3 ms·

I was just talking about this with my wife. I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory but I find that all the solutions to save sites or resources I fin

I was just talking about this with my wife. I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory but I find that all the solutions to save sites or resources I find and need to reference in the future are aweful. Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks. I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one.

nicoburns 2y ago
I feel like I want a dedicated bookmarking app that integrates with the browser but is distinct from it. That has full "library management" features: nested folders AND tags AND something for more temporary storage.
- pizza 2y ago
  In theory, you could make it happen with: - a db - a db browser - a {bookmarks,browser,etc}-to-db tool For instance, - sqlite - datasette https://datasette.io/ https://datasette.io/ - pocket-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite Furthermore, you could integrate e.g. Claude with this, by creating a lightweight model-context-protocol server that lets Claude browse through datasette. You would probably want to throw in a vector db in-between somewhere, so you could get semantic search over bookmarks to work nicely.
- BrenBarn 2y ago
  Zotero can sort of work like this. It's designed as a reference management tool but you can use it to save more or less any web page. It can also save actual snapshots of the page which makes it nice for "really saving" a page in case it disappears (although these days a lot of sites have junk that makes it not work that well). It is a little awkward having it as a separate app though.
ksec 2y ago
>I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory Are you on Safari? If so even switching to Chrome would have helped, and if you are have more than a hundred tabs than use Firefox. >Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks Completely agree as it has been the case for the last 25+ years since Tabs were invented. I keep the Tabs opened as more like a ToDo-List. Saving me from going back and forth so I understand your frustration. Having drop down list in Chrome and Firefox allows you quickly Garbage collect from unused tabs. Which is already much better than the old days as this is a fairly recent additions. ( May be pass ~5 years ) Tree-Tabs sounds good in theory but in practice over the past 15+ years or so most of the tree tabs implementation dont work for me. Mostly an UI issue. Category of Tabs or sometimes called Tab Group seems to be the closest thing. I actually quite like Tab Groups on Chrome, and surprisingly Firefox over the years have tried many implementation but nothing like what chrome has offered ( at least by default ) I use Tab groups on both Safari and Chrome, one group for HN, one group for RSS feed. These two groups keep nearly 80-90% of new tabs generation for me already. So while it is not perfect it is a lot less of a mess than what I had. The rest are random thoughts that came up into my mind and I need some tabs research into it.
- msephton 2y ago
  Safari is quite memory efficient and only stores metadata for inactive tabs, mostly the URL. I currently have 262 tabs in a single Safari window. Memory usage nothing or of the ordinary, a small fraction of my total.
  - ksec 2y ago
    As far as I aware Safari dont "unload" tabs after a period of time for inactivity. ( At least that has been the case both on my home and work machine ) It was an option as part of Dev Tools but was taken out. They haven't been doing unloading from Safari 8 to 17. Using Tab Overview, Unplugging Power Adopter, along with some other functions will trigger reload of all Tabs. Which causes crazy paging, my current Kernel_Task has written 60TB of Data over 6 months. That is 10TB per month. The only way you have true inactive Tabs is if you restart Safari. On recent Chrome and for Firefox they have been doing it since Project MemShrink and at least 10 years. So for those who close their browser windows every now and then or shut down their computer at the end of the day they may be fine. ( Still possible for force reloading of Tabs on Safari though )
    - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      There is aggressive unloading on Safari on iOS (iPhones and iPads).
      - ksec 2y ago
        That is true. But also expected as iOS dont have paging ( Not sure if that is still the case ) I constantly run into Mobile Safari limit of 500 tabs.
        ksec 2y ago
        Another day, another Safari Paging issue, another 1TB written to my SSD.
SecretDreams 2y ago
> Bookmarks suck They suck so bad lol. I bookmark something planning to look back at it the next day. I actually end up looking at the bookmark a year later thinking "oh ya, that".
pabs3 2y ago
There is a Firefox WebExtension that unloads memory from unused tabs, it works quite well. Enough that a window with many many tabs only uses about 10% of RAM on an 8GB machine. That might be a start. https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html
kirubakaran 2y ago
I think you want the "save tabs" feature of https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ Not only can you restore the browser state, the search in histre is the best, if I can say so myself (it's mine). If you let histre save your browsing history, you don't even have explicitly save tabs or create bookmarks. You can just search to find anything you've ever touched. https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/
graycat 2y ago
> I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one. NOOOO problem. Simple solution. In one word, text. Two words, text editor. E.g., this Hacker News thread is at: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=42988455&goto=item%3Fid%3D42988158%2342988455 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=42988455&goto=item%3Fi... Sooooo, have that URL and the title of this thread in a simple, old-fashioned, file, text file, maintained with my favorite editor. Then, when want to revisit this thread, use the editor's excellent text search facilities to find the URL, and then, via a simple editor macro I wrote, one keystroke, and, bam, boom, have the Web page displayed via my pre-selected Web browser. Text. Keep nearly everything important in just text. Source code of .NET for my startup's Web site? Text, never anything but text. Visual Studio? No thanks: Did I mention text? Posts at Hacker News? Text, both for my posts and those of everyone else. File system directory tree? Uh, again the T-word, with the tree from the Rexx function SysFileTree. In the editor, can sort on date, size, name, etc.
- metalman 2y ago
  That is a good way of doing it, and I will cobble something like it together. Right now, I am bookmarking to my phones home page, useing an alternative browser that lets me sset domain settings for each web site, java script, cookies, DOM,which add blockers, font, etc, etc,etc. It works for me, and when it breaks a site, that is often a good indication that its run by rabid advertationalists, and data thieves, and there wont be any content worth the trouble. I do have another browser running crome, to access(briefly) the sites that I cant find an alternative to, but I wipe the cache every once in a while. The difference between the shiny one and the browser* that retains local control, is stark. *stoutner privacy browser, apk on fdroid
- skydhash 2y ago
  I have a bookmark file, but I haven't updated it in some while. The bookmark feature in browsers serves only two functions for me. Important sites, which I pin to the toolbar, and important history landmarks that I just chug down in "Others" (firefox) which is sorted by dates. I rely on the actual history for search (libraries docs,...).
makeitdouble 2y ago
> all the major web browsers have given up on being the User Agent, and instead act as the web developer's agent. The elephant in the room: Chrome is owned by Google and Chromium is only a stripped down version with no independent development, Apple/Safari is paid by Google, Firefox is paid by Google. We could argue design decisions aren't directly dictated by Google in regards to Safari and Firefox, but we're also not seeing any major decision that straight goes against Google's interests. The most we've seen from Safari is manual element removal, and on iOS only.
mike_hearn 2y ago
I looked at improving this a few years ago when looking for a product to do. There are lots of ways to improve bookmarking, content recall etc on the web. Nobody is willing to pay for them. 1. Users don't pay for them. I found lots of startups with the same idea that had pivoted, mostly into dedicated research tools for academics. 2. Browser makers don't pay for them, because if they make their bookmarking tools bad then people search more, and they get paid for search referrals. So making bookmarking or history search better hurts their own revenue. Nobody is willing to pay. So, nobody gets improvements. If people start being willing to pay for their browser, you'll see them get better at stuff like this.
- webspinner 2y ago
  I use linklocker, and pay $12 yearly for it. I would be willing to pay monthly for it, if necessary.
brw 2y ago
Massively agreed. I've had this problem for years and always have hundreds, sometimes thousands of tabs open, spread across a couple dozen windows. Memory usage is actually pretty alright with Chrome these days as the vast majority of tabs stay unloaded, and its Memory Saver feature also unloads opened tabs over time, so it's perfectly usable even with 16GB of RAM. Before that I had to use The Great Suspender to keep the memory usage in check. I feel like I've tried every tab/bookmark managing app/extension under the sun and none of them stuck. I've also thought about creating my own, but it feels like even I don't know what I'm looking for exactly. The main problem I have is that they all have too much friction compared to simply keeping the tabs open. It would have to be something deeply integrated into the browser. Vivaldi has some really cool tab management features and it would be my main browser of choice, but with my amount of tabs, windows and extensions its UI performance degraded to the point of becoming unusable, whereas Chrome held up just fine. Granted it has been a couple of years since I last tried it so that might have improved since. I'd still recommend anyone with similar "power user" needs to give it a try. It's a pretty awesome browser. Tab Groups in Chrome are actually surprisingly decent as well. They're pretty low friction, and open tab groups even sync across devices, including mobile, in (near) real time now, which is great. But I do have some issues with them causing me not to use them. For example, when you re-open a closed tab group it will instantly load all of the tabs inside of it, instead of keeping each tab unloaded until visited, like on startup. You also can't add tabs to a closed tab group. So you either always have to keep the tab group open, meaning they're not much more than a visual aid and only slightly more useful than bookmark folders, or store fewer tabs per group, making them even less useful. They also have the same "object permanence" issue as bookmarks, where it's simply too easy to forget about a closed tab group altogether once I close it.
- cpill 2y ago
  I make a new window for each task in working on keeping the tabs grouped together, and more importantly, make it easy to kill them when the team is done. if I have a group of tabs open for a long time that I'm meaning to read (and I know deep down that I won't but can't admit it to myself) I'll just copy the URLs to a note in Obsidian and lay them to rest.

nicoburns 2y ago

I feel like I want a dedicated bookmarking app that integrates with the browser but is distinct from it. That has full "library management" features: nested folders AND tags AND something for more temporary storage.

pizza 2y ago
In theory, you could make it happen with: - a db - a db browser - a {bookmarks,browser,etc}-to-db tool For instance, - sqlite - datasette https://datasette.io/ https://datasette.io/ - pocket-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite https://datasette.io/tools/pocket-to-sqlite Furthermore, you could integrate e.g. Claude with this, by creating a lightweight model-context-protocol server that lets Claude browse through datasette. You would probably want to throw in a vector db in-between somewhere, so you could get semantic search over bookmarks to work nicely.
BrenBarn 2y ago
Zotero can sort of work like this. It's designed as a reference management tool but you can use it to save more or less any web page. It can also save actual snapshots of the page which makes it nice for "really saving" a page in case it disappears (although these days a lot of sites have junk that makes it not work that well). It is a little awkward having it as a separate app though.

ksec 2y ago

>I have so many tabs open that I run out of memory Are you on Safari? If so even switching to Chrome would have helped, and if you are have more than a hundred tabs than use Firefox. >Bookmarks suck, search sucks, saving browser sessions sucks Completely agree as it has been the case for the last 25+ years since Tabs were invented. I keep the Tabs opened as more like a ToDo-List. Saving me from going back and forth so I understand your frustration. Having drop down list in Chrome and Firefox allows you quickly Garbage collect from unused tabs. Which is already much better than the old days as this is a fairly recent additions. ( May be pass ~5 years ) Tree-Tabs sounds good in theory but in practice over the past 15+ years or so most of the tree tabs implementation dont work for me. Mostly an UI issue. Category of Tabs or sometimes called Tab Group seems to be the closest thing. I actually quite like Tab Groups on Chrome, and surprisingly Firefox over the years have tried many implementation but nothing like what chrome has offered ( at least by default ) I use Tab groups on both Safari and Chrome, one group for HN, one group for RSS feed. These two groups keep nearly 80-90% of new tabs generation for me already. So while it is not perfect it is a lot less of a mess than what I had. The rest are random thoughts that came up into my mind and I need some tabs research into it.

msephton 2y ago
Safari is quite memory efficient and only stores metadata for inactive tabs, mostly the URL. I currently have 262 tabs in a single Safari window. Memory usage nothing or of the ordinary, a small fraction of my total.
- ksec 2y ago
  As far as I aware Safari dont "unload" tabs after a period of time for inactivity. ( At least that has been the case both on my home and work machine ) It was an option as part of Dev Tools but was taken out. They haven't been doing unloading from Safari 8 to 17. Using Tab Overview, Unplugging Power Adopter, along with some other functions will trigger reload of all Tabs. Which causes crazy paging, my current Kernel_Task has written 60TB of Data over 6 months. That is 10TB per month. The only way you have true inactive Tabs is if you restart Safari. On recent Chrome and for Firefox they have been doing it since Project MemShrink and at least 10 years. So for those who close their browser windows every now and then or shut down their computer at the end of the day they may be fine. ( Still possible for force reloading of Tabs on Safari though )
  - blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    There is aggressive unloading on Safari on iOS (iPhones and iPads).
    - ksec 2y ago
      That is true. But also expected as iOS dont have paging ( Not sure if that is still the case ) I constantly run into Mobile Safari limit of 500 tabs.
      - ksec 2y ago
        Another day, another Safari Paging issue, another 1TB written to my SSD.

SecretDreams 2y ago

> Bookmarks suck They suck so bad lol. I bookmark something planning to look back at it the next day. I actually end up looking at the bookmark a year later thinking "oh ya, that".

pabs3 2y ago

There is a Firefox WebExtension that unloads memory from unused tabs, it works quite well. Enough that a window with many many tabs only uses about 10% of RAM on an 8GB machine. That might be a start. https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html https://webextension.org/listing/tab-discard.html

kirubakaran 2y ago

I think you want the "save tabs" feature of https://histre.com/ https://histre.com/ Not only can you restore the browser state, the search in histre is the best, if I can say so myself (it's mine). If you let histre save your browsing history, you don't even have explicitly save tabs or create bookmarks. You can just search to find anything you've ever touched. https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/ https://histre.com/features/save-restore-tabs/

graycat 2y ago

> I don’t have a good workflow and can’t even imagine one. NOOOO problem. Simple solution. In one word, text. Two words, text editor. E.g., this Hacker News thread is at: https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=42988455&goto=item%3Fid%3D42988158%2342988455 https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=42988455&goto=item%3Fi... Sooooo, have that URL and the title of this thread in a simple, old-fashioned, file, text file, maintained with my favorite editor. Then, when want to revisit this thread, use the editor's excellent text search facilities to find the URL, and then, via a simple editor macro I wrote, one keystroke, and, bam, boom, have the Web page displayed via my pre-selected Web browser. Text. Keep nearly everything important in just text. Source code of .NET for my startup's Web site? Text, never anything but text. Visual Studio? No thanks: Did I mention text? Posts at Hacker News? Text, both for my posts and those of everyone else. File system directory tree? Uh, again the T-word, with the tree from the Rexx function SysFileTree. In the editor, can sort on date, size, name, etc.

metalman 2y ago
That is a good way of doing it, and I will cobble something like it together. Right now, I am bookmarking to my phones home page, useing an alternative browser that lets me sset domain settings for each web site, java script, cookies, DOM,which add blockers, font, etc, etc,etc. It works for me, and when it breaks a site, that is often a good indication that its run by rabid advertationalists, and data thieves, and there wont be any content worth the trouble. I do have another browser running crome, to access(briefly) the sites that I cant find an alternative to, but I wipe the cache every once in a while. The difference between the shiny one and the browser* that retains local control, is stark. *stoutner privacy browser, apk on fdroid
skydhash 2y ago
I have a bookmark file, but I haven't updated it in some while. The bookmark feature in browsers serves only two functions for me. Important sites, which I pin to the toolbar, and important history landmarks that I just chug down in "Others" (firefox) which is sorted by dates. I rely on the actual history for search (libraries docs,...).

makeitdouble 2y ago

> all the major web browsers have given up on being the User Agent, and instead act as the web developer's agent. The elephant in the room: Chrome is owned by Google and Chromium is only a stripped down version with no independent development, Apple/Safari is paid by Google, Firefox is paid by Google. We could argue design decisions aren't directly dictated by Google in regards to Safari and Firefox, but we're also not seeing any major decision that straight goes against Google's interests. The most we've seen from Safari is manual element removal, and on iOS only.

mike_hearn 2y ago

I looked at improving this a few years ago when looking for a product to do. There are lots of ways to improve bookmarking, content recall etc on the web. Nobody is willing to pay for them. 1. Users don't pay for them. I found lots of startups with the same idea that had pivoted, mostly into dedicated research tools for academics. 2. Browser makers don't pay for them, because if they make their bookmarking tools bad then people search more, and they get paid for search referrals. So making bookmarking or history search better hurts their own revenue. Nobody is willing to pay. So, nobody gets improvements. If people start being willing to pay for their browser, you'll see them get better at stuff like this.

webspinner 2y ago
I use linklocker, and pay $12 yearly for it. I would be willing to pay monthly for it, if necessary.

brw 2y ago

Massively agreed. I've had this problem for years and always have hundreds, sometimes thousands of tabs open, spread across a couple dozen windows. Memory usage is actually pretty alright with Chrome these days as the vast majority of tabs stay unloaded, and its Memory Saver feature also unloads opened tabs over time, so it's perfectly usable even with 16GB of RAM. Before that I had to use The Great Suspender to keep the memory usage in check. I feel like I've tried every tab/bookmark managing app/extension under the sun and none of them stuck. I've also thought about creating my own, but it feels like even I don't know what I'm looking for exactly. The main problem I have is that they all have too much friction compared to simply keeping the tabs open. It would have to be something deeply integrated into the browser. Vivaldi has some really cool tab management features and it would be my main browser of choice, but with my amount of tabs, windows and extensions its UI performance degraded to the point of becoming unusable, whereas Chrome held up just fine. Granted it has been a couple of years since I last tried it so that might have improved since. I'd still recommend anyone with similar "power user" needs to give it a try. It's a pretty awesome browser. Tab Groups in Chrome are actually surprisingly decent as well. They're pretty low friction, and open tab groups even sync across devices, including mobile, in (near) real time now, which is great. But I do have some issues with them causing me not to use them. For example, when you re-open a closed tab group it will instantly load all of the tabs inside of it, instead of keeping each tab unloaded until visited, like on startup. You also can't add tabs to a closed tab group. So you either always have to keep the tab group open, meaning they're not much more than a visual aid and only slightly more useful than bookmark folders, or store fewer tabs per group, making them even less useful. They also have the same "object permanence" issue as bookmarks, where it's simply too easy to forget about a closed tab group altogether once I close it.

cpill 2y ago
I make a new window for each task in working on keeping the tabs grouped together, and more importantly, make it easy to kill them when the team is done. if I have a group of tabs open for a long time that I'm meaning to read (and I know deep down that I won't but can't admit it to myself) I'll just copy the URLs to a note in Obsidian and lay them to rest.