[doubled112]

I don't like this idea. I can see how others would though.

I have a really hard time getting back into things. Any state a thing remembers is the opposite of helpful.

For example, I don't suspend laptops, I turn them off. It'd be a waste of time closing what I was doing before because I don't remember where I was earlier and it's easier to start over.

Browser tabs are a current state. If I will want to use it multiple times, I use a bookmark. History is for the rare time I think "wait, I swear I read that earlier".

It isn't just computing, I forget where I was in books and games sometimes and start over too. I can't be the only one.

[safety1st]

I feel like I start to lose focus when I have more than a few tabs open. When I see people with dozens of tabs open I get a little panicky. I want to focus on the task at hand and if I want to recall an old site I'll use bookmarks and history for that, not bloat my active session state.

[b112]

Uh. Afraid to say this, but I've had more than 1000 tabs open.

It's useful too. One time I remembered doing something, found the tab. Sure, it was a 6 year old tab, but it was helpful.

[doubled112]

This doesn't sound too much different than my garage, really. Just junk and half finished projects piled up.

That might be useful some day. toss

I get why it'd be useful, and stretching the capabilities like that means that browsers get more and more useful and efficient. It just doesn't work for me, and that's alright. If you can open 1000 tabs, my 10 are no problem!

[philsnow]

I periodically take firefox's recovery.jsonlz4 and pipe it through a bunch of jq to export it as a datestamped bookmarks-$(date ...).org file. Right now I have 15 windows and 5351 tabs. Then I close all but the windows I have actually looked at in the last month.

[b112]

Neat idea. With how lame Google search is, this is handy when looking for something already found.

[throwaway48476]

I once had ~40k tabs.

[cryptonector]

Relationally the only difference between a "tab", "history", and a "bookmark" is a column that tells you what kind it is.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

Kinda but not really.

I expect a tab to stay in memory, at least in virtual memory, and not need to hit the server if it's in the background for a while and then I click on it again, unlike history or bookmarks.

I expect history to not be loaded in memory, it would be a waste of memory.

I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it. "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".

[cryptonector]

All browsers use SQLite3 DBs for this stuff. History is not "loaded into memory" -- it's in the SQLite3 DB, which has a page cache, so some of it might be in memory, but the amount of memory dedicated to the page cache is fixed, so you need not worry about it.

> I expect bookmarks to show up in search. Searching history is different, history has a ton of useless garbage in it.

There is truly no difference except that some URIs are bookmarked (and maybe also in recent history) and some are not. Either way searching these is just a SQL query against the SQLite3 DB. You really need not worry about the efficiency of the search -- it's fast enough. The table(s) that store these things have enough metadata to enable the kinds of searches you might want to do. Among such metadata is "this is a bookmark" and "this is not a bookmark".

> "Bookmark" means "When I type this, show this one URL before all the other ones that seem relevant".

That doesn't preclude treating it not that differently from history. You really need not worry about those details.

Also, a "bookmark" is more than that: it also has a name, it may be in a folder, it may be in the bookmark toolbar, it may have tags to help you search for it, etc.

[aaplok]

If they serve the same purpose, doesn't that open the possibility to use one of them for something else?

I'm also in the group that never keeps more than 10 tabs open, much fewer usually. The idea of having all my bookmarks displayed in a long sequence of tabs sounds horrific to me personally. It would just be an overwhelming amount of information.

I would love it if bookmarks and history were easier to search and retrieve. Having them displayed in a thousand tabs on my screen constantly not so much.

[cryptonector]

They don't have to be displayed in tabs.

[aaplok]

Your response confuses me. The discussion in the thread includes comments about people keeping 1000 tabs, and other people saying that tabs, bookmarks and history are the same thing. I was responding that it doesn't feel very practical for my own usage. Can you explain what you mean in your response?

[cryptonector]

They are all just rows in a SQLite3 DB table. That allows you to search all of them -bookmarks, history, tabs- at once.