Programming My Life

In the same way that it would be hard for me to imagine life without a cell phone, I can’t imagine going back to browsers without tabs.  Tabs allow me to organize my browsing more efficiently.  In fact, I currently have 17 tabs open in just this browser (12 in my other browser).  However, since being introduced to Firefox a few years ago (and Chrome more recently), I have not seen tabs change in a way to allow for more efficient sharing of information or to allow for more control over my browser’s state.

Specifically, I would like to see a browser allow the user to group tabs for two specific purposes.  First, when I am taking a break at work and decide to look at a few sites, or even if I am waiting for something at the end of the day and find a few stories just before leaving, I just copy and paste the URLs and email the to myself.  It would be significantly more efficient if I could group those tabs and have the browser take care of the URLs for me in a small file I could email myself.

Second, if a colleague wants me to provide some background on a subject (or vice versa), I typically do exactly what I do for myself: open several tabs, then copy and paste the URLs into an email or IM.  It would be nice if I could send a file that opened the URLs in his browser so that he could see all of the links rather than opening them individually.

It would also be great if I could break a set of tabs into a named group.  Currently, I have 4 Chrome windows open because I want to separate articles into specific groups so that I’m not jumping from one focus to another between articles.  I am realizing in my ‘computing articles’ window that it is quickly being divided into articles about computing technology and articles that instruct me on something I want to do (overclock my GPU, make a hackintosh, etc.).  So now I’m looking at potentially more windows.  It would be great if I could save all of these tabs into one file that would open them all.

Some may quip that bookmarks serve the purposes I am asking for, but beyond these smaller quibbles that can be solved with some copying and pasting lies a much larger issue I have with the current state of tabbed browsing: saving the state of my tabs is handled autonomously leaving me to guess at the saved state of my tabs.

Chrome’s greatest advantage (tabs as there own processes) is its greatest weakness here.  In order to restart the browser and get all of my tabs back, I need to ensure that all of my tabs are in one window and that I shut down that window.  The same goes for Firefox.

This week while troubleshooting an unrelated problem, my network admin closed my Firefox window and opened a new one,  leaving my previous save state (and all 732 tabs I had open) to vanish into the ether.  By allowing me to save and store tabs, I would never have to worry about him or anyone else (including myself) doing this.

Productivity software (Word, Excel, etc), games, even podcasts in iTunes all offer both manual and automatic save states.  Why can’t browsers?