[colimbarna]

Yes please! Firefox used to have a fantastic feature where I could crash it, and it would have a tab that contained my previous session within it. It would be there forever, between restarts and restores. I could have a kind of chain of sessions. Sometimes, I would deliberately crash the browser because there were too many, but I still had this bunch of tabs which I wanted to be nearly active. At some point, they deleted the feature - you get one chance to restore your previous session, and after that poof - gone. (I think that decision was pure evil on their part - who goes around and decides to delete a users data? And what's wrong with letting me decide how much of my drive I want to dedicate to storing open tabs? But whatever.)

The experience made me realise that what you describe is exactly what I'm trying to do. I have pages I care about. I want them findable when I get back to it, even if that means three years hence. And there are other pages which I just visited once, like a news article, or which occupied me for three weeks, like documentation for a problem I've now solved. The act of closing a tab is a communication to the web browser. I wish it would listen to it.

I could also do with a searchable, browsable list of open tabs. I was recently searching for a car. Then I bought one. So I need to go back and find all the tabs about cars and close them. I want a fully interactive window like an oldschool history window that lets me find all my open tabs about cars and close them, no matter which window they're in - unless I see that it's my car's user manual or my service schedule, in which case maybe I want to keep it open for the next five years.

On the other hand, when I learnt about % in the searchbox, it was a gamechanger. Finally I could find and reuse the tab that is open, instead of the way by default Firefox prioritises search results over open tabs.

(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign. What's the point? Because their designer couldn't handle the idea of a slightly smaller font each time an order of magnitude is exceeded? Why not let me live with the costs of my actions? Also, an easier way to manage tabs on Firefox mobile. But maybe just better tab management in general.)

[mozarella]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-session-m...

The "Tab Session Manager" add-on probably will address the majority of your gripes with firefox's inbuilt session manager :

  - It backs up your last 10 (can be changed) sessions.
  - You can save specifics sessions for perpetuity. In your example, you can save some or all of the windows under a single session named "Car". You can add/remove tabs/windows from it at any time from within the menu. And it is always there ready to be restored when you need.
  - For the rest of my unorgranised miscellaneous tabs (like random hackernews articles), i send them to OneTab rather than save them in a session.
  - Overall, very friction-less, intuitive UX.

>(The other thing I would like, is something in mobile Firefox that tells me how many tabs I have open. I hate the cute infinity sign.

Two (rather cumbersome) work-arounds : - Save all tabs as collection - will tell you how many tabs you have - The "Clear History" option also tells how many tabs you have currently. (Just don't accidentally click "Delete"!! )

[j45]

It's a great plugin. I just wish a few of my sites didn't have issues with Firefox... most of which can be easily addressed when it doesn't find a browser it's biased for.

[bfdm]

Managing my tabs in Firefox mobile is such a pain in the ass. Couldn't agree more with needing a big improvement here.

Even simple things like putting already open tabs at the bottom of the list when typing in the address bar makes things more painful than it should be. I almost always want the matching open tab, put that first!

[anner_]

You used to be able to instantly go to the last result by pressing the up arrow.

You can still get that behaviour by disabling all but your main search engine in settings. One of the first things I do on any install.

[IggleSniggle]

For anyone still on Chrome, this flow matches the OneTab extension pretty well

[sam_goody]

> For anyone still on Chrome,

As if Chrome is an abandoned project, as if people realize that it is spyware, and that using it gives enormous power to a company that is actively working against the trust of their users...

As if users have stopped using Chrome... what a sweet dream.

[IggleSniggle]

This is a different set of users here. I assume most people on HN realize that it's spyware and a Trojan trust-proxy, and abandon it when feasible for one of the many other trust-proxies. The end game looks the same for every browser one way or the other, the trick is to sidestep the end game. Of course, that also results in Facebook and TikTok, but one can sweet-dream