This isn’t as useless as it seems. It is a visual representation of how old the tab is. And I control what “old” is.
To put it another way, it helps me recognize which tabs I am using. And which I am saving for later without having to evaluate the content of the tab.
One tweak… the coverage percentage can it be adjustable? Max = 100% looses all information about the pages contents, except the title.
Also also… if the images can be made translucent… you can make old timey effects like yellowing and decay.
It also creates a human feedback loop. It will train you to instinctively not keep old tabs open as you need to deal with the plants.
It would cause more tabs to be open.
You can't use the old tab because all the plants. You open a new tab for the same page. Don't need to close any old tab for that.
Pro talking here…
Seems like we're recognizing something that people actually want: The assurance that their state will be preserved
versus what the operating system or browser can provide.
In fact, weren't bookmarks supposed to solve EXACTLY this? You'd just bookmark a website on any page then come back to it any time in the future.
But then websites wanted to be apps and stopped storing state in the URL...
It's not about the state of the actual page since that can go away as soon as the browser restarts or even when memory gets low.
But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.
Have session storage extensions ever caught up to where they were before firefox dumped XUL?
> But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.
Oh yeah, you're right. I do sometimes need the Back button to retain its history, and sometimes duplicate tabs to start a new "breadcrumb" path.
Why would you not want to keep them open?
If you have tabs sitting there unused for days, isn't that just a bookmark?
Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable. Firefox mobile doesn't even allow you to tag new bookmarks.
Been years since I used tags in bookmarks, but on FF mobile I do often miss qutebrowser's quickmarks. I have a lot of stuff like "malw" to get to my MAL Watching list on my PC. My compromise on mobile is to use the bookmark titles kinda like a search or a description with keyboard stuffing, so maybe the default name of the bookmark is something generic like "MyAnimeList.net", I'll put "malw - " at the start of it, then next time I hit new tab and type malw out of habit it should come up. Not as good or reliable as a quickmark, but you could probably do something similar for a tag replacement. Bookmark some blog post about the Amiga, edit the title, throw in "retrocomputing diy technology blogpost hacking" or similar on either end, then when you type in "retrocomputing" later it should show up along your other stuff with that in the title. Might be more primitive but should do the trick.
> Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable.
Okay, okay, but what if! https://files.catbox.moe/4m6c5x.png
Or a history item!
People forget about browser history. It’s super useful.
My technique: I open tabs just like anyone else, and when I feel like “that’s too many tabs”, I just close them all. Every one of them.
If I need them again? Open up the browser history. It’s searchable. It has everything. Use it!
At work I’m basically required to use Chrome and Chrome does not keep browser history beyond 90 days. That is useless. An open tab can easily last more than 90 days and survive restarts.
You might like Tab Session Manager, which also lets you tag and search your saved window/tab sessions and annotates them with a date.
https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/
> It’s searchable.
not very well, except you add a lot keywords to website title manually via bookmaeks
Browser history is nothing but self incriminating evidence. Why would you keep it around?
Why? I don't really have anything that dangerous, illegal, or weird open... And the browser history on my local machine is at most exposed to me and my fiancé, who I don't really care to hide it away from.
You do you, I'll do me. I know I'm not the only one, otherwise, the option wouldn't even be available as a preference. Just because you can't think of a reason someone might want to use that option does not mean everyone else is the same level of unimaginative.
As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.
Damn, that’s a very defensive take for someone who started by asking why anyone would behave differently to them.
> As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.
No obligation to share, certainly.
Curiosity is there in part because we may learn a valuable lesson - something those “with nothing to hide” [I know] might not’ve considered. (not a request, we can learn from others)
If authorities already have the means to access your browser history then deleting it won't accomplish anything. They can just install malware and see what you're browsing anyway.
In a remote hack or an evil maid attack, sure. If you get targeted for something, and your computer is confiscated and searched, the less ammunition stored there the better. With a large enough dataset (emails, web history, etc.) it’s pretty easy to cherry pick data points to build a narrative.
I don’t bother with this level of defensiveness but I can follow the reasoning.
Are you against journaling for self-reflection?
I don't keep a diary if that's what you're asking, but it doesn't mean that I can't look back on things to help make decisions for future growth.
Not really sure how any of that has anything to do with leaving a browser history
Perhaps curious if the thinking extends to:
“[Any/most documentation of activity and behavior] is nothing but self incriminating evidence.”
We've all see the stories about people being forced to grant access at border crossings. This is a specific type of information they would love to see. Being in the habit of not storing it means you don't have to forget to do it at the random time you need to have it deleted. So when you do a full shut down before going through the airport, which you obviously do, your browser has already cleaned up for you.
I don't care if I think I've done nothing wrong. The jackbooted thugs at the border might have a different say so, and now you're screwed because you felt like your history was necessary. I trust no one, and I'm not even a freedom fighter.
Some times it really is paranoia.
Sometimes you want to go to a website a second time.
I do it all the time
I use tabs as ephemeral bookmarks, yeah
Maybe there’s a better way
I had the same habit, so I built an extension for it: tabs you haven't touched in a while get auto-archived after a certain period of time, and you can search the archive later.
There's a free tier, and a paid plan for heavier use. You can try it out here: https://tabsprompt.com
Resource conservation ( memory ), attention conservation ( focus, change for additional distractions ) come to mind.
I'm working on tab garbage collection too!
https://github.com/echelon/browser-focus
I need to add screenshots.
Basically puts an overlay on all timed out tabs, shows all timed out tabs so you can kill them all together, etc.
I want a better algorithm / heuristic that can semantically track what I'm doing.
I might eventually be brave enough to break out of tabs and let my windowing system handle everything.
It discourages and frustrates. So yes, it is useless in terms of modern browsing.