Mon

Nov 21
2005

Marc Hedlund

Marc Hedlund

LazyWeb Request: Tab History

Oh LazyWeb, I invoke thee.

I use Firefox and am a very heavy user of tabbed browsing. Right now I have 25 tabs open, but often I'll go to about double that (they're hard to count once ffox stops trying to display them in the screen width; and that's also about the limit where the browser will crash on my Mac). I very often organize my tab-closure behavior around the type of tab content: I'll go through all the NPR tabs I've opened and have a little "drive time" section of the day; I'll read longer essays or things that need full concentration; or I'll make a quick Ctrl-Tab drive-through, looking for all the little blog posts I can knock out quickly. As a result, tabs will stick around for days or sometimes even weeks before I get to them.

Sometimes I come to a tab many days after opening it, and I'll read it and think, wow, that was great. By that time, I have no idea where I found the original link to the page. I'd love to be able to Ctrl-click on a tab and pull up a "Tab History" command, which would tell me what page I was looking at when I opened this tab. It would be good for giving credit if I link to something recommended by a particular person; and it would also be good for keeping track of which sites give me the best recommendations.

Does this already exist?


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Comments: 16

  Simon Willison [11.21.05 09:02 AM]

All you need is a bookmarklet :)

http://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/misc.html#go_to_referrer

That will return you to the referring page (document.referrer), even in new windows or tabs.

  Jeremy [11.21.05 09:10 AM]

There's an extension called "How'd I Get Here" that may help you out
http://www.squarefree.com/extensions/high/

  Curt Hibbs [11.21.05 10:51 AM]

How do you protect yourself from losing open tabs in a crash?

I was using an extension called SessionSaver that would save tabs even if Firefox crashed. However I can no longer use this extension (it conflicts with some other extension(s) and crashes Firefox).

  Devon [11.21.05 11:43 AM]

Awesome post and I'll be watching the comments.

What puzzles me, is why do the Mozilla people leave this kind of thing for javascript hacky bookmarklets and extensions? I love using tabs, but the non-history of them is annoying. Even frames have a history! Why not new tabs? And it'd be nice if there was an attribute/extension for opening in a new tab too. (target="_newtab" would be nice eh?).

  Ben Giddings [11.21.05 11:47 AM]

(Hi Curt!)

Funny, when this post came up, I opened it up in a firefox browser that already had 20 or so tabs open.

For me, Session Saver works, so when Firefox crashes, I don't lose anything, but I don't have any way of figuring out how I got to a given tab, so sometimes I get stuck on a "leaf node" of a search without being able to retrace my steps.

I think that since tabbed browsing has been created, people have started using their browsers differently, and the browser-makers have yet to adapt. There really should be a way of putting tabs on a "back burner" where anything interactive is halted (applets, animation, sound, javascript) and the tabs can sit there for as long as needed.

These "back burner" sessions could show up as bookmarks, but with the advantage that you get the text you saw, not whatever happens to be there now (i.e. radar.oreilly.com as it existed at that snapshot in time, not after new posts showed up)

The first browser to solve this UI issue will really make me happy.

  Curt Hibbs [11.21.05 12:14 PM]

(Hi Ben!)

Tabbed browsing has definitely changed the way I use a browser and, I agree, this stuff should be baked in to the browser.

When I finally upgrade to Firefox 1.5, I think I'll install Session Saver first, and then my other extensions, one-at-a-time so that I can find out what is conflicting.

  sam [11.21.05 02:58 PM]

Why not have it so that when you open a link in a new tab the page with the link becomes the zeroth page in the tabs history. that way you could just press back to see where you came from. This means you get the same behaveour (back takes to back to where you came from) all the time.

  dnl2ba [11.21.05 03:39 PM]

Continuing from what Simon Willison said, you can also just open "Page Info" and look under the "Headers" tab in "Request Headers" for the "Referer" (sic) value.

I personally open new Firefox windows once I hit maybe 10-15 tabs. It helps to have multiple monitors, of course.

  Phil [11.21.05 05:14 PM]

Sometimes I come to a tab many days after opening it, and ... I have no idea where I found the original link
I can have that problem after a few minutes... :-)

I seem to remember that there's a ticket in bugzilla for this very issue--and from memory it's extremely long but with the final decision being that implementing such a feature has a cost in terms of memory, performance and UI which the Mozilla developers have decided is not worth it and that an extension can solve the issue for those that need it.

I use SessionSaver on the Mac and find it's somewhat flakey but seems to save things well enough to protect from it's own flakey-ness. Of course, the issue may also be more with how Firefox handles (or not) that many windows/tabs. (And sometimes I consider a crash the equivalent of someone coming and throwing everything on my desk into the rubbish/trash--if it was really important I'll remember it...)

  Michael Mahemoff [11.21.05 05:59 PM]

Firefox really needs better default tab support instead of relying on third-party extensions. For example, extra tabs (in OSX anyway) just become hidden instead of flowing to a new row. The best extension, the one that brings it up to Opera standard circa 2001 (and takes it well beyond) remains Tabbrowser Extensions, whose homepage has stated for at least the past year: "This extension is strongly unrecommended by Mozilla Foundation. Without it, tabbed browsing is very basic, but with it, other extensions and some websites can go badly wrong.

A plugin/extension-based architecture is great, but not if key functionality is left out in the hope that users will work out how to install it themselves. Firefox is an excellent, popular, browser, but its increasing share of mainstream users is unlikely due to the extension capability.

It would be great if the Mozilla/Firefox developers got behind projects like Tabbrowser and included it (among other extensions) as a standard distribution. Similar to the way eclipse is a (heavily) plugin-based architecture, but that doesn't stop it from creating a standard distribution with a compatible, functional, set of plugins.

  Sean O'Hagan [11.21.05 10:00 PM]

I was annoyed by my many ff tabs as well, so I started working on an in-page bookmarking web service that I call "dogear".



http://www.eigology.com/dogear



I was reading a number of articles at the same time, and if/when my browser crashed or my younger sister closed my browser, I would lose my place in all of them.



With dogear, you can read any number of articles at the same time, and your exact place within each article is saved in the dogear database by clicking on any sentence (using some very simple javascript).



This doesn't handle the "tab history" problem, but it may go some way to solving the "many tab" problem.

Anyhow, this is in active development (by me) and I wouldn't mind some input and some help.

Please contact my gmail account (sohagan) if you want to try it out or want more info.

Cheers,
Sean O'Hagan

  dano [11.29.05 04:07 PM]

Per Michael Mahemoff suggestion of using Tabbrowser Extensions, you might try moving the tab display from the top of the browser to the left or the right (an option in Tabbrowser Extensions). You can see way more tabs this way, and it makes sense since monitors are wider than they are tall. This will also give you move vertical space to move more text above the fold.

  Gordon Mohr [12.01.05 02:41 AM]

A Mozilla bug requesting that spawned windows(/tabs) retain their originating history just turned 6 years old a couple weeks ago (November 13th).

Happy belated birthday, bug 18808!

  Darío Vasconcelos [12.02.05 11:35 AM]

I know this isn't history-related, but has something to do with the multiple tabs problem: I've been using the foXpose plugin for Firefox 1.5 (http://viamatic.com/firefox/) and love it so far. It will show you thumbnails of every tab you have open, and clicking on any of them will take you to the corresponding tab. Very nice indeed

  Steven J. Owens [12.06.05 02:27 PM]

Two things I'd really like for tabbed browsing:

1) being able to drag tabs around the tab bar,
and even off to another window or to their own
window.

2) when I close a tab, I'd like the page I just
closed to show up as the most recent page in my
history. Every now and then, often enough to
annoy me, I'll close a tab that I opened up days
before, and realize just after I closed it that
I needed some detail from it.

  Andrew Shuttleworth [03.15.06 05:23 AM]

I got to this post in fury after one too many Firefox crashes where I lost around 20 valuable tabs that I'd stored up over the day. I just can't believe that these aren't be saved by default.

I was almost tempted to go back to IE and NetCaptor (http://www.netcaptor.com) which had excellent tabbed browsing.

I love Firefox's plug-ins but if SessionSaver doesn't work for me I'll be an ex-Firefox user for sure.

Andrew

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