>Can someone explain what normal people use so many tabs for?
Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).
Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.
>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?
History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.
>Not judging or anything,
It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.
PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.
> But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking.
Joplin?
I’m a happy user.
There are several (mostly-free) competitors.
You’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other, unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user for an essential part of your workflow.
> ou’re going to have to pay for your OwnCloud instance to host the info one way or the other,
I have fiber internet at home, and an Intel nuc with docker. I wasn't happy with Joplin. Over the years, I've checked out half a dozen or so note apps that did webdav (and could be hooked up to Nextcloud), but never found one that quite worked. Joplin's notes aren't really markdown, he spams them up with metadata... I think I know how I'd fix that if I were writing it, but I'm too lazy I guess. Keep hoping someone else will do it. Oh well.
>unless you’re hoping to leech as a free user
If I'm not going to trust iCloud for stuff like this, I'm not going to trust some smaller fly-by-night company or someone hosting for free. Nah, I have that part covered.
Basically, bookmarking webpages has been broken since the 1990s. It was (still is?) too difficult to bookmark something with a meaningful name so that you can find it again. Bookmarking is (without extensions... there's one that saves them to Nextcloud) local, so you have them stranded on a work computer or a home computer or your phone. And, they go stale (likely, a proper bookmarking system could check that Wayback saved it at least once, and also save a link to that just in case).
Many of the tabs I open could be closed soon after, certainly a few days on. Perhaps even most. But they're mixed in with tabs that I would like to keep that content longer-term (weeks or months), and it's tedious to go back through closing them. Giving me tools to have ever-more-complicated schemes to arrange them would only make the problem worse, not better.
>Is this more an issue with bookmarks and history not being as useful as they could be?
History is even more fucked up than bookmarking, which is saying something. If I do start closing tabs carelessly, they'll end up in the closed tabs list, which is so full of junk (all with similar page titles, more often than not) that finding them again will be impossible. If we use full history, then it's so spammed up with hundreds of pages per day that I'll never find anything in that. I don't have a team of forensic data technicians on staff to help me find that one doodad I saw while searching for something else on Amazon last week. Bookmarking is salvageable as a concept, if someone were to truly nail the implementation, but history hasn't been useful since 1995 when Grandma would browse the web for 10 minutes per week.
>Not judging or anything,
It's ok. Judge me. I know I have a problem.
PS It occurs to me that at least some of this problem has been that I've never found a good note-taking app that could be used long-term. If I had that, then I could jot down notes that would be superior to bookmarking pages... often times there's just a trick to writing a one-liner on the command line that I can't keep clear in my head. I don't need the link to the stack overflow page for that, I need an example with a comment. But note-taking software's probably more difficult to get right than bookmarking. I need to be able to access it from anywhere, but not be held hostage by some corporate cloud. I need rich text, but something around the level of markdown, not Evernote's "paste a pdf into it" crud. I am subscription-averse. And so on.