[DennisP]

A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable.

History search helps a bit but that includes all the tabs I ended up not caring about. If I didn't close the tab myself, then assume I'm modestly interested in it.

[agg23]

If you're a Mac user, Arc Browser does exactly that, at a configurable time interval. I have too many long running projects, so I don't like Arc for precisely that reason (and the vertical tab display doesn't scale well when mobile).

[charlie0]

I've been using it for a while, but it's a free product, so I can't help but wonder what kind of data they are siphoning off me to sell. Of course, Chrome does that as well, but it's a mega company and I trust them from a security perspective more than Arc.

[charlie0]

Searching history almost never works for me.

1. The page titles don't often align with my search terms. 2. Most of the history is clutter of Google searches and other noisy stuff I don't care about (as you've mentioned).

To that end, I've been using readwise or raindrop to great effect. I can save the pages I really care about and then organize them as needed. I don't really believe in the whole "I need 100's of tabs open" model, get some help y'all.

[schiffern]

Sounds like serializing the entire tab state (DOM, JS, form inputs, etc) for instant resume, plus indexing text for instant search.

Imagine being able to resume a complex web-app, complete with input form text and the entire application state. A huge limitation of most browser suspend/resume implementations is that they often cause data loss.

We've all had the experience of letting a tab get too "stale" and suddenly it drops you back to the main page or the (dreaded) empty form. This mistrust becomes a constant mental burden, often forcing you to unnaturally twist your workflow due to fear of getting burned again. Yuck.

[ff2400t]

Firefox on Android have options for those. You can configure when tabs get automatically closed, and tabs get automatically moved to an Inactive section after two weeks of not opening them.

[clouddrover]

> A big improvement for me would be if the browser just archived and closed old tabs after a few days of not getting focus. Then made the archived tabs searchable.

Yeah! It'd be like a way to easily see where you're up to in a book but for the web! They should call this feature "bookmarks".

[mostlylurks]

The usability of bookmarks is far worse than that of tabs. With tabs, I can just middle click in the relevant window and the tab will be in the right place, waiting for me. With bookmarks I have to either spend a lot of effort putting the bookmark into the right folder, or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks. And I'd have to remove the bookmarks once I'm done with them.

And as someone who opens up hundreds of tabs and returns to many of them only several months later, bookmarks serve a different purpose in my workflow than tabs. Tabs are single-use; I close them after I consume the content in the tab and never open them again. Bookmarks are reusable, pages which I may want to return to multiple times.

[clouddrover]

> or just have one big uncategorized list of bookmarks.

What, you mean just like one big uncategorized list of tabs?

[mostlylurks]

No, because my tabs are categorized into windows, each with their own purpose, and even inside those windows, the order of the tabs has some meaning and can be easily controlled, whereas the easy route of adding bookmarks into one big uncategorized list always just adds the bookmark at the end of the list, which is quite inconvenient.

[DennisP]

It's silly to require manual intervention for something so easy to automate. For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs, bookmarks aren't that helpful.

I can't resist quoting the article:

> (If you just said "bookmarks" I would like you to leave. Now.)

[clouddrover]

> For those of us who accumulate hundreds of tabs

How can you "accumulate" hundreds of tabs? Just close them.

[mostlylurks]

As someone that opens up hundreds (or thousands) of tabs regularly, I close each tab after I'm done with that specific tab, and it would make no sense to close it before that. But because I open most of my tabs from pages which contain a lot of links, like search results or link aggregators, and because each of those tabs may in turn generate even more tabs because they contain several relevant links or may raise questions which lead me to throw some more queries at my favorite search engine, it takes quite a bit of time before I take the first peak at most of the resulting tabs, so they end up sticking around until I go through them, one by one.

[charlie0]

What is it exactly that you're looking for that you can't just close that page and go back to Google with better terms to get you to the page you're actually looking for?

I've noticed that when looking through deep documentation, it's often much better to go back to Google and refine the query than it is to go through whatever crap software the doc site is hosted on to find stuff. Not all docs sites are like this, but I encounter crappy doc sites quite often.

[clouddrover]

Okay, so it's through lack of focus.

[DennisP]

I don't want to just close them. I want to save them and have them searchable later, like I said above.

[dspillett]

> They should call this feature "bookmarks".

Keeping a tab open includes history in what is saved, which can be quite significant (if that tab was not opened as a fresh tab so has no history), a simple bookmark does not.

People here are suggesting storing more than that, not less, including the DOM so it's content can be searched later.