[ajstiles]

I built the "first tabbed browser", NetCaptor, back in 1997. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/meet-th...

My take - some of us leave tabs open way too long because we fear not being able to get back to those sites again… it’s loss aversion. Tabs aren’t the core problem per se, it’s recall. We need to solve the “I want to get back here again” problem.

I primarily use Brave and effectively start fresh every day. I might get up to 20 open tabs at any given time, and I sometimes use tabs as a sort of Inbox that needs to be cleared. But sometimes, it’s best to declare tab bankruptcy and start over.

[chansiky]

Something I learned with tabbed browsing is that its important to clear the working "memory". One of my most used shortcuts is "close other tabs", and "close tabs to the right". Keeping tabs open should be like allocating to the stack and frequently cleared when the task is done. I might open 5 tabs from one link but when I have what I need I'll move the only the ones I need to the left and close the ones to the right. I find clearing tabs very refreshing - when in doubt: nuke it.

The introduction of tabs was fantastic, and I'm very glad you brought it to us. It bundles windows together, I would rather pick up my firefox bucket and look for a web page there than to look through a dumpster of software windows. But it took me a very long time before I figured out how to not let it get out of hand.

If people are afraid of losing tabs, they just aren't trusting their own memory/curiosity enough. When something is important, your mind tends to remember it, and if it wasn't, then its okay to have lost it. If something was that crucial, you can just Google it again, and if you cant find it on Google you still have your browser history.

[lewisjoe]

I'm working on something that solves this. It's not ready yet, but here's a sneak peak of the landing page: http://closetab.email

[chris_st]

Good point. I've lost track of the number of start-ups that proposed some kind of "Search your browser history" functionality, which, to be honest, I've wished for myself. But I don't know of any that have even made it to released-product stage.

[Reelin]

Does Memex resemble what you were wishing for? (https://github.com/WorldBrain/Memex/)

[chris_st]

Not really -- What I'd like would be something that doesn't require me to annotate, in advance, what I want to find again. I often think, "I know I read something about this a while back!" and then I try to think which website I'd seen it on. The ones I've read about just watch your whole browsing history and let you search that.

I also couldn't get it to work when I tried a while ago (which I imagine they've fixed).

[asdff]

What about something with HTTrack as you browse and grep?

[chris_st]

Yeah, that seems like a step in the right direction -- don't think I want all the images, just the text, but I'd guess that's an option.

Wonder if you could hook that in through a local proxy...

[forgotmypw17]

Thanks for the memories, and the inspiration!

Based on trends I saw in NetCaptor, I wrote an add-on for my favorite browser at the time, Opera, and happily used it for probably years.

I don't have the code nor the binary anymore, but a screenshot still remains: