The PermaTab Web Browser (lee-phillips.org) 52
lee1 writes: The UHI human interaction research group has been intensively studying a pervasive problem facing users of the web: the problem of tabs. How to organize them, preserve them, keep track of them. We have carefully considered the pros and cons of various approaches offered by different browsers, and by extensions: tab trees, second rows of tabs, vertical tabs, 3D tabs, musical tabs, you name it.
None of them were good enough.
None of them were good enough.
The problem isn't tabs, the problem is people... (Score:5, Insightful)
... let's be realistic, nobody has the attention span or intellectual resources to dig too deeply into what most people's browers have open.
The real issue is the problem has been solved multiple times, all that's really needed is an offline google for browsing history, and a good way to store snapshots of websites offline.
The real issues is that there should be an offline version of something like delicious.
https://del.icio.us/ [del.icio.us]
I've always found that tagging websites that you save to bookmark via keywords that are searchable allows you to reduce your browser tabs enormously.
It was much simpler in the early days of a net to just dl a whole website. But all with the modern greed and all the frameworks to prevent "right click save as", with javascript and all the other crap infecting the modern web.
Someone really just needs to take google search add delivious together + storing snapshots of webs offline and have it be like searching chromes browsing history where things are organized by date/time/month. Most data goes cold and gets old at some point because we have limited capacity to process information as human beings.
So any old data goes into "cold storage".
Re:The problem isn't tabs, the problem is people.. (Score:4, Informative)
... let's be realistic, nobody has the attention span or intellectual resources to dig too deeply into what most people's browsers have open.
Additionally, somebody doesn't have "the attention span or intellectual resources" to recognize an April Fool's Day joke on Slashdot... ;-)
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... let's be realistic, nobody has the attention span or intellectual resources to dig too deeply into what most people's browsers have open.
Additionally, somebody doesn't have "the attention span or intellectual resources" to recognize an April Fool's Day joke on Slashdot... ;-)
April fools joke or not, the fact is many of us do have huge #'s of tabs saved or constantly have open because there no one has truly solved issues of data organization very well. There are a hodge podge of different frameworks to organize data but its not unified very well.
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April fools joke or not, the fact is many of us do have huge #'s of tabs saved or constantly have open because there no one has truly solved issues of data organization very well. There are a hodge podge of different frameworks to organize data but its not unified very well.
I agree entirely. I currently have - and I kid you not - well over 500 tabs open in the browser instance I'm using to post this. And that's down from over 700 a few weeks ago. So yes, I feel your pain all too acutely.
In considering the problem I just came up with an idea which hasn't been thought through and is probably full of holes. I'll toss it out anyway in case it leads to useful ideas. What if a tab could have user-assigned keywords that could be searched to find all the tabs containing a given keywor
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Joke aside, I've come to wonder if I the last person left on the planet who presses ctrl-w regularly when browsing? The number of tabs I have open ranges from one to ten or so, and when I'm done with something, I close it. It's surely faster to get to my email by pressing ctrl-t, o [autocompleted to Outlook webmail] and enter than to move my mouse to the top of the screen, look for a tab which is in a different place at different times, click, and press ctrl-r. (I guess the other option would be repeating c
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I have Gesturefy, I don't even need to move my mouse more than an inch to do most things.
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All that tells me, is that you don't have a gamma wave detection helmet coupled with machine learning... pfft.
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ctrl+L for URL bar in browsers, ctrl+K usually jumps to search field, if you're like me and keep them separate
this is alt+D for file browser's path on windows, but i guess outside server connecting that's not useful
start+E is globally available
tabs as bookmarks is insanity, i leave them up as ongoing sessions but "finish later" is a concept prone to neglect
oh yeah, ctrl+tab to roll through tabs, add shift to reverse (generally true in hotkeys; ctrl+shift+T is closetab undo) and ctrl+number will jump directl
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Joke aside, I've come to wonder if I the last person left on the planet who presses ctrl-w regularly when browsing?
I had three choices:
1} Ignore the mystery of "what does Ctrl-W do".
2} Google it.
3} Try it.
Figuring it'd be harmless since a simple keystroke wouldn't delete my pr0n or anything, I gave it a try.
Thank you for teaching me another keystroke that does Ctrl-F4. I'll never use it, and immediately forget it because Ctrl-F4 is a legacy system-wide keystroke that means "close this window, not this program". It's the smaller version of Alt-F4... which is kinda famous. Comes from the CUA standard, way back i
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Re: The problem isn't tabs, the problem is people. (Score:2)
I didn't know ctrl-f4 actually. Good to know.
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Why would I press CMD-W when I'm not finished with a tab yet ... ?
(But I see the many answers to your question, seems many people did not know about it).
And I hate the idea of keeping something in RAM that doesn't need to stay in RAM.
Well, it is usually swapped out to disk.
As I'm working on a laptop, I simply want all my searches at hand when I open it.
So I can work without internet connection etc. from every where. (I just mention this before you suggest the "recently closed" feature or the "read later lis
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I only use bookmarks for a small number of sites I visit regularly. Everything else I clip into a Joplin notebook.
Too many times I bookmarked a site only to find it had gone by the time I went back, and the Wayback Machine copy was missing or incomplete. So now I just clip it, keep a copy forever, and I still have the URL if I want to check for updates.
Re: The problem isn't tabs, the problem is people. (Score:1)
So you didnâ(TM)t get to the part about the monitor?
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I find this website very useful: https://dotepub.com/ [dotepub.com] they have a "bookmarlet" that you install in your browsers bookmark bar (or at any place where you have your bookmarks) and it converts your current web page into an ePub file! Suck that you damn java script "save as file ..." blocker suckers!
Here you can try it out, without installing the bookmarklet: https://dotepub.com/converter/... [dotepub.com]
(That also works e.g. on the iPad where the iBooks reader asks you if you want the ePub to be opened in iBooks.)
Funny! (Score:3)
That monitor stand seems small. (Score:2)
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I am a mole-man, and live deep beneath the earth. We do not have infinite sky above us... but the cave systems are quite extensive. Please consider releasing a Permatab monitor which expands infinitely in the horizontal direction.
Thank you.
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Bug report, (Score:4, Funny)
On the PermaTab web browser, all tabs have Close buttons.
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Yeah, it wasn't well executed. Solid idea for a joke, but not a good execution.
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permatab (Score:3)
and here I was hoping the permatab browser addon was returning. Really could use it since I am all the time accidentally closing the wrong tab.
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You may enjoy Ctrl-Shift-T or Cmd-Shift-T.
No room for tabs (Score:2)
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Dual monitor setup... stacked on top.
Top monitor is all the tool bars, the bottom monitor is the actual browser.
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Dual monitor setup... stacked on top.
Top monitor is all the tool bars, the bottom monitor is the actual browser.
LOL - if I hadn't posted I'd mod you up! Right now my browser window contains the window controls, the menu bar, the bookmarks toolbar, and three rows of tabs on the top, as well as the 'search in page' bar and status bar on the bottom. If I could wangle it, your stacked-monitors idea might actually be practical for me!
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Next April, they'll be releasing a companion product - the PermaBar browser extension.
The Mac Wheel (Score:2)
reminds me of the Onion article: https://www.theonion.com/apple... [theonion.com]
Worth the watch! :)
What they really mean (Score:1)
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Hi, I'm a Slashdot reader. Everything posted here must be met with aggression and/or ridicule so I don't waste time to detect a joke or click at TFA before working up bile and spewing it out.
The Subject of this post (Score:4, Funny)
What's the problem? (Score:2)
Tada - your permatabs are back.
Lots of tabs ... (Score:2)
But now imagine an entire orchestra of bimbos moaning that you can't close.
tab hording (Score:2)
You should read a web page to completion, then close the tab.
If you think you need to spend all day collecting a bunch of websites you might want to read. Don't bother, you won't have time to finish them. Working on more than a few things at once is not something anyone can sustain for long periods. If you have 10 or 20 tabs open for days, there is no way you're utilizing that information. Shut that shit down.
I'd leave an exception for those using web-based applications (like Discord or Slack). You can now
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First, you went on a nice rant because you didn't realize this was an April fool's joke. Good one, grandpa!
Second, your use-case is not everyone's use-case. Thinking it is makes you look very self-centered.
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No, it's everyone's use case. the only purpose for tabs is to procrastinate reading things. The proof is that I was able to respond to this post thanks to tabs.
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Before you give advice to other people how to use a browser, you perhaps should figure how to use a web browser efficiently:
You have to research "about blah", you open a new window and google "about blah". Call this the google tab.
You read the results and open each interesting one in a new tab.
You have a 3 to 4 tabs open you glimpse over the text to see what they have in common - especially if the links you opened were spread out over the first or several search result pages.
Go back to the google tab, and r
I know this is a joke but... (Score:2)
I've never left tabs open when closing a browser? In fact my settings are to wipe history at closing.
Search history on Google is turned off also.
I use bookmarks... Or my memory and a Google search of the page's name.
I rarely have more than 5 tabs open simultaneously.
Maybe that's because tabs didn't exist when I started browsing the web (with Mosaic)
IE6 deja vu (Score:2)
Just get rid of Chrome/ non MRUs (Score:1)
And use Opera, Firefox or any other sane browser that supports Most Recently Used tab switching.
Use tab locking for stuff that you never want gone.
It's called bookmarks. Look it up. (Score:1)
Or "softlinks", for those who speak proper 9P. ;)
Tabs are an idiotic duplicate duplication of features. I see that now.
It's just a sub-level of the task bar. The task bar should be hierarchical. But not with stupid "grouped tasks", that are only visible if you click on the.
But for many people, who seem to be disgusting tab hoarders, it's just a duplication of bookmarks. Which are already herarchical.
And both of those should just be regular files in regular directores. So the task bar and tab bar would just
Tabs are in the wrong layer (jokes aside) (Score:2)
The problem is that tabs are being done at the "application" layer -- the web browser, the office document, the database query tool.
At that application layer, the tabs can only do one thing: group my application windows.
Quite frankly, that doesn't help me in the least. It's just another click to dive through. Of course, that's why the taskbar expands them for me. So really, it does almost nothing. A mini-taskbar within an application.
Virtual desktops go too far in the other direction. All of these wind
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That is actually a very good idea!!