My web browser just crashed 😩
It had just over 100 tabs open.
Some of these were reference pages for tools I was using or other things that I was going to refer back to.
A few had half-written articles.
Several of the tabs had YouTube watch queues with several hundred videos that were not worthy of a place on one of my persistent lists. As far as I know, those queues are not recoverable. And it doesn’t bother me.
The other 95 were things I wanted to watch, read, and/or write about.
When my browser restarts, very few of those tabs will get revisited despite it being easy to do so.
My tab-opening obsession comes in three parts.
- A browser window with many tabs opened from search results, a table of contents, or list of resources where I am looking for one answer that is likely to be on one of those pages, but I didn’t know which when I looked at the resource list
- Pages that I had opened because they had interesting titles and had no way to judge whether they were worth looking at, but the UI was such that opening lots of tabs was easier than navigating the site.
- Things I knew I was interested in doing something with.
Losing the first two isn’t much of a loss. In the first case, I probably found or no longer care about the answer.
In the second, the vast majority of those pages weren’t worth looking at anyway, and creating a similar quality list isn’t particularly hard.
But losing the third is a loss. These would be worth continuing with, but they are lost in the volume of the second set of undifferentiated potential fluff.
Similarly, losing the half-written articles is a loss. While they are easy to find, picking up from where I left off is much more work than it would have been to finish them initially, and in many cases, they are no longer timely enough to be worth finishing. Obviously, there is a broader-than-tabs issue here, which I will leave for another day and not even begin writing an article about, though I might put it on my ever-growing topic list.
So, what can I do about this third case?
If you have methods that you are using or other suggestions, please add them to the comments below.
So far, I have two ideas to run as experiments.
The firstis somehow making these worthwhile pages special or salient. Perhaps adding the urls to some special list.
- My browser used to have a “reading list” functionality; it doesn’t currently, but I am sure there is an extension for it.
- Using a separate window for such tabs so that after my browser crashes, they are all in one place.
- Copying the URLs somewhere.
The second is to simply stop and read / write / watch the worthwhile. Opening just one tab (so I don’t lose navigation) and not continuing on that “from page” until I have completed the worthwhile activity.
Do you do, or have you tried either of these?
Is there a magic AI tool that will solve this for me? It sounds hard.
I’ve started an experiment with the second. If you are interested in my progress, please let me know.
