[Vinnl]

Heh, reading the title I thought this was going to be someone losing all their tabs because "clear history" on mobile Safari apparently does that: https://twitter.com/SaraSoueidan/status/1457307545815732233

> Oh dear God.. Clearing history on Safari iOS closes all currently-opened tabs?! Why is there nothing that warns you of that?! Why does clearing history on mobile work differently from the way it does on mac? I had 60+ important tabs open and now they're gone!!

> I had so many notes, bookmarks, and links I needed to use in my course + so many pages unrelated to work, all open for later reference. And no I don't have a backup to restore from. What the heck, Apple?!

[m_st]

I was struck by that too. Don't know why or how or with which action, but lost all my opened tabs on my iPhone a few weeks ago.

Luckily it was really just work "in progress", but never the less I've lost information. Which shouldn't happen in 2021.

[Someone]

Tried that. Cannot reproduce (iOS 15.1; iPhone and iPad).

I have seen iOS on iPad suddenly start with a set of tabs from some time ago, though, and that can look identical to “losing all tabs”. Can’t repro that either, but it seems to happen after one runs multiple Safari’s side by side and then went back to full-screen (if you do that, multiple Safari’s show up in the Task Switcher)

Either way I think this is a bug, not by design.

[joconde]

When I clear history from the Settings app, it closes all tabs (at least it did when I tried a few months ago). When I clear from Safari itself, it doesn't close tabs. Maybe you did the latter?

[chrisseaton]

> I had 60+ important tabs open and now they're gone!!

This just doesn't seem a reasonable expectation that these are preserved - they would also be lost if the computer crashed wouldn't they?

If it's important then save it.

[berkes]

> they would also be lost if the computer crashed wouldn't they?

In 2000, maybe, yes. But nowadays all browsers write important parts of their state to disk and will recover that on crash. If you do a `sudo reboot now` in a terminal, you'll find firefox opens all tabs when rebooting.

A lot of the content in those pages will be gone; e.g. sessions, SPA/JS-in-memory-state or this comment in a textbox before submitting. But the tabs, their URLs and even the placement of tabs is restored.

[hvis]

Browsers these days routinely persist the contents of the current session to disk, exactly to defend against a crash (computer or the application itself).

Of course, bugs and disk corruption happen, but you need more than a computer crash to lose all your tabs.

[ksec]

>Of course, bugs and disk corruption happen

And Firefox has multiple backup of sessions to the point even if your previous session was corrupted you can still recover a session saved slightly earlier. This was partly done because there are people ( like me ) who have hundreds if not thousands of Tabs opened and they ( me ) complain a lot about it.

Chrome made something similar and put in protection that may corrupt the ex-session files. To the point for nearly a decade browsers have had bullet proof session restore. ( Apart from Safari which still happens from time to time )

[hvis]

> And Firefox has multiple backup of sessions to the point even if your previous session was corrupted you can still recover a session saved slightly earlier.

Yup. You might have to root around in the profile's directory, though, which not every user knows how to do.

But it being a possibility is absolutely great.

> This was partly done because there are people ( like me ) who have hundreds if not thousands of Tabs opened and they ( me ) complain a lot about it.

Same.

[sorokod]

Firefox has "Open previous windows and tabs" as a startup option. Is that something that Safari doesn't do?

[cyberbanjo]

Interesting, on both my phone and computer tabs stay until I close them? Sometimes they need to manually be "recovered" if crash.

[tinus_hn]

They do persist. To the point of people forgetting that they are ephemeral.

[tediousdemise]

It boggles my mind that people use tabs like bookmarks. Not only does this usually destroy your available RAM, but its just not the right tool for the job. You are using a hammer like a screwdriver.

To each their own, I guess. Just don't get mad when your browser crashes from overloading with tabs, or when you clear your history and it triggers the expected behavior of closing them. It would be a huge privacy concern if your open tabs didn't close when you clear the browser history.

[PeterisP]

I fully disagree. IMHO other open tabs are part of the current app state (not its history) just as the currently active tab. Do you expect clearing history to close the window you are currently looking at? None of the multiple browsers I use would close any open tabs when you clear browser history, at least on computers - mobile UX might be different, though, but I don't use mobile browsing much perhaps this is a source of differing expectations?

Regarding crashes, I fully expect that a browser which crashes or gets forcibly closed (e.g. the computer losing power) will restore all the open tabs afterwards, and modern browsers do succeed in doing that, if they did not, I would consider that as a bug to be fixed.

[tediousdemise]

Leaving a million tabs open is analogous leaving all your silverware on your countertop instead of putting it in a drawer where it belongs. Regardless of how convenient it is, it's chaotic and incorrect user behavior. People need to take accountability for not using internet browsers correctly. Learn from your mistakes. PEBKAC.

This actually gave me an idea: a web browser with a feature that automatically saves open tabs into a "tab list," which functions the same way as bookmarks. Oh wait, that's the browsing history.

[PeterisP]

If I have two tabs open, click "erase history" and one of these two tabs gets discarded, I have "used browsers correctly" (unless using the browser-provided tab functionality is always wrong) and still lost current application state. In such a situation there is no mistake to learn from, just broken user expectations (since no other browser does it that way) i.e. broken UX.

Also, I must point out that your choice of words with respect to users who have different habits than you - "PEBKAC", "need to take accountability for not using browsers correctly" is condescending, arrogant and simply rude - please do not do that. Not respecting users' choices and behavior is not an appropriate way to design user interfaces and is not an appropriate position from which to argue how user interfaces should be implemented. If browsers provide functionality for more than one tab, then browsers must work properly for more than one tab. In this case, the expected functionality for n=2 is the same as for n=1000, so the number of open tabs is not particularly relevant.

[Tsiklon]

On mobile, iOS will aggressively swap out webpages that haven’t been looked at in a while, though it still maintains the presence of the tab in the window. Navigate back to a paged out tab and it will force a page reload.

The swapping behaviour seems to be good at stopping leaky sites from ruining your browsing experience.

Personally I am also guilty of using tabs like bookmarks. Especially on mobile. Though I do think that if the aggressive swapping wasn’t done, this behaviour wouldn’t be so prevalent.

[ebiester]

This is a user experience problem. It is easy to close a tab. It is hard to delete a bookmark, and easy to end up with a giant list of things you will never care about again.

50 tabs open is an indication that there is a stage between "I am actively reading" and "I care about this enough to make a permanent record."

[palerdot]

> This is a user experience problem. It is easy to close a tab. It is hard to delete a bookmark, and easy to end up with a giant list of things you will never care about again.

Precisely. Personally, I created a browser extension[0] for myself where I just save the webpage and set a reminder to read, and then just close the tab. This way, I just close the tab immediately, and then I would be able to revisit the page later via reminders. This kind of works fine for me.

[0] - https://palerdot.in/remindoro/

[tediousdemise]

Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. There should be some sort of middle ground, which I suspect is what tab groups try to solve.

My use case for tabs is quick ingestion of information that I tend to look at immediately, in rapid succession. Say, a Google search for something, and I open the top ten links to ingest the info.

I do not use bookmarks or keep tabs open. I do not save browser history either. Everything important to me, for the past or future, is in my head. If I want to bookmark something, I'll make a shortcut instead. Hacker News is a good example of a shortcut I'll make on my homescreen.

Overall, I think it's important to exercise our memory or we risk losing it. Having a cognitive load is important to our aging brains, and I feel that things like bookmarks and open tabs reduce our cognitive load too much. There are also privacy merits to not retaining bookmarks, tabs, or browser history. My ideal web browser is completely stateless.

[Vinnl]

> when you clear your history and it triggers the expected behavior of closing them

As the tweeter mentions, no other browser has that behaviour, nor does Safari on MacOS, nor did older versions. A sibling comment also reported not being able to reproduce it, so it sounds like a bug - in any case, definitely not expected behaviour.