5 ms·

> 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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!
    - philsnow 3y ago
      I periodically take firefox's recovery.jsonlz4 and pipe it through a bunch of jq to export it as a datestamped bookmarks-$(date ...).org file. Right now I have 15 windows and 5351 tabs. Then I close all but the windows I have actually looked at in the last month.
      - b112 3y ago
        Neat idea. With how lame Google search is, this is handy when looking for something already found.
      - throwaway48476 3y ago
        I once had ~40k tabs.
- cryptonector 3y ago
  Relationally the only difference between a "tab", "history", and a "bookmark" is a column that tells you what kind it is.
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
    Kinda but not really. I expect a tab to stay in memory, at least in virtual memory, and not need to hit the server if it's in the background for a while and then I click on it again, unlike history or bookmarks. I expect history to not be loaded in memory, it would be a waste of memory. I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".
    - cryptonector 3y ago
      All browsers use SQLite3 DBs for this stuff. History is not "loaded into memory" -- it's in the SQLite3 DB, which has a page cache, so some of it might be in memory, but the amount of memory dedicated to the page cache is fixed, so you need not worry about it. > I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. There is truly no difference except that some URIs are bookmarked (and maybe also in recent history) and some are not. Either way searching these is just a SQL query against the SQLite3 DB. You really need not worry about the efficiency of the search -- it's fast enough. The table(s) that store these things have enough metadata to enable the kinds of searches you might want to do. Among such metadata is "this is a bookmark" and "this is not a bookmark". > "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant". That doesn't preclude treating it not that differently from history. You really need not worry about those details. Also, a "bookmark" is more than that: it also has a name, it may be in a folder, it may be in the bookmark toolbar, it may have tags to help you search for it, etc.
  - aaplok 3y ago
    If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else? I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information. I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.
solarkraft 3y ago
Damn, thanks! I've been saying this for a while. They're all references to pages, optionally with some state.
Mathnerd314 3y ago
In some sense they are the same thing, they are all stored in the Places database in a relatively uniform schema. In another sense they aren't, history is erased after a few months whereas losing bookmarks or tabs would be very bad. Firefox Mobile has this "inactive tabs" feature which is OK but I would never turn on the option to auto-close tabs.
lambdaba 3y ago
I'm totally with you on this. I remember seeing this concept video from Mozilla in the mid '00s, IIRC it's pretty much this vision, and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY. I'm actually a bit shocked that almost 20 years later and the browser interface is pretty much still the same.
- pxc 3y ago
  Some of the ideas about being able to work with data in different formats are cool, as is attempting to group related sites/pages/topics together, but that UI looks way too visual and spatial for me. Too much movement, too many images. Text is much less work to parse for me.
  - lambdaba 3y ago
    It's a concept, but I agree. It does show nicely what a true "user agent" could look like. I want this, the browser as sidekick not machinery with multiple buttons etc. I want my browser to be my operating system.
nashashmi 3y ago
Did you know that history in Chrome only remains for three months?
araes 3y ago
Not here. Would much prefer something like evolved bookmarks, yet still very much separate from a bookmark I specifically chose. Evolved would be more like the browser just hangs onto History longer if you go there more. Tabs, I donno, I'm not the target audience for Tabs. I'm on somewhat limited resource hardware, so keeping 100 tabs open is simply not feasible. All browsers run like slugs with 100 tabs open from personal experience. With four tabs open on Firefox Developer 125.0b9 I have (6) main process groups with (8) further subprocesses for 1075 MB of memory while doing ... nothing. The tabs are Not impressive. HN (2,text), WP (text), Gmail (text). Adding only Redfin and Facebook jumps me up 500 further MB in resident memory. Two tabs, no actions. How do the landing pages for two major companies eat 500 MB of resident memory statically?...
- isthatafact 3y ago
  firefox and chrome seem to have long embraced the philosophy of `why worry about memory usage when I know if it uses too much RAM the browser will simply crash or become completely unresponsive due to swapping forcing the user to reboot (or if very lucky only force-kill the browser) ........problem solved!'
Too 3y ago
Dumping everything you have onto the kitchen counter is also very natural. It just doesn’t remain effective for long. The cabinets are a pretty darn useful invention. Don’t mix work surface with storage.
jrmann100 3y ago
Have you checked out Arc Browser? [0] It's pretty opinionated. "Archives" tabs after a pre-set amount of time, uses pinned vertical tabs instead of bookmarks… [0] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/
fasa99 3y ago
browser history is a log and presumably contains things one doesn't care about after reading but definitely so for tabs and bookmarks as "things that are interesting" - the tab is notable because it has a back/forward aspect. It seems to me in this day & age you have media organization tools (jellyfin? I think it's called?) that just handle everything. I'd love to see some basic AI language model (more of the BERT/gensim flavor likely) that can similarly auto-organize trounces of bookmarks, I have way too many. The other interesting and increasingly relevant feature towards bookmarks would be the concept of saving them for posteriority, as we know the internet is not forever, whether this means a local save or a ping to archive.org as to say "someone bookmarked this maybe you can hang onto it". The trick of it there is not just capturing all the content of a webpage including videos, but if we say "tabs are bookmarks" then maybe you want to capture the back/forward button pages to a degree. Anyway that's what my dream browser might look like. Also dream browser powerfully denies browser fingerprinting.

doubled112 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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 3y 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!
  - philsnow 3y ago
    I periodically take firefox's recovery.jsonlz4 and pipe it through a bunch of jq to export it as a datestamped bookmarks-$(date ...).org file. Right now I have 15 windows and 5351 tabs. Then I close all but the windows I have actually looked at in the last month.
    - b112 3y ago
      Neat idea. With how lame Google search is, this is handy when looking for something already found.
    - throwaway48476 3y ago
      I once had ~40k tabs.
cryptonector 3y ago
Relationally the only difference between a "tab", "history", and a "bookmark" is a column that tells you what kind it is.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y ago
  Kinda but not really. I expect a tab to stay in memory, at least in virtual memory, and not need to hit the server if it's in the background for a while and then I click on it again, unlike history or bookmarks. I expect history to not be loaded in memory, it would be a waste of memory. I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".
  - cryptonector 3y ago
    All browsers use SQLite3 DBs for this stuff. History is not "loaded into memory" -- it's in the SQLite3 DB, which has a page cache, so some of it might be in memory, but the amount of memory dedicated to the page cache is fixed, so you need not worry about it. > I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. There is truly no difference except that some URIs are bookmarked (and maybe also in recent history) and some are not. Either way searching these is just a SQL query against the SQLite3 DB. You really need not worry about the efficiency of the search -- it's fast enough. The table(s) that store these things have enough metadata to enable the kinds of searches you might want to do. Among such metadata is "this is a bookmark" and "this is not a bookmark". > "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant". That doesn't preclude treating it not that differently from history. You really need not worry about those details. Also, a "bookmark" is more than that: it also has a name, it may be in a folder, it may be in the bookmark toolbar, it may have tags to help you search for it, etc.
- aaplok 3y ago
  If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else? I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information. I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.

solarkraft 3y ago

Damn, thanks! I've been saying this for a while. They're all references to pages, optionally with some state.

Mathnerd314 3y ago

In some sense they are the same thing, they are all stored in the Places database in a relatively uniform schema. In another sense they aren't, history is erased after a few months whereas losing bookmarks or tabs would be very bad. Firefox Mobile has this "inactive tabs" feature which is OK but I would never turn on the option to auto-close tabs.

lambdaba 3y ago

I'm totally with you on this. I remember seeing this concept video from Mozilla in the mid '00s, IIRC it's pretty much this vision, and more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYMA5W8b1zY. I'm actually a bit shocked that almost 20 years later and the browser interface is pretty much still the same.

pxc 3y ago
Some of the ideas about being able to work with data in different formats are cool, as is attempting to group related sites/pages/topics together, but that UI looks way too visual and spatial for me. Too much movement, too many images. Text is much less work to parse for me.
- lambdaba 3y ago
  It's a concept, but I agree. It does show nicely what a true "user agent" could look like. I want this, the browser as sidekick not machinery with multiple buttons etc. I want my browser to be my operating system.

nashashmi 3y ago

Did you know that history in Chrome only remains for three months?

araes 3y ago

Not here. Would much prefer something like evolved bookmarks, yet still very much separate from a bookmark I specifically chose. Evolved would be more like the browser just hangs onto History longer if you go there more. Tabs, I donno, I'm not the target audience for Tabs. I'm on somewhat limited resource hardware, so keeping 100 tabs open is simply not feasible. All browsers run like slugs with 100 tabs open from personal experience. With four tabs open on Firefox Developer 125.0b9 I have (6) main process groups with (8) further subprocesses for 1075 MB of memory while doing ... nothing. The tabs are Not impressive. HN (2,text), WP (text), Gmail (text). Adding only Redfin and Facebook jumps me up 500 further MB in resident memory. Two tabs, no actions. How do the landing pages for two major companies eat 500 MB of resident memory statically?...

isthatafact 3y ago
firefox and chrome seem to have long embraced the philosophy of `why worry about memory usage when I know if it uses too much RAM the browser will simply crash or become completely unresponsive due to swapping forcing the user to reboot (or if very lucky only force-kill the browser) ........problem solved!'

Too 3y ago

Dumping everything you have onto the kitchen counter is also very natural. It just doesn’t remain effective for long. The cabinets are a pretty darn useful invention. Don’t mix work surface with storage.

jrmann100 3y ago

Have you checked out Arc Browser? [0] It's pretty opinionated. "Archives" tabs after a pre-set amount of time, uses pinned vertical tabs instead of bookmarks… [0] https://arc.net/ https://arc.net/

fasa99 3y ago

browser history is a log and presumably contains things one doesn't care about after reading but definitely so for tabs and bookmarks as "things that are interesting" - the tab is notable because it has a back/forward aspect. It seems to me in this day & age you have media organization tools (jellyfin? I think it's called?) that just handle everything. I'd love to see some basic AI language model (more of the BERT/gensim flavor likely) that can similarly auto-organize trounces of bookmarks, I have way too many. The other interesting and increasingly relevant feature towards bookmarks would be the concept of saving them for posteriority, as we know the internet is not forever, whether this means a local save or a ping to archive.org as to say "someone bookmarked this maybe you can hang onto it". The trick of it there is not just capturing all the content of a webpage including videos, but if we say "tabs are bookmarks" then maybe you want to capture the back/forward button pages to a degree. Anyway that's what my dream browser might look like. Also dream browser powerfully denies browser fingerprinting.