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Simon Willison’s Weblog

On blogging technique and better tabbed browsing

I’m addicted to tabs. Several times a day, I scan down my blogroll looking for blogs that have updated since I last checked, then middle click each one to open it up in a new tab in the background. I then work my way through each one, reading the earlier ones while the later ones are still loading (tabbed browsing makes being stuck on a modem a lot less painful). If I see anything interesting linked to from a blog entry I’m reading, I’ll middle click that as well. Within a few short minutes I’ll have so many tabs open I’ll be running out of space in my tab bar.

Often I’ll leave anything even remotely interesting open all day, but if I’m in the mood to reduce the clutter I’ll load up Notepad and start pasting URLs of interesting pages in to a document there as I close each tab in turn. These pasted URLs later form the basis of blog entries, which I always write in Notepad for fear of losing them to browser crashes. Eventually, I’ll either write up an entry and transfer it to my blog, or delete the URL from consideration. If I’m really behind, I’ll blog a whole bunch of links at once in a big list.

This technique works pretty well for me, except for one thing. Because I’m constantly opening links in new tabs, the back button in my browser no longer returns me to the page that I found the link on. I open dozens of links during a day and often leave them open for hours (if not days) before blogging them, during which time I frequently completely forget which blog I first saw the link on. For interesting items that aren’t being blogged in dozens of places at once I like to provide a “finders fee” by linking back to the person on who’s blog I saw the item, but I am often unable to do that due to the loss of the back button.

Thank goodness then for Jesse Ruderman’s "go to referrer" bookmarklet, which I just found while exploring his Miscellaneous category. It sends you back to the page you came from, even for new windows or tabs in which the back button has stopped functioning. My biggest problem with tabbed browsing is a problem no more.

Posted 13th August 2003 at 12:01 am

This is On blogging technique and better tabbed browsing by Simon Willison, posted on 13th August 2003.

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25 comments

  1. I don't know what your default browser is, but in Firebird you can right-click and "View Page Info" which will show you the referring URL as well.

    Ben - 13th August 2003 00:43 - #

  2. Oooh! Good bookmarklet idea. This should be a Firebird extension.

    Adrian - 13th August 2003 01:14 - #

  3. Definitely a nice bookmarklet. Much nicer than having to open up Page Info to get the referrer.

    Jordan - 13th August 2003 02:32 - #

  4. Jesse is my new hero for the day. Awesome.

    -davidu

    David A. Ulevitch - 13th August 2003 05:09 - #

  5. That is almost the exact same browsing pattern as mine. I also use Notepad (well, NoteTab) to keep track of URLs and write blog entries. I have the same problem with remembering the referrer; this bookmarklet is perfect.

    caiuschen - 13th August 2003 05:41 - #

  6. Only one minor problem - it still tries to take you to the referrer, even if there isn't one, which is more annoying than anything else... try this instead: javascript:if(!document.referrer) { alert('No referrer!'); } else { document.location = document.referrer; } void 0

    Works for me in Mozilla

    Andrew - 13th August 2003 07:27 - #

  7. Oops, leaving out "else" was dumb. Fixed.

    Jesse Ruderman - 13th August 2003 07:54 - #

  8. You can add your blogroll OPML to MyWireService and you get just the updated blogs without all these tabs. Plus, you can save stuff for later and it's easily-accessible when you want to read it later. :-)

    troy hakala - 13th August 2003 07:55 - #

  9. I wish Global History would keep track of the referer every time I visited a new URL. Then I could determine how I first found a site even if the original window isn't still open. (Bug 128398.)

    Jesse Ruderman - 13th August 2003 07:57 - #

  10. It's obviously time to get an aggregator. Since about one week, I'm pretty much addicted to FeedDemon. Give it a try!

    Manuzhai - 13th August 2003 09:02 - #

  11. I've tried a few aggregators but I've never really got in to them - mainly because none of them are quite integrated enough with my browser. Reading blogs is mainly about following links, and if you click on a link in an aggregator it has to open up in a browser window, leaving you switching between two applications. I've tried web based aggregators which work OK but don't really give me anything that my current system doesn't. The single biggest benefit of an aggregator is being alerted to new posts, but my bogroll (powered by blo.gs) does that as well. Plus, a lot of the bloggers either have good designs or have authors who constantly tinker with their blog's functionality - if I used an aggregator I would miss out on that.

    Simon Willison - 13th August 2003 09:39 - #

  12. My aggregator has an integrated tabbed browser, so it's not much of a problem for me. :) But I can see why you'd want to just browse.

    Manuzhai - 13th August 2003 12:06 - #

  13. Simon: "none of them are quite integrated enough with my browser." I would recommend Feed On Feeds - it's a php/cron/mysql app that you use from your browser. It only takes a few minutes to set-up so I would at least give it a go. URL: http://minutillo.com/steve/feedonfeeds/

    zlog - 13th August 2003 12:50 - #

  14. I'm a Firebird-user, too, but I used to be a Galeon-addict. I only miss three things: Galeon preserved its history when opening a new tab, which cures your back-problem, and it also had the option to "Quit with session", storing all your open tabs and reloading them on next start. The last feature was its save-on-crash, which prevented one from losing all open tabs in the rather infrequent case of a crash.

    Kenneth - 13th August 2003 13:12 - #

  15. Could this behaviour (using the referrer) not be integrated as default in Moz/Firebird for situations when a new tab is opened?

    AlastairC - 13th August 2003 13:55 - #

  16. Re aggregators - I use Bloglines.

    Simon Brunning - 13th August 2003 15:00 - #

  17. I use my own homebrew web-based aggregator and pretty much follow the same pattern as you do in tab usage. It's got a lot in common with the AmphetaOutlines skin I made for AmphetaDesk, in that all it displays is a running list of linked titles with disclosure triangles (via CSS display: none and a tiny bit of JS). Mostly, I end up visiting sites and use the aggregator itself just as a means of sifting through entries. Many of the feeds I watch just include excerpts and not full content. I forget that a lot of other aggregators are more like the QWK offline news readers I used back in BBS days and cache much of the content. Me, I want my aggregator to be a tool to direct my attention to sites themselves as interest strikes.

    l.m. orchard - 13th August 2003 16:06 - #

  18. In case you have a lot of tabs open you want to revisit you can save the tab set in FireBird using Ctrl+Shift+T, then re-open it using Alt+L when you have more time to read everything. You can also bookmark a set of tabs as a group.

    Kjartan - 13th August 2003 16:30 - #

  19. Opera 7 is great for what Simon described. You can have multiple Opera windows with multiple tabs opened in them. Then you can save/load/insert sessions (session are saved tab/window states, they include tab's back-forward history etc). Additionally you can see all links in one page by pressing Ctrl+J and easily copy all those links into the clipboard. Opera is excellent for powersurfers! Yes, FireBird is better than IE, but it's still no match for Opera (feature and usability wise), IMHO.

    OperaFan - 13th August 2003 19:26 - #

  20. Jesse is just plain my hero. I think it's cool how many useful features you can add on to a dom-supporting browser with a bit of glue. Imagine if browsers exposed their DOMs to the OSs through interop interfaces! Aggie integration would be child's play, for one thing. ;)

    Jeremy Dunck - 13th August 2003 23:24 - #

  21. And another thing... I've withed for a "forever history" for.. eh.. forever. What I mean is, it'd be fantastically useful (memex-y, even) if the browser would remember all URI traversals forever. Instead of a list of has-beens, you'd have a web of been-theres. It wouldn't fit a traditional GUI widget, but imagine you could browse sites you've previously visited graphically? Maybe trails that hadn't been followed in a long time could be a less vibrant color, and the trail that you initially used to get to a node would have an aura. Think about it. I do. ;)

    Jeremy Dunck - 13th August 2003 23:29 - #

  22. Because I'm constantly opening links in new tabs, the back button in my browser no longer returns me to the page that I found the link on.

    Opera right-click "Duplicate Window" solves this - the new window has exactly the same history as the old one.

    Katja - 13th August 2003 23:59 - #

  23. Just have to throw this in here, Galeon does this by default, and it is very useful.

    Jason Lotito - 14th August 2003 15:39 - #

  24. I wrote Deadman's Redirect for exactly this purpose. It reads RSS, it keeps track of history (in a way that easily integrates with any browser that does bookmark keywords with arguments) and it's server side, so I never have to worry about "oh that URL is in a note at work and I'm home" or whatever.

    The next version will allow "groupable" data structures, so you could group your history entries by day/subject/whatever.

    It requires PHP4 and works best in Moz and derivatvies.

    I've pimped it here before and hesitated before posting this, but I saw that everyone else was making recommendations, so I thought I would too. :)

    Sam - 14th August 2003 20:33 - #

  25. I do exactly the same thing. Except that instead of using notepad, I use an online bookmark stack (eBookmarks).
    Mine is here: http://enotes.monstuff.com/bookmarks.php?user=dumk y (when you have the password you can add/delete entries).
    Also, to make the bookmarks stacking easy, a bookmarklet is available as well as browser modifications (for IE and mozilla).
    Contact me if you are interested in trying it (the source is available or you can get an account easily).

    Dumky - 16th August 2003 04:59 - #

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