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Posted by speckx 3 days ago

Overgrown, when plants invade your abandoned tabs(charliegerard.dev)
250 points | 80 comments
drfloyd51 9 hours ago|
This isn’t as useless as it seems. It is a visual representation of how old the tab is. And I control what “old” is.

To put it another way, it helps me recognize which tabs I am using. And which I am saving for later without having to evaluate the content of the tab.

One tweak… the coverage percentage can it be adjustable? Max = 100% looses all information about the pages contents, except the title.

Also also… if the images can be made translucent… you can make old timey effects like yellowing and decay.

paid_dot_expert 9 hours ago||
It also creates a human feedback loop. It will train you to instinctively not keep old tabs open as you need to deal with the plants.
j16sdiz 3 hours ago|||
It would cause more tabs to be open.

You can't use the old tab because all the plants. You open a new tab for the same page. Don't need to close any old tab for that.

baxtr 2 hours ago|||
Pro talking here…
Razengan 2 hours ago|||
Seems like we're recognizing something that people actually want: The assurance that their state will be preserved

versus what the operating system or browser can provide.

In fact, weren't bookmarks supposed to solve EXACTLY this? You'd just bookmark a website on any page then come back to it any time in the future.

But then websites wanted to be apps and stopped storing state in the URL...

Dylan16807 1 hour ago||
It's not about the state of the actual page since that can go away as soon as the browser restarts or even when memory gets low.

But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.

Have session storage extensions ever caught up to where they were before firefox dumped XUL?

Razengan 57 minutes ago||
> But tabs store history, and that's important pretty often to me. And I can dig through multiple tabs and their histories together.

Oh yeah, you're right. I do sometimes need the Back button to retain its history, and sometimes duplicate tabs to start a new "breadcrumb" path.

johnea 9 hours ago|||
Why would you not want to keep them open?
zetanor 8 hours ago|||
If you have tabs sitting there unused for days, isn't that just a bookmark?
terribleperson 8 hours ago|||
Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable. Firefox mobile doesn't even allow you to tag new bookmarks.
notpushkin 1 hour ago|||
> Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable.

Okay, okay, but what if! https://files.catbox.moe/4m6c5x.png

opan 4 hours ago|||
Been years since I used tags in bookmarks, but on FF mobile I do often miss qutebrowser's quickmarks. I have a lot of stuff like "malw" to get to my MAL Watching list on my PC. My compromise on mobile is to use the bookmark titles kinda like a search or a description with keyboard stuffing, so maybe the default name of the bookmark is something generic like "MyAnimeList.net", I'll put "malw - " at the start of it, then next time I hit new tab and type malw out of habit it should come up. Not as good or reliable as a quickmark, but you could probably do something similar for a tag replacement. Bookmark some blog post about the Amiga, edit the title, throw in "retrocomputing diy technology blogpost hacking" or similar on either end, then when you type in "retrocomputing" later it should show up along your other stuff with that in the title. Might be more primitive but should do the trick.
ninkendo 8 hours ago||||
Or a history item!

People forget about browser history. It’s super useful.

My technique: I open tabs just like anyone else, and when I feel like “that’s too many tabs”, I just close them all. Every one of them.

If I need them again? Open up the browser history. It’s searchable. It has everything. Use it!

kccqzy 8 hours ago|||
At work I’m basically required to use Chrome and Chrome does not keep browser history beyond 90 days. That is useless. An open tab can easily last more than 90 days and survive restarts.
nor-and-or-not 3 hours ago||||
You might like Tab Session Manager, which also lets you tag and search your saved window/tab sessions and annotates them with a date.

https://tab-session-manager.sienori.com/

tcfhgj 7 hours ago||||
> It’s searchable.

not very well, except you add a lot keywords to website title manually via bookmaeks

dylan604 7 hours ago|||
Browser history is nothing but self incriminating evidence. Why would you keep it around?
Melonai 5 hours ago|||
Why? I don't really have anything that dangerous, illegal, or weird open... And the browser history on my local machine is at most exposed to me and my fiancé, who I don't really care to hide it away from.
dylan604 5 hours ago||
You do you, I'll do me. I know I'm not the only one, otherwise, the option wouldn't even be available as a preference. Just because you can't think of a reason someone might want to use that option does not mean everyone else is the same level of unimaginative.

As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.

lazyasciiart 4 hours ago|||
Damn, that’s a very defensive take for someone who started by asking why anyone would behave differently to them.
Barbing 4 hours ago|||
> As for specifics of why, that's something I've chosen to do and that's all that matters.

No obligation to share, certainly.

Curiosity is there in part because we may learn a valuable lesson - something those “with nothing to hide” [I know] might not’ve considered. (not a request, we can learn from others)

done_lurking 4 hours ago||||
If authorities already have the means to access your browser history then deleting it won't accomplish anything. They can just install malware and see what you're browsing anyway.
taneq 2 hours ago||
In a remote hack or an evil maid attack, sure. If you get targeted for something, and your computer is confiscated and searched, the less ammunition stored there the better. With a large enough dataset (emails, web history, etc.) it’s pretty easy to cherry pick data points to build a narrative.

I don’t bother with this level of defensiveness but I can follow the reasoning.

skinfaxi 5 hours ago||||
Are you against journaling for self-reflection?
dylan604 5 hours ago||
I don't keep a diary if that's what you're asking, but it doesn't mean that I can't look back on things to help make decisions for future growth.

Not really sure how any of that has anything to do with leaving a browser history

Barbing 4 hours ago||
Perhaps curious if the thinking extends to:

“[Any/most documentation of activity and behavior] is nothing but self incriminating evidence.”

dylan604 4 hours ago||
We've all see the stories about people being forced to grant access at border crossings. This is a specific type of information they would love to see. Being in the habit of not storing it means you don't have to forget to do it at the random time you need to have it deleted. So when you do a full shut down before going through the airport, which you obviously do, your browser has already cleaned up for you.

I don't care if I think I've done nothing wrong. The jackbooted thugs at the border might have a different say so, and now you're screwed because you felt like your history was necessary. I trust no one, and I'm not even a freedom fighter.

NetMageSCW 3 hours ago||
Some times it really is paranoia.
fwip 5 hours ago|||
Sometimes you want to go to a website a second time.
dylan604 5 hours ago||
I do it all the time
girvo 8 hours ago|||
I use tabs as ephemeral bookmarks, yeah

Maybe there’s a better way

iugtmkbdfil834 9 hours ago|||
Resource conservation ( memory ), attention conservation ( focus, change for additional distractions ) come to mind.
echelon 7 hours ago|||
I'm working on tab garbage collection too!

https://github.com/echelon/browser-focus

I need to add screenshots.

Basically puts an overlay on all timed out tabs, shows all timed out tabs so you can kill them all together, etc.

I want a better algorithm / heuristic that can semantically track what I'm doing.

I might eventually be brave enough to break out of tabs and let my windowing system handle everything.

cactusplant7374 7 hours ago||
It discourages and frustrates. So yes, it is useless in terms of modern browsing.
jdprgm 3 hours ago||
I don't think any browsers are really designed for the range of how many tabs people keep open.

I also wonder what the distribution does really look like. Just on my primary profile here I felt like I was making progress trying to get it to under 2000 tabs recently.

It feels like a hopeless battle though. Across multiple machines and browsers and browser profiles i'd reckon i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs.

CodesInChaos 53 minutes ago||
Get the "One Tab" extension. It closes all tabs, but saves a list, so it gets over the psychological hurdle of losing the open tabs.
ralnivar 3 hours ago|||
Might be just me but I just close everything at the end of day to start a clean slate for next day (usually around 50). I also just use bookmarks for persistent autocomplete.
SubNoize 2 hours ago||
I think your approach is the general normal one.
cvs268 2 hours ago|||
> i'm stuck at like 12,000 open tabs

Would you mind giving this a shot and sharing your feedback? https://github.com/TheCodeArtist/firefox-tabs-review

Helps wade through the backlog of tabs to "burndown" one by one or en-masse?

K0balt 3 hours ago|||
This is bizarre to me. I close Out my browser completely several times a day lol.
darknavi 2 hours ago||
My wife refuses to use bookmarks and instead uses open tabs. It drives me nuts.
spencer-p 3 hours ago|||
Do you actually come back to a tab 2,000 tabs later?

Lately I've tried using an extension to close any tabs I haven't opened for a few days. I haven't missed them, and if I actually want to come back to something, I make a todo now.

jdprgm 2 hours ago||
I do come back to a non-trivial amount.

The main issue is overcoming i opened a tab for reason and i want to close a tab for a reason, but tabs usually lead to more tabs so even trying to stay on top of it, it just endlessly grows.

Youtube alone is a major culprit and i'm confused on how everyone doesn't have at least several hundred videos they started watching or opened in a tab out of possible future interest.

Jach 2 hours ago||
For youtube, sticking it on 'watch later' is one approach, or some other playlist. Even better, that way you can cronjob a script to save them locally. I'll leave youtube tabs for too long (despite this) and too often I've eventually returned and it's been removed. My other tab-shrinking habits are bookmark folders in the form "year-unread" and a local txt file where I loosely dump related URLs into pseudo-categories/sections.
moffkalast 12 minutes ago|||
Tabs Georg who has 12k tabs open is an outlier and should not have been counted.
SubNoize 2 hours ago||
This feels like a hoarders mentality. You don't have to answer this but do you hoard in any other aspects of life? There's nothing more therapeutic than closing tabs. Worst case, everything is in history and can be opened again.
jdprgm 1 hour ago||
No I don't think I do. I associate "hoarders" with reality tv and disastrously messy homes though which I can't relate to.

If anything though I would say I associate open tabs in the same vein as an infinitely growing number of books in the to read list or movies in the to watch list. Both usually leading to a tree branch style recommendation of more and more books or movies I might be interested in after consuming.

ccozan 7 minutes ago||
Can I have the same for my chatGPT chats?
ramboldio 8 hours ago||
Related work: Trello allows 'aging' for tasks. One can set them to become more transparent over time or turn into stained 'pirate' paper.

https://trello.com/power-ups/55a5d917446f517774210012

itomato 7 hours ago|
Cursed skeuomorphism
triclops200 9 hours ago||
"Originally, I was thinking about blocking users from closing their overgrown tabs until they slash all plants, but I thought it would be too annoying... " I would ask that you please add this as an option :), might actually use it for that feature alone because I do accidentally close old tabs by accident without noticing that was meaning to keep open.
alanning 8 hours ago||
Fun project, but I also really liked the way she came up with it:

I was doing a little creative exercise the other day around the word "Overgrowth”…

Is this a common thing in the creative space? Seems like a fun activity

dylan604 4 hours ago|
People get inspired by seeing a new color, smelling a new scent, or hearing a new song. Inspiration comes in all shapes and forms. Makes me kind of sad that you seemingly haven't been inspired by something random in life yet.
profsummergig 8 hours ago||
Chrome's "tab group" feature is awesome and it ended my issue with unaddressed and open tabs. It even works on Chrome for Android mobile.
20after4 1 hour ago||
You could combine this with tab unloading to save resources once a tab has gotten completely overgrown.
newscracker 3 hours ago||
This is so cool! I wish for this to be available on Firefox, where I usually have multiple windows with each window having several tabs. The repository doesn’t make it clear if this works on non-Chrome/ium browsers.
Barbing 4 hours ago|
Related:

  Zero regrets: Firefox power user kept 7,500 tabs open for two years
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41156568
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