[cosmic_cheese]

Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades, with the most radical change having been Arc's decision to cut out bookmarks altogether (which I don't think is right either). Bookmark management sucks and is too high friction for my brain to willingly engage in it.

Third party managers don't hit the spot either. They all spread out over too large of a surface area, trying to do read it later or moodboards or canvases and whatever else, without offering much in the way of material improvements over built in bookmarks (aside from being cross-browser).

[ksec]

I wouldn't say directly, but it is certainly part of it.

The problem is context. I think Tab Groups partly helped. But the implementation of tab group is still not good enough as it is. A lot of tabs aren't bookmark but unfinished work or research. I currently have Groups for Housing Market because of Rent increase, Jobs Search, Product Research, Marketing Courses, Surgery Research for Lasik, Youtube and a few others personal stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if it add up to 500 tabs.

Again, I will take this opportunity to say again, Multi / Lots of Tabs on Safari sucks.

[snailmailman]

It’s also very frequently easier to just open a new tab, compared to finding the already existing one.

I never really need more than one YouTube tab. I can’t watch more than one video at once, and if I want to watch something later, I use YouTube’s own “watch later”. But in my 300+ tabs there’s likely several copies of my subscription box. Because rather than scroll through the tabs I can just press ctrl+t and type YouTube in. This not only happens with YouTube, but with every bookmarked page I have, from the HN front page to the site I use to check the weather.

[cosmic_cheese]

What I find works better than tabs for things like YouTube is “installed” PWAs. In my case under macOS, I use Safari to do this (File > Add to Dock…), which spins out an independent single site browser process that has a dock icon, presence in OS window management functions, etc as well as both windows and tabs. This way I can keep a few YouTube videos open without them getting lost in the shuffle of browser windows and tabs. These windows stay open even if I close my main browser too which is also nice.

[pcthrowaway]

In Chrome, you can use cmd+shift+a or ctrl+shift+a to do fuzzy search in all your tabs (I believe this uses the URL and the page title)

[recursivecaveat]

For anyone else using firefox: Alt+D to select address bar (or F6 or Ctrl/Cmd+L), then start your search with '%' to search your tabs.

[dredmorbius]

How long has this existed?

It didn't exist (or was undiscoverable) when I was last using Chrome / Chromium, though that was ~6+ years ago.

[pcthrowaway]

~2-3 years I believe

[dredmorbius]

Thanks!

[ulbu]

tabs is just not the correct abstraction for focused work.

[random3]

To clarify - is Internet, the browser (to which tabs are implicit) not the “correct” abstraction either? What are you trying to say?

[kazinator]

Some content just can't be bookmarked. The only way to keep the state is to keep the tab open and the browser running. If you reload the same URL, you get something else.

So the web is too broken for bookmarks to replace all uses of tabs.

[miladyincontrol]

Self hosted karakeep has been the only thing that got me out of tab hoarding.

Bookmarks, locally archives the page, OCRs text off images, auto tags using and summarizes it using whatever AI model I want, in my case one off a local ollama instance. ios? just a share away to have any link processed.

Now I just stash and move on, when I need to find things again it's never been easier.

[zerd]

I was about to do exactly what OP did and create a chrome extension when I found karakeep which saved me from doing that. I really like the full archive because sites disappear all the time, and screenshots for a visual overview. Used to use pinboard but didn't like that archive feature was a subscription. It also works with SingleFile to archive logged-in sites.

[miladyincontrol]

Good catch on mentioning singlefile, I use it but I dont think about it much since it's such a background 'thing'. Havent really dug into it's usage beyond feeding pages over but seems like its got a ton of use cases.

[kown7]

What solved some of my problems was a Firefox plugin called MarkDownload. Instead of saving a bookmark, just download the thing (as a text file) which makes it easier to find by search (or just grep -R).

[apercu]

> Aligning with the linked post, I've found that tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers

It's also related to the fact that since ~2010, the quality/efficacy of "search" has gone downhill and you'll never find anything again.

[cosmic_cheese]

Efficacy plays a role in this effect, but so does unintuitive connections between search terms and results. "Google-fu" used to be a somewhat solid "science" but now small query differences can yield unpredictable effects on results, and the likelihood of remembering the exact query that yielded the desired result is low.

[chankstein38]

Tangent, I was searching for 3mm spherical magnets last night and literally every retailer's search is total garbage and delivered any kind of magnet you can imagine while occasionally sprinkling in things that were vaguely related to "3mm spherical magnets"

I don't understand how it's useful to anyone, even the companies. I just leave without buying things so why would their searches not just search for the specific thing that I ask for?

[apercu]

I haven't ever figured out why search is so hard for so many websites, including some that I've worked on. Even using third parties (like Keyoti) I've had trouble. In one case I solved a lot of issues with Elastic, but it's sort of overkill for 90% of website use cases.

[IAmBroom]

"I see you're searching for 19th-century mayors of New York City. Here's some 4k UHD TV's for sale! (Promoted)"

[Tanoc]

Part of the reason why I kept tabs open in the tens of thousands (mainly images that were sourced from single tabs) was because bookmarks absolutely suck at actually organizing based on priority of access. In Firefox for example there's no way to create new bookmark containers, there's just folders and then there's the "Other Bookmarks" container. Since Other Bookmarks has a different structure than a folder, you're likely to just start throwing things into Other Bookmarks, which clutters it. Being able to sort by type, root URL, alphabetical order, and date saved would be so great.

The other issue is cache. If my internet goes out, for a lot of things I can just still re-open Firefox and there's a cached version of whatever tabs I had open that weren't put to sleep that I can look through. It's great when there's spotty cell coverage when using a hotspot, or when using a laptop in something like a highway or train tunnel. Bookmarks don't store a cached version of the page, it's just a link. This means if I close Firefox to clear up some RAM or save some battery life and then open it back up, if I didn't have those tabs open I'd have to have an active internet connection to view the page contents again.

[em-bee]

it used to be that even an unloaded tab would load a cached version. they removed that feature. i loved it. i wish each tab would save at least one cached version not only in case the internet goes out, but also in case the page changes. it does matter for reading hackernews for example, because it helps me keep track of what i have not read yet.

[wink]

I kind of disagree (personally, not out of principle).

The first time I've written my own bookmark manager was like 25y ago, before del.icio.us - which I used, then I got on pinboard, lately I've been self-hosting linkding.

I totally use those solutions daily, and I still have a couple bookmarks in some browsers (but mostly on the bars for frequent access).

The thing is, that 90% of my open tabs are either "I kinda want to consume this soon" or more often it's a working copy of research etc.

ANY form of bookmarking (and thus closing the tab) would destroy part of it's usefulness of being just one click away (also visible and on my mind). Of course that's not true for all of them.

So maybe I kinda agree with one of your possible observations, just not with your conclusion. Maybe if I could instantly find what I wanted in my bookmarking service, then I wouldn't need to look for it (just minutes or hours later) in my tab bar. On the other hand I'd need several hard-separated categories there, or a different bookmarking tool for work.

The middle ground is missing (on several axis):

  - daily & semi-important -> bookmarks bar
  - long-term & maybe important & !daily -> bookmark manager
  - "need to read this" -> tab

[em-bee]

daily, regardless of how important, works better as a tab. could even be a pinned tab.

"long-term & !daily" is the only thing that could be a bookmark. the problem then is categorization. tagging helps. but before i bookmark something i open it as a tab to look at it, which makes bookmarking a extra step over "i want to keep this, so i'll just not close the tab". somewhere the impulse from "i want to keep this" to "bookmark this" is missing.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

Absolutely don't agree. I'm a tab hoarder (currently have 2084 tabs). I don't use builtin browser facilities, but instead use sideberry. I've tried a lot of other tab mgmt approaches too. Some were excellent, some were far from it.

The one thing they all have in common: they cannot stop me from being tab hoarder. That behavior (in my case, and I suspect I am not alone) is not impacted by tab/bookmark mgmt approaches, at least not by anything I've seen.

[cosmic_cheese]

I tried Sidebery for a while among other vertical tab extensions and found them all too flaky and tacked-on-feeling for my taste. Needing to edit userCSS to hide the redundant tab bar kind of sucked too. Now I don't use vertical tabs unless the browser has them built in as a first-class feature.

[yencabulator]

For what it's worth, Firefox now has vertical tabs as a first-class feature. (FF does groups but not trees, if you were a Sidebery power user.)

[imiric]

> Third party managers don't hit the spot either.

I've been happy with Pinboard for many years now, which does just the bare essentials. There are integrations for most browsers, though I prefer using it externally via a small CLI client. This allows me to keep a local backup of my bookmarks in JSON, to filter them with fzf/rofi, and to use it with any browser. After all, I just need to quickly find a URL, and copy/paste it in the browser.

The service has had some issues over the years, leading to growing concerns over its stability and longevity. It hasn't affected me much personally, but I've wanted to replace it with a fully self-hosted solution for a long time now. With projects like ArchiveBox, linkding, etc., this is quite feasible, though I've been lazy with making the jump. My Pinboard renewal is coming up, and I think it might be time.

[zargon]

I ditched Pinboard a few years ago because I had a lot of difficulty getting my data out and there is no support. Marciej (idlewords) snarkily brags about not answering email (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23789426).

[imiric]

Yeah, I've read similar complaints, but I haven't had any issues.

The only data I need—my bookmarks and tags—are already backed up in a JSON file. You can get this via the API. It would be good to have the crawled archives as well, but I don't really need it. A large number of my bookmarks are probably dead anyway, and could use pruning, so an archive of these is not that valuable.

[sfRattan]

> ...tab hoarding is directly connected to exceedingly poor bookmark UX/UI in browsers. Despite being a core browser feature, it's barely improved in decades...

I'm often a visual person, similar to what the twitter longpost also describes---I miss Apple's spatial file manager and made heavy use of the drag-and-drop grid on the Windows 10 Start menu to pin apps in logical groups---but I don't really have any problems with bookmarks as they exist now in Firefox. I have as many bookmarks as some tab hoarders have tabs (last count around 2,000), and I drag them into a well-ordered hierarchy with the Firefox Bookmarks Sidebar (Ctrl+B to toggle show/hide).

A hierarchy in a vertical sidebar has always seemed... Plenty visual, I guess? Do folks who have hundreds or thousands of tabs open also have as many files in their Desktop and Download folders and just search there too? What upgrades to bookmarks would make them significantly better than they are now?

Hierarchy-as-directory is a good conceptual abstraction, and it has useful, well-established visual representations. I get ornery when software tries to conceal a useful hierarchy from the end-user (most often... the file system itself, as in the iPhone).

I'll note that Firefox's "keyword" option for bookmarks is a killer feature for me: assign a keyword to a bookmark (e.g. "hn" for news.ycombinator.com or "yt" for www.youtube.com) and you can type those letters into the URL bar and instantly load the bookmark. It's kept me on Firefox for years, even though I'd prefer some of the security features and better process isolation of Chromium/Blink. I have a row common bookmarks in the Bookmarks Toolbar with favicons and names matched to their keywords and I've never needed or wanted a landing page with favorite sites.

Bookmarks do seem worse to me in other browsers without keywords. Oddly, if I import my Firefox bookmarks into other browsers the keywords I made in Firefox still work, but I can't edit them or add new keywords in those other browsers. Maddening.

[cosmic_cheese]

For me, what works for filesystems does not work for bookmarks. I'd have to give some thought about why that's the case.

[dkarl]

I was very happy with Pocket. After Mozilla discontinued it, I switched to Instapaper, which I barely use, for reasons I don't fully understand. All I know is that the Instapaper home screen feels unhelpful and off-putting to me.

[BrenBarn]

I agree this is a factor. The friction of bookmarking pages in a way that would actually reduce the effort of finding the page later is too high.

[terribleperson]

Firefox has bookmark tags, except they're not accessible on mobile.

Browser devs do not seem interested in improving the state of bookmarks.

[sixtyj]

Yes, I agree, there is one exception.

Onetab add-on in FF works fine. After every work you just “onetab” all tabs. It is flat structure, so I usually store similar tabs into one box.

There are 2 features: restore all tabs into browser. And fulltext search is easier.

I was a tab hoarder too. I am cured now as Onetab helped me a lot. (No affil. here.)