Getting my tabs under control

A few things I've thought and read lately are, I think, about to kick

me onto a little bit of a "digital health" spree. Digital health

isn't really a meaningful term, but you'll know what I mean but the

time this post is done.

One of the things I read was a post in Geminispace by demifiend[1],

about not being online 100% of the time, but connecting only when the

need arises in connection with some specific purpose. Somebody posted

about this idea in Gopherspace, too, but it was at least a year ago,

so I have no way to find out who or link to it.

The Gemini mailing list is, generously, hosted for me at zero cost by

somebody who is almost a complete stranger to me, the owner of the

orbitalfox.eu domain - they are a friend of somebody else who has been

involved in the Gemini project since its earliest days, and they made

the arrangement for me. I'm not sure I'm even have any administrative

access to it myself, which perhaps is not ideal, but it's working out

fine so far. Anyway, the other day I had a peek at the "Orbital Fox"

website[2] for the first time and found a nicely organised little

collection of posts (called a "Logarion", not a term I'm familar with)

on various topics which I think a lot of people in Gopherspace would

be interested in.

One of the posts was on the relationship between bookmarks and browser

tabs and how many people - myself most definitely included - fell into

the trap once tabs came along of using them as a kind of queue

mechanism and more or less stopping using bookmarks, even though they

are, as the Orbital Fox says, "lighter than tabs both mentally and

computationally".

Let me be frank and confess that I have a massive tab problem. I am

talking about literally hundreds of tabs open simultaneously, to the

extent that Firefox's GUI doesn't really work very well and it becomes

hard to navigate my tab pile. So many tabs that inveitably Firefox

eventually crashes - which is great, because it means I can restore my

previous session and still have all those tabs open, but until I

actually click on them they don't load the page and therefore they

don't actually consume very much in the way of resources - so I can

open yet more tabs before the next crash!

It's a genuine sickness, clearly.

I have tried to kick this habit in the past. Once a friend introduced

me to the OneTab extension[4]. The way this works is that when you

start to feel like your tabs are getting out of control, you click the

little OneTab buton, and they all get closed and replaced by, well,

one tab, which contain clickable links to all the sites you previously

had open in tabs. The one tab provides you a nice and clean interface

from which you can prune those tabs down - once you have enough open,

Firefox's own GUI does a very poor job of letting you try to regain

control this way.

The very first time I tried to use OneTab, it brought my computer to

its knees for the better part of an hour. Full on, non-responsive

lock up. And then, eventually, things came back to life and there was

the promised one tab. It worked, but crunching down my hundreds of

tabs was a gargantuan feat for it and so I never used it again.

Imagine my amazement, then, when I learned from the Orbital Fox post

that Firefox has a "Bookmark all tabs" feature which you can use for

more or less the exact same purpose, and upon trying it out found that

it handled hundreds of tabs quickly and effortlessly. I cleared my

slate and to be honest haven't even bothered to go back into the

resulting huge bookmark folder and weed throught it yet - which says a

lot about how important all those tabs I'd carried with me for months

• really* were.

Since then I have been making an active effort to close tabs as soon

as I stop having an immediate use for them. Just now I've installed

OF's recommended "Lean tab limiter" extension, with a limit of 16 tabs

(these days I like my arbitrary thresholds to be powers of two). I am

hoping this will dramatically limit my browser's memory consumption,

and eliminate browser crashes and lock ups. At the same time, I'm

going to try starting to make more regular, and careful, use of good

old fashioned bookmarks. Of course the ultimate goal is not just to

make my computer happier but to keep myself more focussed, less

distracted, and to move away from a perspective of the internet as

a bunch of stuff that I feel a need or obligation to keep on top of,

and to take back control of my time and attention.

[1] gemini://demifiend.org/journal/2020/internal-wifi.gemini

[2] https://notes.orbitalfox.eu/

[3] https://notes.orbitalfox.eu/bookmarked-web-surfing.html

[4] https://www.one-tab.com/