Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds(blog.entropy.observer)
blog.entropy.observer
Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds
https://blog.entropy.observer/sorting-400-tabs-in-60-seconds/
62 comments
> You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way.
You can visually group tabs together with browser windows. You can then group windows together with workspaces. You can also just save all open tabs in the window as a folder of bookmarks named the current timestamp or whatever you're doing. It takes almost no time at all and prevents the chaos in the first place.
You can visually group tabs together with browser windows. You can then group windows together with workspaces. You can also just save all open tabs in the window as a folder of bookmarks named the current timestamp or whatever you're doing. It takes almost no time at all and prevents the chaos in the first place.
Bookmarks lose history and that's a problem.
Also it's not easy to open a big batch of bookmarks into inactive tabs.
Also it's not easy to open a big batch of bookmarks into inactive tabs.
Why not just sort by domain name? Good enough for most cases, and would be more or less instant.
> The idea is simple: Give GPT3 a list of items and ask it to return a list of categories those items belong to.
60 seconds to sort 400 tabs is a hell of a price to pay. It needs to be worth it. Do you really need semantic search? Do you really need semantic search that queries a huge proprietary model?
(A really cool feature that Chrome doesn't have would be the ability to search the content of the webpage as well.)
What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that's not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option.
The benefit of this approach is that you can do it in the browser, in real-time (or at least locally with a downloaded model). Even 400 tabs will be a piece of cake. Plus you won't need to proxy precious API calls to a service which may become unavailable or very expensive with no warning.
60 seconds to sort 400 tabs is a hell of a price to pay. It needs to be worth it. Do you really need semantic search? Do you really need semantic search that queries a huge proprietary model?
(A really cool feature that Chrome doesn't have would be the ability to search the content of the webpage as well.)
What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that's not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option.
The benefit of this approach is that you can do it in the browser, in real-time (or at least locally with a downloaded model). Even 400 tabs will be a piece of cake. Plus you won't need to proxy precious API calls to a service which may become unavailable or very expensive with no warning.
I wish we could authenticate API access we pay ChatGPT (or anther AIs) for with peoples projects so they can avoid just immediately running out of API tokens (we’d be using our tokens not theirs). I don’t think you can expect every product that uses AI APIs to make rolling the API costs onto the consumer practical but some individuals might find it useful to throw a few of their API tokens at services for their particular use cases.
That's an interesting idea. It'd be cool if ChatGPT gave a portion of the income to whatever 3rd party app we authenticated with as well
So the workflow would be this:
* pay 20$ a month for access to ChatGPT and receive API token
* use my API token w/ 3rd party app
* ChatGPT awards 3rd party app some portion of the 20$
So the workflow would be this:
* pay 20$ a month for access to ChatGPT and receive API token
* use my API token w/ 3rd party app
* ChatGPT awards 3rd party app some portion of the 20$
How does ChatGPT know to award the app? Could be a shitty idea, but I was thinking of a different way:
I like the idea of the user having their own AI profile, like an email, that other services can utilize. Just like it's up to the user to manage their email quota with Google, they would manage their AI quota with OpenAI.
1. Pay $20/month for ChatGPT access, get personal API token
2. Sign up to 3rd party app
a) Enter your API token into app
b) Pay $3/month as a subscription
I like the idea of the user having their own AI profile, like an email, that other services can utilize. Just like it's up to the user to manage their email quota with Google, they would manage their AI quota with OpenAI.
You can do all this with OpenId I think…
I think you could do this if your app handles everything on the frontend, right? Just use local storage to hold the user’s API key. The Star History[1] does this for its GitHub star graphs.
[1] https://star-history.com/
[1] https://star-history.com/
My "browser stack" is based around Microsoft Edge.
- Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly.
- It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM.
- It has the Workspaces [1] feature, basically creating cloud-saved tab groups. This only works when your account is tied to Azure for now (so only at work), but that's the only time I use it, so it's all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it's nice not to have to use one.
- This hidden gem of a browser extension: Auto-Group Tabs [2]. Lots of extensions claim to do this, few do it well. It supports regex and pops tabs into groups extremely quickly/smoothly. It feels native. Combined with the vertical tabs feature, you get nice, easy to read, collapsable groups. The developer is super responsive and awesome.
Honorable mention extensions I've tried but ultimately don't use anymore:
- Tab Xpert [3] It's a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I've tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don't end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary.
- Clutter Free [4] Keeps you from opening more than one of the same URL. Would be really useful, but I found it too disruptive to use daily. You don't realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that.
I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven't moved over to using it by default yet though.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introduci...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/da...
[3] https://tabxpert.com/
[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-preve...
[5] https://arc.net/
- Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly.
- It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM.
- It has the Workspaces [1] feature, basically creating cloud-saved tab groups. This only works when your account is tied to Azure for now (so only at work), but that's the only time I use it, so it's all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it's nice not to have to use one.
- This hidden gem of a browser extension: Auto-Group Tabs [2]. Lots of extensions claim to do this, few do it well. It supports regex and pops tabs into groups extremely quickly/smoothly. It feels native. Combined with the vertical tabs feature, you get nice, easy to read, collapsable groups. The developer is super responsive and awesome.
Honorable mention extensions I've tried but ultimately don't use anymore:
- Tab Xpert [3] It's a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I've tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don't end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary.
- Clutter Free [4] Keeps you from opening more than one of the same URL. Would be really useful, but I found it too disruptive to use daily. You don't realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that.
I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven't moved over to using it by default yet though.
[1] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/introduci...
[2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/auto-group-tabs/da...
[3] https://tabxpert.com/
[4] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clutter-free-preve...
[5] https://arc.net/
For those who think 400 tabs is too much I have had over 800 tabs in some sessions, going back months with the help of TreeStyleTabs, which is probably the reason I still use Firefox.
Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized.
Combine that with the Firefox Addon Copy To Clipboard which enables you to maintain the tree structure when you copy a tab tree, in Markdown, Asciidoctor and Orgmode.
Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized.
Combine that with the Firefox Addon Copy To Clipboard which enables you to maintain the tree structure when you copy a tab tree, in Markdown, Asciidoctor and Orgmode.
Hm. Reading the heading, I am thinking: "What? Only 400 elements sorted? In a whole minute? What criteria did they look for to sort them?"
It seems like a really low number of things to sort. If they added two zeros to that, maybe it would be impressive. In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.
It seems like a really low number of things to sort. If they added two zeros to that, maybe it would be impressive. In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.
I'm pretty sure a non-GPT thing could do this in < 1 second.
I thought the same thing, except adding 4 or 5 zeroes
> In my browser 400 per 60s would mean, that I have to wait almost 10 minutes, until they are all sorted.
There's always gotta be that guy that will come up with the most unreasonable and unbelievable usage of any tool, just to show how special they are.
No, you don't have 4,000 browser tabs open, nobody believes that.
More on the topic, since the title mentions GPT, I imagine it sorts them based on the content, like categories.
There's always gotta be that guy that will come up with the most unreasonable and unbelievable usage of any tool, just to show how special they are.
No, you don't have 4,000 browser tabs open, nobody believes that.
More on the topic, since the title mentions GPT, I imagine it sorts them based on the content, like categories.
I have 156 windows in firefox (it tells you the number when you shut down), with (my estimate) 20-30 tabs in each.
So 3900 tabs.
So 3900 tabs.
@thegabriele don't know why it won't let me reply to you but...
I like using tabs because they keep the history of each tab. Bookmarks don't do that. If I just kept bookmarks, if the page went down I wouldn't be able to go back, and maybe find another way to find an archive of that page.
In Firefox I can search for tabs by typing, "% searchterm" into the url bar. Then I can right click on the back button to see how I arrived at a particular page.
If I know I'll want to come back to where I was, I'll mostly duplicate the tab (thus keeping the history), and then click on the link.
Alternatively I'll click a link using the middle mouse button to open the link in a new tab, but that doesn't keep the history.
I try to keep all tabs for a particular project or topic in one or two windows but clearly I'm very bad at doing that.
Firefox only loads background tabs when you click on them, so it's good for this kind of tab abuse.
My PC has 64Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD, why should I ever have to close a tab??
I like using tabs because they keep the history of each tab. Bookmarks don't do that. If I just kept bookmarks, if the page went down I wouldn't be able to go back, and maybe find another way to find an archive of that page.
In Firefox I can search for tabs by typing, "% searchterm" into the url bar. Then I can right click on the back button to see how I arrived at a particular page.
If I know I'll want to come back to where I was, I'll mostly duplicate the tab (thus keeping the history), and then click on the link.
Alternatively I'll click a link using the middle mouse button to open the link in a new tab, but that doesn't keep the history.
I try to keep all tabs for a particular project or topic in one or two windows but clearly I'm very bad at doing that.
Firefox only loads background tabs when you click on them, so it's good for this kind of tab abuse.
My PC has 64Gb RAM and a 1Tb SSD, why should I ever have to close a tab??
sounds like you are using tabs as bookmarks
Tabs are better because they keep the history.
How can you manage such numbers? And...why?
I replied below, not sure why the reply button wasn't there for me before.
Give it a minute if there's no reply link, you usually can't reply to comments within a short while after posting.
touche.
Also... WHY?
Also... WHY?
I don't know, it takes real effort to curate your tabs below 100. Its very, very easy to not close tabs you don't use, these days, and at least one major browser just doesn't bother to load the tab if you haven't touched it in a while.
I know it seems hard to believe, but for a single topic its not unusual to have 10+ tabs open, when I do research on a topic I'm often hitting 20-30 tabs, and the more work you do the more you have open.
100 tabs per topic, lets say, and someone interested in 40 topics, I could see 4k tabs as reasonable. I would bet they only have 10 tabs actually activated/loaded, but.
I know it seems hard to believe, but for a single topic its not unusual to have 10+ tabs open, when I do research on a topic I'm often hitting 20-30 tabs, and the more work you do the more you have open.
100 tabs per topic, lets say, and someone interested in 40 topics, I could see 4k tabs as reasonable. I would bet they only have 10 tabs actually activated/loaded, but.
What is the point of 4K tabs though? If everything is open, nothing might as well be open because it serves no utility in tracking what you’re working on, right?
I often get into the 30-50 tab range, and the majority of those are unused and I have to do a purge because I’ve long forgotten the context where I need them. I can believe someone might do similarly with more tabs, but no that many more XD.
I often get into the 30-50 tab range, and the majority of those are unused and I have to do a purge because I’ve long forgotten the context where I need them. I can believe someone might do similarly with more tabs, but no that many more XD.
The thing is, I want my bookmarks to be tagged properly, to make sure, that I will always find what I search, provided I enter anything relevant. Website titles might or might not contain all the useful search terms. Tagging takes effort. I am lazy, so I do not bookmark and tag everything right away.
I also use an extension to group my tabs into categories, which makes it much easier to handle the amount of tabs.
I also use an extension to group my tabs into categories, which makes it much easier to handle the amount of tabs.
In Firefox you type "%" into the url bar, which will search all tabs.
Also you can right-click the back button to see the history of each tab. Usually that begins with a google search that reminds me what the context was.
I try to keep all tabs for a certain topic in the same window, or two windows if I want to tile them to view both. Obviously, I'm very bad at respecting such limits. :-)
Also you can right-click the back button to see the history of each tab. Usually that begins with a google search that reminds me what the context was.
I try to keep all tabs for a certain topic in the same window, or two windows if I want to tile them to view both. Obviously, I'm very bad at respecting such limits. :-)
>I try to keep all tabs for a certain topic in the same window
Have you tried tree style tabs?
Have you tried tree style tabs?
No, I loved Tab Mix Plus but Mozilla killed it.
I get nervous messing with it too much in case I lose all my tabs.
I know I can manually backup/restore the file from the Firefox profile folder but I'd rather not mess with it.
Can anyone verify that tree style tabs works with an absurd number of tabs?
I get nervous messing with it too much in case I lose all my tabs.
I know I can manually backup/restore the file from the Firefox profile folder but I'd rather not mess with it.
Can anyone verify that tree style tabs works with an absurd number of tabs?
Have often gone at 2K+ (which maybe isn't absurd compared what others have opened) but max ~100 active rest being unloaded. Only issue had once was sidebar went into rendering loop on browser startup. Not sure what did to fix (should've maybe fill a bug report too) but lost the hierarchy so had to group them again. A bit time consuming due to the amount of tabs but not much since you can select and group multiple tabs.
This is just misusing your browser. That's what bookmarks or reading lists are for.
Bookmarks don't keep the history.
I use tabs to keep the history, so when I come back to that tab, I can right-click the back button and see how I got to that page.
I use tabs to keep the history, so when I come back to that tab, I can right-click the back button and see how I got to that page.
I filed a year ago a couple of bugs because Firefox was crashing when I tried sorting 2000 tabs with two different extensions [1].
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/2...
[1] https://github.com/mozilla/multi-account-containers/issues/2...
Honestly I do on a regular basis. Also that doesn't sound like a lot for a browser to maintain. Imagine opening most links in a new tab. That's how it happens and that's me.
No you don't.
As you can see from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g the browser becomes completely unusable with a few thousand tabs, and the experience is massively degraded way before that.
You also would run out of RAM way before opening 4,000 tabs, with most consumer boards supporting only a maximum of 128GB of RAM.
As you can see from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iwgyzX-76g the browser becomes completely unusable with a few thousand tabs, and the experience is massively degraded way before that.
You also would run out of RAM way before opening 4,000 tabs, with most consumer boards supporting only a maximum of 128GB of RAM.
Before you continue digging this hole you should consider web browsers don't load all old tabs on startup. I have definitely had 2000+ tabs open and that didn't even slow down the browser as usually less than 100 or so are loaded at a time. I basically use tabs as bookmarks.
Note that I use Firefox and not Chrome, and my tab usage is one of the reasons.
I don't know a way to check the exact number, but I'm 100% sure I'm over 2,000 tabs.
At work now so can't check but my PC at home has 64Gb RAM and up to half of that is used by Firefox.
I've noticed it gets unresponsive over 160 windows. I currently have 156 open (it tells you the number when you exit Firefox. Each of those windows has at least 20 tabs.
Firefox is good for an excessive number of tabs because it only loads the tabs when you activate them. Chrome is a memory hog.
At work now so can't check but my PC at home has 64Gb RAM and up to half of that is used by Firefox.
I've noticed it gets unresponsive over 160 windows. I currently have 156 open (it tells you the number when you exit Firefox. Each of those windows has at least 20 tabs.
Firefox is good for an excessive number of tabs because it only loads the tabs when you activate them. Chrome is a memory hog.
Spoiler: this is part 1, chrome / brave focused, no GPT3 or rust yet, just chrome APIs and JS.
The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don't have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.
The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don't have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.
An alternative to using GPT could be NLP Clustering.
If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups within groups (idk if chrome supports that, but there’s extensions like Tree-Style Tab in Firefox that do)
If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups within groups (idk if chrome supports that, but there’s extensions like Tree-Style Tab in Firefox that do)
If I happen to have a huge number of tabs open I usually just close them all without looking, but that’s just me I guess.
I can’t subscribe to your email list!!! Please fix it. I loved your content
Thanks, didn't expect someone would sign up.
Should be fixed now (or as soon as DNS propagates)!
I don't know what this is, but I'm pretty sure I don't want it.
Upvoted. Honest question. How did this make the front page of HN with 4 upvotes at the time?
what don't things get moved to HN even with few upvotes and then disappear after a couple seconds?
So with 4 upvotes could just be it was its turn to be put on the front page but 4 people had already voted.
Also I thought there was some sort of thing that rewarded if you got a lot of votes quickly, like if you got 4 upvotes in a couple minutes it would probably push you to the front page and keep you there long enough to get more votes?
However take all that with grain of salt because I have never actually tried to figure out how upvotes work, this was just my not trying to understand at all sort of soaked up ideas.
So with 4 upvotes could just be it was its turn to be put on the front page but 4 people had already voted.
Also I thought there was some sort of thing that rewarded if you got a lot of votes quickly, like if you got 4 upvotes in a couple minutes it would probably push you to the front page and keep you there long enough to get more votes?
However take all that with grain of salt because I have never actually tried to figure out how upvotes work, this was just my not trying to understand at all sort of soaked up ideas.
Used to be common to see links on front page with 3 votes, but it’s been a while I think since I’ve seen that.
[deleted]
Site is hugged to death / dead for now.
Too bad there isn't a service which automatically queues all of hn/new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting.
Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.
Too bad there isn't a service which automatically queues all of hn/new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting.
Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.
The site is probably still busy sorting the incoming clients, lol.
400 in 60 seconds??
400 in 60 seconds??
>400 in 60 seconds??
The bottleneck seems to be API token limit.
The bottleneck seems to be API token limit.
[deleted]
No idea what this is since the URL is dead but it sounds like a joke based on the title...
Maybe sorting on relevance using GPT-3 based assessment of page contents.
It is, it's using it to sort tabs into categories based on the topic.
So it loads every page, parses that, and then sorts?
It only sorts on the title as far as I can tell.
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As someone with thousands of unsorted and duplicate tabs saved those “tab saver” chrome extensions, I was hoping for something I could use.
Couldn't read the article either but do people actually want to sort their tabs ? My tabs are approximately in a chronological order and I can find a specific tab based on that, sorting them would be a disaster
Edit: oh ok it uses gpt-3 to sort by content, but even then I don't want my tabs to be shuffled in any ways..
Edit: oh ok it uses gpt-3 to sort by content, but even then I don't want my tabs to be shuffled in any ways..
It will be usable for you soon - if you want, I can ping you with the repository so you can build it yourself.
60 seconds is still quite some time for a reorder operation, but sorting through 400 tabs and giving them a somewhat intuitive position in the tab bar will take much longer than that.
You may say "that's a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don't you close them?" but I've encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project/theory and freely open and close tabs and be unwilling to close the group or try to commit them to bookmarks in some way. Bookmarks suck for grouping things together, doing to requires a lot of clicks and drags to get the items all in the right place. Besides, with how lazy browsers load tabs these days and the built in ability to search for tabs straight from the address bar you don't really need to bother anyway.
Everyone who's going "wtf sorting 400 items shouldn't take a minute why would you do this" clearly hasn't read the article. If you can't read the article because a site just got hugged to death, please with withhold your criticism until you've managed to find the article contents.