What is this person actually proposing? In concrete terms?

This reads like a lot of hand waving and talking in circles from someone who drank an extra pot of coffee.

People have been trying to suck functionality from the web into the browser since Netscape 4.5 at least. The devil is in the details.

I read stuff like this and wonder if I'm the only one that never has more than 10 tabs open and rarely more than a single browser window. Can any tab fiends chime in about your workflow?

Curiously I fall in between the two groups he describes.

I usually have about 3-4 browser windows open, each in its own workspace (I'm on i3) - basically its own screen.

In each one I have about 5-15 tabs open. That's about the limit of what I can read at a glance to quickly flip between them.

Periodically I close a few. That's how 50% of the tabs get closed.

The other 50% go when I declare 'tab bankruptcy.' If a window has been at the tab limit for a couple days and wasn't compelling enough for me to act on before, I'll close all its tabs. If I didn't take notes about it or process it in some way, too late, gone now.

I actually do take screenshots of some of my tabs, full page screenshots, which I think in practice is my 'bookmarking' system. I title the file with what it's about - say, "shadcdn.png". Now it's 'saved', in theory anyway for me to look at at some undefined future date (no hurry).

That's my system, which works well enough.

If I had to guess, Google will only change Chrome in ways that make it more money. Browsers could do all kinds of awesome things but Google isn’t going to do any of it if it interferes with sending people to ads. It would be kind of nice if the majority browser wasn’t owned by the people selling you ads.

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.

I’m not sure exactly what the proposal is, but a server in ever web browser so you could host, like, a little tiny social media and file sharing site could be nice.

The author defers a lot to their "fixing search" article[0] for arguments and numbers. That article wrongly assumes that search (and the other problems mentioned, like social) is simple to rebuild to avoid misaligned incentives by relegating it to "just" an API. A search company would still have to implement crawling, recrawling (efficiently, timely for topical events), spam filtering, ranking without being game-able, and a ton of other subtleties (robots.txt, many ways of tagging, stale content for certain categories). It also doesn't solve the underlying non-UI misaligned incentives of not injecting ads directly into the API results or however.

Browsers really can be doing more for the user. But if everything became an API for the browser to just consume and display how it sees fit, there would be a lot of new challenges on top of all this new API support that browsers would need to solve. The API vendors would not just roll over nicely.

[0]: https://berjon.com/fixing-search/

I have lots of tabs open in a dozen windows in 8 MacOS desktops. Each window is current project focussed + Mail, News and Entertainment. I work my 16GB of RAM very hard with many bloated web pages.

I don't like the environment much but I care about the time to context switch between projects (with text, email, and phone interrupts).

I also find the sign-in process to be very broken and an attempt to reduce the sign-in time is my major issue. It is a lot worse with many 2FA authorisation schemes — TOTP, email, text message, open this or that app on my phone.

If the time to open a new tab (including the sign-in process) was 50ms then I would have one window and use some mechanism to open a set of tags.

Perhaps a tab group suspend function that frees up resources and securely saves authentication state and context information?

Tabs wouldn't be so bad if there was a unified tabular interface for all windows/tab-likes. And I'm not taking about a "your Chrome tabs are just apps in your quick switch menu" like on Android. I'm talking like every program has deep linkable content, and one set of vertical tabs (left side of screen?) for the whole OS that each point to that deep linked content. Sublime text tabs, Krita tabs, those few apps that refuse to tab, those few apps that refuse to open multiple instances, all your OS "windows" in one place.

This actually makes sense… Why isn’t Mozilla rolling out ad tracking to Firefox for it to fund itself? Oh yeah, they’re already getting all the money they need from Google.

Personally, I want my browser to do less, not more.

> "no one wants to run an app in a tab. no one at all"

what? I'm completely fine having a number of tabs running "apps", every day, for decades now. It's no different than apps in the system tray.

The Settle Your Tabs part towards the end really spoke to me.

> Technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate. But the product view beats the architectural view every time. The question isn't "should we or should we not bundle these concerns?" but rather "given that these concerns are bundled up in actual real-world use and perception anyway, what underlying design can we come up with so that the resulting architecture makes sense?"

Visceral reaction: Outside of FLOSS, technical people often react strongly against bundling concerns that can be kept separate because bundling them is often the first step to an over-aggressive capitalism entirely consuming their utility. The "Feed" that eventually becomes a heavy advertising venue or even a brainwashing tactic, has destroyed Twitter, and Facebook, and others as user experiences, rendered things like Youtube into potent infohazards, become a foundation for post-free-speech worlds in which the Platform is expected to Moderate Content for rightthink because the Platform is (for the sake of engagement!) deciding what to show you in an Editorial Capacity. The corruption of Google Search, or the Amazon review functionality, or then the Amazon search functionality, is a major short-term loss for human agency at least as big as the writer envisions, and it's being done because bundling different concerns provides an opening, gives the corporate board an erection during quarterly P&L briefings. Over the Possibilities.

If you care about the user experience, consider how long my grandfather's wrench was permitted to remain a wrench, rather than autonomously transforming into a screwdriver, or a brick, or a nice welcoming block of cheese, or a magazine subscription, or a bonfire, or Ebola. The owning entity only has to learn how to use the wrench once a generation; The interface does not drastically change to combine my love life, my choice in cereal, and my ability to tighten bolts. I have to re-learn some online tools once per YEAR because somebody is bundling something in a way that is in the short term slightly more profitable. I have a closet full of useful tools that don't exist on my cognitive plane any more and I'm not sure I want to investigate deeply enough to figure out what cosmic horror they became. In order to preserve my agency, I need to be able to flip back and forth between those tools and summon up capacities that I have not engaged in for several years; The state of web applications (and by extension, the browser) makes me as a tool-using ape feel like I have dementia with the number of holes that now exist in my knowledge versus my past self.

You don't need a bigger browser. You need a predictable environment that you can buy and own, that doesn't tear itself to shreds when you're not actively handing it a geometrically larger amount of money every five minutes. Most layering violations (outside of FLOSS) that you observe are trying to pick your pocket with one hand and scramble your neocortex ("The way you THOUGHT that the platform worked") with an icepick with the other.

No, my use of tabs may not be Technically Optimal. It is a way of organizing information. But it's predictable, and it's within my cognitive grasp, and it lets me do a great many things without entirely losing track of them. I don't want to have to relearn an entire means of organizing my information because you thought that my tabs belonged in your bookmark service†, or in your AI personal assistant†, or that they should be tidy and Bring You Joy. I don't want somebody to rearrange the papers on my desk; That would be profoundly disturbing because it breaks the model for how I think, how I predict things, and how I remain effective.

†Which you DEFINITELY will refrain from charging a subscription for. For a year, maybe even two, before seizing that chunk of my exocortex.

Many tab user (~20-50?) reporting in.

I guess I sort of get tab FOMO where I don't want to close a page because I haven't "used it up" yet. e.g. I've had a tab group for a while for buying new shoes. Really, most of these tabs should be bookmarks, but I'm just not bothered enough to change it (yet).

Interspersed among the FOMO tabs are things I'm currently working on. These are strewn all over the place and I've observed two things about how I use them. First, when I try to prune work tabs I am always overzealous and I find myself reopening the same tabs over and over. Second, I'm sensitive to where tabs are located spatially and I'm able to frequently find my way back to oldish tabs.

So basically, I'm saying "I have a system," but that is a flimsy defense and the real answer is probably "I'm not bothered enough to change."

I use them instead of bookmarks. Basically had two requirements to be reasonable:

* Tree Style Tabs for automatic organization and collapsing into "folders" (links opened in a new tab become child tabs, the parent can be collapsed like a folder, to arbitrary depth)

* Some sort of tab unloader/discarder, so memory usage stays reasonable.

I only have like 10 or so root level tabs, the rest of the several hundred grew from there.

I open tons of tabs but they rarely stay open.

I have a folder called "Daily" that I middle click each day -- they contain news sites (Google News/HN/Reddit etc.) From those I middle-click articles/comments I want to read, but my tab counts rarely exceed 20. I read those articles/comments, and I Cmd-W to close them. At the end of the day I end up with 0 tabs, and close the browser.

Even when I'm in the middle of doing research, I open a ton of tabs, save the promising ones as bookmarks in a folder, and close the rest. I take my cue from that scene in Ratatouille where the chef says "keep your stations clear" [1]. I try not clutter my tab bar with irrelevant tabs so my attention is not divided.

I've seen people who open 100s of tabs, and they do what I do except they never close tabs. To me that seems to be a sign of a cluttered mind, but it's the same kind of mind that is able to find objects in a messy room, so who am I to judge? Whatever works I guess.

The risk of not closing/bookmarking tabs is that you're one Cmd-Q or system hang away from losing all your tabs.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgiK-HWKPjw

Simple: Events come in, like emails, chats, bug reports, etc. They have URLs in them. I click the URL, bringing another tab into the world. Half the time I forget to close the tab. Sometimes the browser windows breed when I drag two tabs out to view them side by side. Days later I realize I can't keep track anymore and I run a script that kills *edge*,*chrome*.

For example, I load Hacker News, scan all the headlines and ctrl-click anything that looks interesting, plus the comments section.

I use keyboard shortcuts to cycle through them. I might ctrl-click additional links in the article or comment section to browse through when I'm finished reading.

If I'm interrupted, I'll open a new tab, or a new window if there's too many (I prefer 10 or less, since you can then use ctrl-# to jump between them.) Eventually, if I've given up on them, I'll close a bunch in one go. Or I'll just close a whole window because I haven't looked at in a while.

Easy come, easy go.

On HN, I have once been to told to see a doctor or psychiatrist for having a few hundred tabs ( I am not making this shit up ). And it was from a pre 2013 Account.

So may be you are the normal one. I mean a few years ago Firefox has telemetry to show vast 95% of people has less than 10 tabs opened. And then you have a long tail that goes from twenty to a few thousands.

As a reply below i think most of us use it as research, come back later, short to medium term reading list. Like I am looking for a super thin wallet, currently Bellroy, but I dont like its flimsy structure. And then I have about 10 tabs next to those that are alternative. I haven't decided yet but that set of tabs are what my current unfinished wallet research status on. A bunch on HN Tabs that I waited for all the comments to settle before reading. etc. And if you have many unfinished task your tab number tends to increase a lot. And unlike old days where a single site would give in depth information on a topic, and you only need a few to make some informed decision, current web is basically very thin and light on everything.

I almost never have more than one browser window open and I think the most tabs I have ever had open was 7.

You're not the only one. I very rarely have more than two or three.

This matches my usage pattern and I use the term "tab bankruptcy." Twinsies!

Wouldn't PDFs be a better way to save them? Full page screenshots glitch out me about half the time, esp sites that use js to muck with scrolling

As browsers have reached the feature plateau, I still like the pace Firefox is innovating.

I'm using Firefox heta, and every time I jump a major version number, I get a bit excited to see what's new. Unlike Chrome (which I uninstalled on both my desktop and mobile devices), I know that none of the new features are mal-intended. Sure, Firefox messed up in the past (like Pocket integration), but they Firefox has been innovating for the past few years at a pleasant pace.

Recently, they added in-browser offline translation, enhanced cookie blocking,automatic cookie banner rejection, etc. In FF 120 (current beta), the only new feature I noticed was that they enabled "Copy Clean Link" context menu (which copies a link without tracking URL queries), and it's better than a browser run by an ad company sneaking in WEI or speaking at Ad Block Developer conference to say "Manifest v3 isn't that bad".

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).

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.

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.

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.

> 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".

The article is making the case for unbundling the authoring experience by bundling the browser and making it an owned environment. And that could be a win.