I keep a few tabs open, and close the browser regularly.
A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.
However as time has gone on, I've been surprised to find I may have the rare behavior and it is common for people to work this way.
So.. maybe this is a way he can backup his "filesystem" and not suffer a nervous breakdown when his machine reboots or some othe browser failure where he loses his world.
I am like your friend... basically tabs are a "working memory" that you don't want to store permanently in bookmarks. each window or sets of windows is typically a different topic that is being research on with a bunch of middle clicks to open tabs. I have so many open that I wrote a small webext for it that shows a page of all your tabs that you can click on to navigate to that tab with a click. just a nicer interface to see all the windows open and all the tabs. https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist
I hope you find it useful :) if you have any suggestions let me know. i have been working on a small upgrade to it where the tabs can be closed with a middle click and reordered in the windows but i don't work on it very often as it's quite useful as it stands for my needs
edit cmd-shift-e/ctrl-shift-e will open up the extension which I guess I should update on the homepage.
Hey cool, thanks, I've installed it now too - it'll be quite useful!
I'd love if you could have a link on the Tabist page that shows a popup allowing for copy/pasting of a text box to show list of titles/URL or just URLs for either easy sharing of a grouping of tabs or so I could do an occasional backup of URLs? Not sure if this person's code is useful for that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605222 ?
Maybe a global link for all windows and one per window?
Edit to add: I have a dream of someday contributing financially to a bunch of open source organizational tools that I'd like to see/would use and depend on heavily, let me know if interested in hearing more - can email me matt@engn.com if curious.
Awesome! I'm not sure if the version on the store has the tab backup feature enabled or not but there is a backup feature that is under the options area. It just dumps a json file with all your tabs and a restore feature where it opens up all those tabs again but that is really slow if you have a lot of tabs.
Interesting idea on the popup; I'll give that some thought.
Cool, thanks. Another use case other than backup I was thinking is if just wanting to share a window of tabs (so all relating to a project) by copy/pasting it to someone in a message/email; I guess on flip side too, if person receiving the links also had Tabist then could have another popup to "open links" (maybe there's a way to do that in Chrome easily but I'm not aware); could eventually create a centralized service that just pushes the links to them and perhaps auto-opens them - obvious potential security issues there but arguably person you're receiving links from would be trusted by you.
> A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.
For those in the comments who are like myself (and parent's friend) and have hundreds or even thousands of tabs open, I highly recommend the Panorama Tab Groups extension for Firefox:
This extension adds back in the functionality that was removed from Firefox half a decade ago. It gives you a visual, 2D-map of arbitrary groups of tabs in a tile layout you can view with "Ctrl-Shift-F". Combined with the backup feature (just in case it crashes or gets corrupted, although this has yet to happen to me) and Firefox's built-in tab session saving option, so long as you have enough memory (I bought 40 gigs of RAM for this laptop after terrible memories of running Firefox on a Chromebook with 4GB of soldered RAM), you can basically browse as though you'll never have to close a tab again, AND also be able to stay organized.
Is having several tabs open in a browser rare? My social circle - which comprises mostly software engineers, admittedly - sees browsers with 30+ tabs open as normal.
A friend of mine keeps basically infinity tabs open. I sort of rolled my eyes, but accepted his rare behavior.
However as time has gone on, I've been surprised to find I may have the rare behavior and it is common for people to work this way.
So.. maybe this is a way he can backup his "filesystem" and not suffer a nervous breakdown when his machine reboots or some othe browser failure where he loses his world.