💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › getting-my-tabs-under-control… captured on 2023-03-20 at 18:22:47.
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Getting my tabs under control ----------------------------- A few things I've thought and read lately are, I think, about to kick me onto a little bit of a "digital health" spree. Digital health isn't really a meaningful term, but you'll know what I mean but the time this post is done. One of the things I read was a post in Geminispace by demifiend[1], about not being online 100% of the time, but connecting only when the need arises in connection with some specific purpose. Somebody posted about this idea in Gopherspace, too, but it was at least a year ago, so I have no way to find out who or link to it. The Gemini mailing list is, generously, hosted for me at zero cost by somebody who is almost a complete stranger to me, the owner of the orbitalfox.eu domain - they are a friend of somebody else who has been involved in the Gemini project since its earliest days, and they made the arrangement for me. I'm not sure I'm even have any administrative access to it myself, which perhaps is not ideal, but it's working out fine so far. Anyway, the other day I had a peek at the "Orbital Fox" website[2] for the first time and found a nicely organised little collection of posts (called a "Logarion", not a term I'm familar with) on various topics which I think a lot of people in Gopherspace would be interested in. One of the posts was on the relationship between bookmarks and browser tabs and how many people - myself most definitely included - fell into the trap once tabs came along of using them as a kind of queue mechanism and more or less stopping using bookmarks, even though they are, as the Orbital Fox says, "lighter than tabs both mentally and computationally". Let me be frank and confess that I have a massive tab problem. I am talking about literally hundreds of tabs open simultaneously, to the extent that Firefox's GUI doesn't really work very well and it becomes hard to navigate my tab pile. So many tabs that inveitably Firefox eventually crashes - which is great, because it means I can restore my previous session and still have all those tabs open, but until I actually click on them they don't load the page and therefore they don't actually consume very much in the way of resources - so I can open yet more tabs before the next crash! It's a genuine sickness, clearly. I have tried to kick this habit in the past. Once a friend introduced me to the OneTab extension[4]. The way this works is that when you start to feel like your tabs are getting out of control, you click the little OneTab buton, and they all get closed and replaced by, well, one tab, which contain clickable links to all the sites you previously had open in tabs. The one tab provides you a nice and clean interface from which you can prune those tabs down - once you have enough open, Firefox's own GUI does a very poor job of letting you try to regain control this way. The very first time I tried to use OneTab, it brought my computer to its knees for the better part of an hour. Full on, non-responsive lock up. And then, eventually, things came back to life and there was the promised one tab. It worked, but crunching down my hundreds of tabs was a gargantuan feat for it and so I never used it again. Imagine my amazement, then, when I learned from the Orbital Fox post that Firefox has a "Bookmark all tabs" feature which you can use for more or less the exact same purpose, and upon trying it out found that it handled hundreds of tabs quickly and effortlessly. I cleared my slate and to be honest haven't even bothered to go back into the resulting huge bookmark folder and weed throught it yet - which says a lot about how important all those tabs I'd carried with me for months