share, but I think these types of tools, if made native, could also really help a lot of other people. I'd really love the idea of being able to sync specific tab groups across containerized accounts, so I can do things like share a group of tabs between home and work machines. IDK, what do others think? What do you use to manage tab hoarding? My hardest problem is properly purging[side note] [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr... [1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duplicate-tabs-closer/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/duplicate-tab... [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-discard/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-disc... [side note] this is an extra problem on mobile. Often I don't realize I'm opening new tabs because when I just open the browser sometimes it drops me in the last one and sometimes I'm on the "home page" (new tab). So I get orphaned tabs this way. And on mobile it is even harder to group and deal with "inactive" tabs. Which for me are frequently research papers. And we all know Zotero and Mendeley are shit. Seriously, why can't I easily load them into my ipad and mark up those documents, share marked or unmarked, attach notes or communal share? Do the creators do research? Sorry, off topic again.

Anthony-G 2y ago

I also suffer from “tab overflow” so I convert them to bookmarks. Unlike tabs, bookmarks use minimal browser resources – just an entry in an SQLite database. Every so often, I use Ctrl-Shift-D to save all the tabs in the current window to their own folder in Bookmarks. I follow this with Ctrl-Shift-W which closes all the tabs in the current window. I repeat this for each browser window containing multiple tabs. That way, the tabs that had been open are stored in a loosely organised way and are easily retrieved if I ever feel the need to. More often than not, I won’t look at them again but they’re there if I want to.