Anti-tab-proliferation proposal

[ilzolende]

• If it's a good regularly-updating website, subscribe to it on Dreamwidth, unless
  • it lacks RSS
  • it's the county newspaper or my dad's blog or something.
• If it's a good image, save the image file with a meaningful filename.
• If it's a good text blog post, save the raw HTML or the text or something.
• If it's not good, why am I holding onto this tab? I should probably close it.

This is not yet a complete ruleset.

Comments

[contrarianarchon]

... Yeah, I need to work on this. Currently have 300+ tabs. Of those, I think maybe 100 can be cleared by actually following my version of this rule-set and saving things when I find them, rather than opening a new tab to do it later. This is augmented by the lack of nice ways to save files for many posts.

The rest, I don't think can be simply solved. I *could* make a bunch of accounts and then read fanfic through RSS/email notifications, but I mostly don't want to read it as it updates (And getting the emails or w/e and then ignoring them will either require more tabs or for me to constantly cringe away from some feed); saving it to read in chunks when I'm in the mood works better. Also, I have a bunch of tabs for stuff which I want to read, which will often take many hours or days per tab. Ditto with hitting "Track post" rather than opening a tab to track it with.

... I should merge my Ars Magica char-sheets, there are like 20 of them and google-docs seems super memory inefficient in that environment.

[brin_bellway]

Ooh, are we talking about different approaches to tab management? It's interesting to see how much variation there is in that.

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Most of my tab proliferation is Tumblr posts that I haven't decided whether to reblog yet, or haven't decided how to phrase my response.

I make tab-clearing part of my ~weekly backup routine. There are currently 6 - 7 tabs I don't routinely clear:

• My Dreamwidth reading page


• Two series I've been reading on and off (I try not to keep more than two items in this category, and have been known to downgrade an in-progress series to cold storage if I find I've lost interest for the moment and want to replace its tab with a different one)


• The interface for my Archive Team warrior


• Whichever bit of my Wordpress I'm currently working on formatting


• The equivalent section of my tumblr-utils archive to compare it to


• [if I'm active on Flight Rising at the time] A Google Sheet that helps me keep track of my store inventory and calculate the profit potential of various game activities (separate window from the other tabs, so I can look at it and a Flight Rising window side by side)

The list of things I want to archive but haven't yet is kept in my notepad program. The list of media tabs I'm curious about consuming, don't expect to want multiple times (so no archiving), and realistically will probably never get around to is kept in my browser's bookmarks.

I generally don't have more than 15 tabs or so open at any given time. I so often hear about people having dozens or hundreds of tabs, and I'm not sure how that even works on a logistical level. Where do you get the RAM for all that?

(Of course, I also hear about people complaining what a data hog Chrome is, when the whole reason I switched to Chrome was because it was vastly *less* of a data hog than Firefox. Ever since Quantum, Firefox memory-leaks all to hell, needing to be restarted every [few hours] to [couple days] lest it render the whole computer unusably laggy. Is there some RAM-light browser all the cool kids are using? Can it run XKit?)

[contrarianarchon]

... I have, as I may have mentioned 300+ tabs, sorted in a variety of windows; there's the main one where I keep interfaces for discord, emails, etc, one for tumblr/dreamwidth access, two which are acting as overflow for the tumblr/dreamwidth one, one for exalted homebrew I mean to read, one for fanfic/webcomics etc I mean to read, one for the google docs/spreadsheets I need for roleplaying games and one for music/youtube videos. On the other desktop, I also have a window for webcomics I'm keeping up with, fanfic I'm keeping up with, and "Things I ought to consider buying" which mostly means DTRPG pages and pages for video games which I can't steam wishlist for whatever reason. Of this, I'd estimate about half of my total tabs could (and ought) be processed into some format which is not a open tab, either since they need 15ish mins reading, or because they just need to be saved or moved to another spot (i.e. moving "Thing I am considering buying" into the matching wishlist spreadsheet), and most of the rest are "stuff I ought to read" type. But my archiving process is not low-effort right now, so I procrastinate and do enough to keep the problem getting worse.

WRT to ram, I bought my current laptop specifically for it's 16gb ram, and with all the tabs loaded, Chrome reliably uses half to two thirds of that space. However, I use the task manager to kill the tasks for all my tabs on a semi-regular basis, so my tab-bar is a long scroll of the "Page failed" icon.

My bookmarks is used exclusively as a way of finding things I like again, since I don't have good methods of archiving large or convoluted webpages, and also because many things update in a positive sense or need to be used as a reference document or just are cool or w/e.

[brin_bellway]

>>16gb ram, and with all the tabs loaded, Chrome reliably uses half to two thirds of that space.<<

Last time I left Firefox open long enough to reach two-thirds RAM usage, I almost had to force-reboot: the computer was barely functional enough to accept and (eventually) execute a command to shut Firefox down.

Mind you, I only have 8 GB RAM, so one-third of my RAM is less absolute room to work with than one-third of yours.

(I do have three empty RAM slots, though, each of which is capable of accepting 8 GB. I might ask for a RAM upgrade for my birthday: I've only run into one edge case so far of being unable to do something I wanted to do because of insufficient RAM, but progress marches on and it might become more of a problem by November, at least to the point of being worth nipping in the bud.)

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Some of my bookmarks *are* actually reference material and the like, which I think was supposed to be the intended use case. But my reference materials are generally in their own sub-folders, while the main bookmark folder is mostly interesting-looking video and audio (with occasional text, but I'm a lot more likely to [get around to] and/or [download] text, so it mostly isn't kept in the bookmarks).

(Note that I *do* sometimes archive things that I have not actually read, if I think future selves might want to access them multiple times. As such, a lot of my digital TBR is a collection of ODTs/PDFs/EPUBs/HTMLs on my computer.)

[contrarianarchon]

... That'd need much smoother archiving methods, esp for large things i.e. webcomics (many of which are actually set up to make scraping harder). My general principle borders on the level of bookmarking everything I could be bothered to read to the end, and my threshold for archiving is higher than that.

(I'm sorry "I need better archiving methods" is becoming the recurring theme of my conversations with you)

[brin_bellway]

>>(I'm sorry "I need better archiving methods" is becoming the recurring theme of my conversations with you)<<

I thought we were bonding over this common interest.

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I have a big advantage in that I just don't tend to consume much image-based media in the first place. My answer to "how do I archive webcomics" is "I don't need to".

(I do use youtube-dl on occasion, but mostly for audio. I have very little experience with optimising one's archiving of images and especially video, and found space-optimisation rather difficult on the couple of occasions I've tried. There seem to be a lot of file-size-affecting axes on which a video can vary.)

[contrarianarchon]

We are bonding, but it makes me look bad if I have one complaint over and over again rather than lots of novel complaints.

... That is a significant advantage, but webcomics are very good. For the most part, I don't archive them, and when I do, it's often manually during a re-read, but most of my archiving is more-or-less manual.

I don't try to save any but the very finest two or three videos, though I do have a bookmark folder (and it's own mess of subfolders) for such. (In this respect, it helps that I basically only watch video when recommended to do so, and watch television/movies only when it is the social activity of the moment)

[brin_bellway]

One year later, I return with an update:

A while back I pulled Digger into my local to-be-read collection by instructing wget to just copy the entirety of diggercomic.com. (Much like archiving a Dreamwidth blog, though without the login cookies.) Initial tests of the local copy suggest it worked fairly well (took a bit of--ahem--digging to find the first-strip page in it, but once you find it it loads even in airplane mode and the "next" button works as it should), and the copy takes up surprisingly little space: 167 MB uncompressed, 79 MB compressed.

Which webcomics were you thinking of? Would this work on any of those?

[contrarianarchon]

Huh, digger is one of the comics I had noticed lowkey as being setup to be *hard* to do that kind of thing to. (to be fair I *still* have no actual skill at non-manual backup collection, but that if that works that's several layers of potentially quite helpful; if you have tutorials that you know are helpful to save me the time googling help when I get around to it, or at least to make me feel obligated to read them, that would be helpful!).

Speaking of updates to this conversation: I forgot about this, tried switching to Firefox because everyone said it was memory-lite (and I kinda wanted to be less google-ecosystem-bound), discovered that not only is it not, but it has fewer and less effective native memory-management tools. I am now foolishly suspended in a state of using both Firefox and Chrome in an extremely foolhardy manner, with several hundred tabs split over two browsers. (Also Edge on the side as a container for Facebook; this should be fixed soon by an extension that Tulip recommended for the purpose, but I need to actually try and *do* that first)

[brin_bellway]

>>if you have tutorials that you know are helpful to save me the time googling help when I get around to it, or at least to make me feel obligated to read them, that would be helpful!<<

In my previous comment I mentioned my guide to using wget on Dreamwidth, much of which (the non-cookie parts) applies in this case as well. Also, here is the official wget manual.

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>>tried switching to Firefox because everyone said it was memory-lite (and I kinda wanted to be less google-ecosystem-bound)<<

Same. (same action, during same time period, for same reasons)

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>>not only is it not [memory-lite]<<

In my own experience, the secret to making Firefox memory-lite is to never, *ever* leave a Tumblr dashboard tab open for extended periods of time. (Webpage-view Tumblr blogs seem to be generally fine.) It looks like the memory-leak problems I was having with Firefox were all the blue hellsite's fault, which...well, it certainly seems in-character.

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>>it has fewer and less effective native memory-management tools<<

Yeah, the lack of ability to crash tabs at will is unfortunate, all the more so for someone with that many of them. Apparently there are extensions for that, though I haven't tried them myself.

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>>Also Edge on the side as a container for Facebook; this should be fixed soon by an extension that Tulip recommended for the purpose<<

I don't do Facebook per se, but I do use account containers on occasion and they are definitely handy.