TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem

https://omar.website/tabfs/

by pps • 3 years ago

1033 193 3 years ago

omar.website

napsterbr• 3 years ago

This is absolute genius and opens up so so many opportunities!

jadbox• 3 years ago

Plan 9 is pleased.

prettyStandard• 3 years ago

Wow, this is brilliant.

So often I want to automate parts of my web experience, and I think ugh I need a browser extension, or user script, or puppeteer. All of which feel clunky for trying to do something simple.

Seems like this will get me 90% of the way for most things, then when I need to click a button or automatically respond to an automatic email, that's just a few lines of code and a cron job away.

mdni007• 3 years ago

Genius

hailruda• 3 years ago

Exactly, why isn't more software made to be accessible from a filesystem?

aeonik• 3 years ago

Two things,

1. I couldn't get this working on my M1 Mac due to MacFUSE issues.

2. I wish there was a version for Firefox.

I think this is such a cool project, and I want this to work really badly. I have many workflows where I'd like to log data for certain sites I visit it plain text for further analysis. And long term storage.

HALtheWise2• 3 years ago

The article claims this does support Firefox? (albeit, requiring re-install each time you open the browser due to an upstream bug)

superkuh2• 3 years ago

It's not a bug. It's an intentional choice by Mozilla that users should not be able to install software without the approval of Mozilla. They say it is for security. But the signing portal is automated so this is only realistically for revokation after widespread damage has been done.

The suggestion in the thread is to use the developer edition which is, in lineage, essentially aurora/alpha version (in the past naming scheme) and contains bugs and security holes.

With modern Firefox if you want software freedoms you have to give up safety... or use the unbranded version which has no auto update and manually re-install the browser for every update.

mdaniel• 3 years ago

There was recently someone who made a "fuse-ish" thing using user-mode NFS, which more closely matches my mental model of living in the new multi-arch, locked-down macOS world (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32726166 not open source but the discussion shows the general idea)

I regrettably don't know the guts of NFS enough to know how much of FUSE can be ported, but my guess would be "perfect is the enemy of good" for folks who otherwise can't even run this right now

HALtheWise2• 3 years ago

The open-source implemention I'm aware of is in Buildbarn

Design doc: https://github.com/buildbarn/bb-adrs/blob/master/0009-nfsv4.... Code: https://github.com/buildbarn/go-xdr

superkuh2• 3 years ago

Too bad firefox doesn't allow it's users to install extensions without their approval and this extension can only be installed temporarily.

in Firefox You'll need to install as a "temporary extension", so it'll only last in your current FF session. (If you want to install permanently, see this issue: https://github.com/osnr/TabFS/issues/4#issuecomment-75344738...)

solarkraft4• 3 years ago

This was the straw finally pushing me to very seriously consider migrating to Chromium. They seem to absolutely despise power users, they pull the same type of shit with Fennec/Fenix.

They hate their users so much they're perfectly willing to compromise their security. "This extension is not actively monitored by Mozilla". But you can't do the responsible thing and build it from source yourself.

Even installing the "Developer Edition" didn't enable to me to install self-built extensions (yes, with that secret flag). And it doesn't even tell you that it doesn't accept unsigned extensions, they claim that the extension is "broken".

The fuck?! This is Apple-level user hostility. Meanwhile Mozilla execs are getting Apple exec-style compensation while driving it further into the ground.

trwired• 3 years ago

This was the straw finally pushing me to very seriously consider migrating to Chromium.

What is the situation surrounding Manifest V3 in Chromium? Won't that throw a wrench into power user's workflows with its own arbitrary limitations?

oh_sigh2• 3 years ago

It is hostile to power users, but gracious to unsuspecting users who might have a sneaky person install extensions on their browser to steal their data/spy on them. In any case, a real power user could always use a developer build and set that flag.

HellsMaddy• 3 years ago

It’s really not that bad. You can sign up for a free Mozilla developer account and upload the bundle you’d like to sign, and install the signed extension a few minutes later on any edition of Firefox.

evilpie• 3 years ago

And it doesn't even tell you that it doesn't accept unsigned extensions, they claim that the extension is "broken".

It's likely you forgot to include the browser_specific_settings with a some arbitrary id in the manifest.json.

Permanently installing unsigned extensions definitely works in the Developer Edition after setting the pref in about:config.

bilkow2• 3 years ago

Have you tried rebuilding the XPI in a different way or trying a different XPI? I would guess that your addon is broken, as it works for me: https://postimg.cc/9rkbMd7v

I understand the frustration and would also like improved control, but I understand firefox preventing this in the "normal" edition as it's very common for trojans to install unwanted extensions manually by fiddling with the profile files, I've had to remove them manually from family computers in the past.

doublerabbit2• 3 years ago

lol, I feel that Firefox is chrome but using Firefox engine. What I don't understand is that can see evidence of this if you cause an error and view source. It has chrome:// literally hard-coded and commented out.

Host a web server, kill the web-server, try to visit the URL, open inspector and look chrome.

Examples:

"<script xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" src="chrome://global/content/neterror/aboutNetErrorCodes.js"></script>"

Visit chrome://global/content/aboutNetError.mjs in your firefox browser. Why is Firefox accepting chrome:// URI's?

You can even browse: chrome://global/skin/icons/

Visit: jar:file:///usr/local/lib/firefox/omni.ja!/chrome/

(i'm on freebsd, so if linux: /usr/lib/firefox/omni.ja!/chrome or something) too drunk to care. The internet is fucked.

Firefox version: 109.0 (64-bit)

root@cuddles:/usr/crystal/doublerabbit/ # pkg install chromium Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up to date. All repositories are up to date. The following 3 package(s) will be affected (of 0 checked):

New packages to be INSTALLED: chromium: 109.0.5414.119 noto-basic: 2.0_1 sndio: 1.9.0

Call me skeptical, what a coincidence. Convince me.

bradrn• 3 years ago

Even installing the "Developer Edition" didn't enable to me to install self-built extensions

For a different perspective, I’ve successfully done this on both Windows and Linux. In both cases it was pretty straightforward. (My extension was admittedly very simple, though… maybe it’s different with more complex ones.)

alamortsubite• 3 years ago

It's not the prettiest solution, but you can work around this problem with web-ext: https://www.npmjs.com/package/web-ext

guax• 3 years ago

This is a super nice idea. I wonder what other software we could interact in this form. The Unix people did have a good point about everything being a file.

behnamoh3• 3 years ago

The Unix people did have a good point about everything being a file.

Yes and no. While it simplifies things to an extent, it's also confusing, especially with extension-less files.

Example: Tell me, is this a file or directory?

    ~/hn/today-posts

It could be a file that curls todays posts, or it could be a folder (directory) that contains them.

sva_• 3 years ago

The terminal emulator may change the color of the prompt, for example.

yegle• 3 years ago

How would adding an extension solve the issue? E.g. is this a file, a device file, or a symlink?

/dev/readme.dev

To know what this is, a `stat(2)` is required.

crabbone• 3 years ago

Valid complaint, but maybe not such a great reason.

It gets worse when you deal with sysfs or procfs and similar. It all becomes obscure magic, like what values can be written into what file, why some files aren't readable, or the contents of files being just a bunch of numbers which you have no way of interpreting.

Another problem is that there's way too many of different file types and they aren't organized into any kind of hierarchy or any other meaningful order. This makes tools like rsync extremely complicated, with loads of footguns and still not solving the problem well. It feels especially bitter because in exceeding majority of cases you don't want tools like rsync to deal with named FIFO or device files or sockets etc. but you get accidentally but painfully bitten by them every now and then.

drdaeman• 3 years ago

Example: Tell me, is this a file or directory?

A directory is a file (and IIRC e.g. Plan 9 decided they should be readable just like normal files and there shouldn't be any special readdir syscalls). You can see its attributes to figure out the rest.

If not for strong Linux limitations (because of alleged hardlink knot-tying problem) and belief that it just cannot be both, transparent archive access through a filesystem would be a thing. As well as metadata access (`play ./file.mp3` vs `edit ./file.mp3/id3v2`). People of the past seemed to have paid great attention to interoperability and effort to make common interfaces; folks of the modern age ('00s and later) love unique and completely incompatible solutions to the same problem.

dredmorbius• 3 years ago

'ls -l' will tell you the basic information of a given listing, including whether it's a normal file, directory, symlink, block device, named pipe, etc.

stat(1) will provide additional information on a file.

file(1) will not only distinguish between filesystem=level distinctions, but will make a remarkably good guess as to what the file contents of a normal file are, based on magic(5).

jbverschoor• 3 years ago

Any database:

  cat /mnt/imdb/movies/tt0103064/director/details.json


  cat /mnt/imdb/actors/by_contains_name/arnold/roles.csv

Or any graphql source

pmoriarty3• 3 years ago

GraphiQL.... what a fucking nightmare

pmoriarty3• 3 years ago

Plan9 takes this even further

yjftsjthsd-h2• 3 years ago

One source of inspiration is to see what the Plan 9 folks did, plus things inspired from that - filesystems for network access, for the clipboard, for representing windows on the screen.

I've also been considering some sort of filesystem for MQTT, which combined with an appropriate bridge would allow for reading and control of assorted smart devices as a filesystem.

layer84• 3 years ago

The file interface is somewhat limited though (e.g. everything is just an opaque untyped byte stream) and has security issues in conjunction with shell scripting (e.g. quoting and escaping).

A data type aware interface like AppleScript or COM, if universally supported, would be more expedient.

enriquto2• 3 years ago

The file interface is somewhat limited though

And so? The mantra says "everything is a file", not "everything is only a file". You can provide stream access to everything, and then more advanced access to some particular resources.

yesenadam• 3 years ago

I loved this talk by Omar Rizwan from !!Con 2018 on that topic:

Four fake file systems! (9 mins) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfHpDDXJQVg

i.e. screenshots, torrents, youtube, git.

sirjaz• 3 years ago

No support for Windows? There are more Windows endpoints than all iOS, MacOS, and Linux desktops combined.

dlivingston• 3 years ago

https://github.com/osnr/TabFS/issues/13

smashed• 3 years ago

Haven't looked into the source, but this is most probably using FuseFS in order to present a mountable filesystem.

Fuse does not support windows. If it did the extension could probably be easy to port..

Your best bet is probably running the browser under some wsl layer.

rmbyrro2• 3 years ago

How many of those windows users would want to write a mesh of Python and Bash to interact with their browser?

Not saying it shouldn't support windows, but choosing Linux and MacOS as initial support is a sensible choice...

arrakeen• 3 years ago

echoing the sentiment given to linux users every time they ask for a version for their os-- you can just install linux in a vm if you want to use this.

barbazoo• 3 years ago

This is fantastic. I hope more people support them.

behnamoh3• 3 years ago

His link [0] makes me trust him more about what he's doing as he's clearly using Vim/Neovim :)

0: https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1338932056743546880

luispauloml• 3 years ago

he's clearly using Vim/Neovim

The author directly mentions Emacs twice and one of their liked tweets says "in practice most of my logical 'windows' are actually browser tabs or Emacs buffers": https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1176587656915849218

behnamoh3• 3 years ago

There's Evil mode on Emacs which is basically Vim.

linza• 3 years ago

That looks incredibly useful. Now i imagine i had a small terminal window within my browser that i could focus by pressing ESC ...

djha-skin• 3 years ago

I was just thinking there is nothing new under the sun, but then I find imaginative programs like this.

hendzen• 3 years ago

This is really cool. Great work

phillco5• 3 years ago

If you're on macOS, you can do a small piece of this natively with AppleScript (or anything that can send apple events) in Chrome or Safari -- namely, you can iterate through windows or tabs, view their source code, and execute arbitrary javascript you pass (there's a one time security option you have to accept). This can be handy for quick automations if you don't want to install anything.

(Background: I have RSI, so I've been developing some integrations between applications and Talon Voice (https://talonvoice.com/). AppleScript ends up being surprisingly valuable/fast/reliable for applications that support it. I also built an integration with iTerm2's Python API before noticing that everything I was trying to do was already supported by its AppleScript dictionary, and was faster. In Google Chrome, the "iterate through tabs and execute javascript in them" is very useful for automating Google Meet muting/unmuting.)

Nothing against this excellent project though; I'm a big fan of Omar's Twitter! And I suspect most here will appreciate the easier scriptability of the filesystem approach than dealing with the atrocious syntax of AppleScript.

_acnx• 3 years ago

Have you got any suggestions for coping with RSI? I'm having significant issues.

mokanfar• 3 years ago

Devote a 4 digit budget for a new workspace that relieves RSI causing movements.

chaorace• 3 years ago

It's all about hardware. I've addressed it quite well with a three-pronged approach:

1. Motorized standing desk - typing from varying postures keeps strain spread out

2. Kensington trackball mouse - less hand sweeping / temptation to drags wrist on table

3. Ortholinear "Planck" keyboard - modifier keys accessible via thumb and programmable layers more generally can completely eliminate painful hand poses and keep fingers on the home-row

Scaevolus• 3 years ago

Have you tried a book on the mind body connection of pain? It helps some people with RSI: https://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connectio...

replwoacause• 3 years ago

The Kinesis Advantage 2 keyboard fixed mine. I also use a Logitech trackball instead of a mouse.

phillco5• 3 years ago

If you're programming, definitely check out Cursorless: https://www.cursorless.org/.

Talon itself provides noise and speech recognition, and provides the framework that allows you to build automations with any program; Cursorless really helps make programming by voice feel comparable to typing.

For me, it's a combination of introducing alternate input methods (largely voice, but noises are also very additive -- they very well for fast/discreet actions, whereas voice is higher bandwidth but lower latency), as well as building higher-level and better integrations with applications. But I still have always to go personally.

I've been meaning to write up a blog post with everything that I've learned, but you know how it is :)

wahnfrieden• 3 years ago

Split vertical keyboards with very very light switches. I use Sofle Choc and have the sides at shoulders width apart

I recommend breaks and rest over strengthening exercises when dealing with hand pain. Learn preventative measures

pmoriarty3• 3 years ago

"If you're on macOS, you can do a small piece of this natively with AppleScript (or anything that can send apple events) in Chrome or Safari -- namely, you can iterate through windows or tabs, view their source code, and execute arbitrary javascript you pass (there's a one time security option you have to accept). This can be handy for quick automations if you don't want to install anything."

Are there any good examples of doing this?

phillco5• 3 years ago

I believe I modified a version of this - https://gist.github.com/lyallcooper/10f48ab050ac8594fe46335e...

cpleppert• 3 years ago

sure, for example this pauses every youtube video in every chrome tab: tell application "Google Chrome" repeat with theWindow in every window repeat with theTab in (every tab of theWindow) if (URL of theTab) contains "youtube.com" then execute theTab javascript "document.querySelectorAll('video, audio').forEach(e => e.pause())" end if end repeat end repeat end tell

There are lots of examples just by googling. The script editor has a dictionary for every application you can natively script.

oefrha• 3 years ago

You don’t need to write AppleScript yourself, someone else has already done the hard work with Scripting Bridge and you can simply enjoy an easy-to-use CLI: https://github.com/prasmussen/chrome-cli

Been using this for about a decade now.

SonicSoul• 3 years ago

interesting, what are your use cases?

nbar• 3 years ago

Love to hear more about this. I also suffer from RSI and would love to know if it’s helped changing input to voice

password4321• 3 years ago

I used to scan all the tabs in open browser windows to list all URLs.

See also https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/ with Playwright et al., even Excel VBA: https://github.com/PerditionC/VBAChromeDevProtocol

Many sites fight against automation, see https://github.com/ultrafunkamsterdam/undetected-chromedrive...

tedmiston• 3 years ago

Shameless plug: I've made a set of AppleScripts I call "Tab Transporter" for moving groups of tabs between browsers. The code is painful to write when you're used to a normal programming language, so these examples could be useful for anyone else looking to interact with browser tabs via AppleScript.

I've used them daily for 5+ years.

https://github.com/tedmiston/tab-transporter

ayewo• 3 years ago

Funny, I do similar [1] though my solution is very basic compared to yours. The script allows me to quickly move the current tab from Firefox or Safari to Arc Browser [2] (which uses Chrome under the hood).

I use the following key-bindings ⌥⌘F or ⌥⌘S in Raycast [3] to activate a tab move to Arc from Firefox or Safari, respectively.

1: https://github.com/ayewo/raycast-script-commands/tree/main/b...

2: https://arc.net

3: https://www.raycast.com/

phillco5• 3 years ago

Nice, thank you!

gymbeaux4• 3 years ago

If I were you I would find out which “RSI” you have. Mine wasn’t from “overuse” per sé, just posture and needing to stretch/exercise.

If your RSI is Carpal Tunnel or Cubital Tunnel Syndrome, a quick and easy surgery is the answer.

If your RSI is tendinitis (unlikely, for all the times I see people self-diagnose with it) rest is your best bet.

If your RSI is arthritis, there are medications and even surgeries out there to help with it, but that’s the easiest one to diagnose because it just requires looking at an x ray of your hand.

You may have carpal tunnel syndrome-like symptoms, but that likely just means you have nerve impingement somewhere between your cervical (neck area) spine and your hand.

I’m not a doctor, but through personal experience I can tell you, you probably have the power to get rid of your “RSI” without resorting to dictation software and so on.

dceddia• 3 years ago

Regarding stretching, I found the book Conquering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome to be a huge help. It has lots of suggestions for kinds of stretches to do based on the kind of work you do, but my big takeaway (and according to the author, the most important part) was how to do the stretches: only stretch until you barely feel a stretch, then hold there until you feel a sense of release. In my experience that was more effective than the “stretch until you feel a good strong stretch” strategy.

https://www.amazon.com/Conquering-Carpal-Syndrome-Repetitive...

codethief2• 3 years ago

This is solid advice! I had "RSI" for years (could barely type or write) and in the end what solved everything were exercises to improve my posture and strengthen my back, neck and shoulders.

scarface74• 3 years ago

If you had told me in 1992 when AppleScript was first introduced that it would be around for over 30 years across three processor transitions, I would not have believed you.

Now they just need to bring back QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc and PowerTalk (please don’t for all that is holy)

fiddlerwoaroof• 3 years ago

Interestingly, all the AppleScript functionality is built on an objective-c api called ScriptingBridge and it’s relatively easy to use a real programming language for the same sorts of things. JavaScript is natively supported by Script Editor, but there’s bindings for Ruby and Python too. I’ve wrapped it up in Common Lisp for my own use: https://github.com/fiddlerwoaroof/objc-lisp-bridge/blob/mast...

varenc• 3 years ago

Just to show folks how simple this is, here's the JavaScript (JXA) version of the AppleScript code needed to run JS in the current active tab:

   /usr/bin/osascript -l JavaScript <<EndOfScript
      var current_tab = Application('Google Chrome').windows[0].activeTab();
      current_tab.execute({  javascript: 'alert(1)'  })
   EndOfScript

Once you figure it out it's not too tricky. For example, I have shell utils for converting all links on a page to "in current tab links" by removing the `target` attr on <a> tags:

    function chromeJS() {
       INPUT="$1";
       INPUT=${INPUT//\"/\\\"} ## escape quotes
       INPUT=${INPUT//\'/\\\'}
       /usr/bin/osascript -l JavaScript <<EndOfScript
          var current_tab = Application('Google Chrome').windows[0].activeTab();
          current_tab.execute({  javascript: '$INPUT'  })
    EndOfScript
    }
    ...
    $ chromeJS "document.querySelectorAll('a').forEach(a => a.removeAttribute('target')); alert('Made all links in-tab links!')"

rektide• 3 years ago

If anyone knows a twitter account even 1/8th as fun as Omar's[1] (the author of TabFS), I'd love to hear it.

Endless fun meditations & musings on code & processes & computing. It's the most live, most inove stream of computing out there.

chrisshroba• 3 years ago

[1] https://twitter.com/rsnous

prhrb• 3 years ago

This seems very interesting and all the uses cases it satisfies

layer84• 3 years ago

I’m already thinking about how to name web pages to trigger shell command injection attacks. ;)

sabujp2• 3 years ago

Be my guest, I'll run this in a vm. But what's even scarier is cross tab exploits. Want to steal data from another tab of a tabfs user?

mgaunard• 3 years ago

This is extremely useful. Thank you.

IncRnd5• 3 years ago

This is a great idea. I really do like this.

However, we shouldn't forget the reduced security of the situation. This opens entirely new attack vectors by introducing the otherwise fantastic ability of local programs to consume network input.

With the flexibility and utility of local information comes additional remote attacks. In doing so, this extension blurs the lines between the greater difficulty of remote attacks vs local attacks. Many programs never considered in their threat models that input would come over the network. There are many developers who never try to protect past a certain point, saying, "if the person gets this far, there is nothing we can do anyway", then they ship.

rmbyrro2• 3 years ago

Isn't this already a reality with wget, curl, and even package managers like pip and npm?

I mean, any script on my machine can use these tools to interact with network input and execute untrustworthy code...

IncRnd5• 3 years ago

That's not the issue. The issue is adding network input into local tools whose threat models never considered having network input.

gorgoiler• 3 years ago

Except now the attacker has your cookie jar with the bank.com cookie in it.

(Fantastic extension, btw.)

chisquared• 3 years ago

even package managers like pip

This reminds me of a blog post [1] I read before. Pertinent quote:

Unbeknownst to me, even with --dry-run pip will execute arbitrary code found in the package's setup.py. In fact, merely asking pip to download a package can execute arbitrary code (see pip issues 7325 [2] and 1884 [3] for more details)!

Also seen on Twitter [4].

[1] https://moyix.blogspot.com/2022/09/someones-been-messing-wit...

[2] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/7325

[3] https://github.com/pypa/pip/issues/1884

[4] https://twitter.com/moyix/status/1566561433898426368

vorpalhex5• 3 years ago

If your local machine is compromised such that your mountpoints are free game to some tool running.. what difference do you think this will make? Your cookie jar IS STILL exposed without this.

IncRnd5• 3 years ago

You misunderstand the security implications, so making categorical statements like that isn't useful. While random running processes may be on a developer's machine, that's not at issue here.

hannasm• 3 years ago

I think the security implications of this would qualify as a fantastic new problem to solve if it's really of any meaningful consequence.

vitiral• 3 years ago

One of the coolest use-cases for this for me is the ability to "host" these folders on a server and be able to access it from embedded contexts. I'm hoping to write a full computer stack that can run on microcontrollers (GitHub.com/Civboot/fngi), including a gopher-like browser for lightweight protocols. It could never interface with the real WWW... unless it had a server hosting the browser like this!

evo_9• 3 years ago

Took me forever to find a good option on FireFox, Simple Tab Groups is pretty awesome: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

loa_in_• 3 years ago

BroTab exposes a python library for doing same in Firefox

throwaway290• 3 years ago

It says some features are Chrome-only. How much of what us shown will not work in Safari? If anyone already tried. Otherwise I might...

beckhamc• 3 years ago

Nice work! Is it possible to somehow switch to a tab somehow using this? (Use case: switching browser tabs within Emacs). Thanks

arambhashura• 3 years ago

You mean like what this does?

https://github.com/atomontage/osa-chrome https://melpa.org/#/osa-chrome

timetraveller26• 3 years ago

unix gang approves

smusamashah• 3 years ago

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25600338

greatgib• 3 years ago

This is so awesome, I can't believe that someone really created that.

I have dozens of windows, each with thousands tabs and this is something I would have dreamed of if I knew that it was possible.

Really kudo to this guy for that!

eichin• 3 years ago

Hmm, this might be the right audience - anyone with C and JS skills want to poke at https://github.com/osnr/TabFS/issues/75 and maybe come up with a pull request? (I got as far as I could on the C side, all the details are in the issue, but I'm not sure what shape the javascript side of the fix would be...)

nchudleigh• 3 years ago

Now THAT is unix philosophy at its best.

rsync2• 3 years ago

I wish I could just visit about:tabs and see a plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs I have open.

No esoteric attack vectors, no major new features or integrations, just a quick and easy way for any user regardless of technical ability to dump their tabs before they update firefox or reboot their system ...

... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.

As it stands, you need to dig several directories deep into /Library (or whatever, depending on your OS) and then use JSON tools to export ... I've already lost most people.

FWIW, rsync.net has an outstanding $1500 bounty for this feature[1]. Consider this an inflation adjusted bump to $2500.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24524923

ww520• 3 years ago

I built [1] for the reason to save and restore the browsing tabs. It has export and import sessions feature as a by product. [2] also has a test list mode on tabs.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/session-boss/

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tip-tab/

rsync2• 3 years ago

Thanks - I will look at these.

Sebb767• 3 years ago

... since everyone has been burned by a FF restart that, for unknown reasons, fails to restore tabs even when configured properly to do so.

I've actually had this several times with Chrome, but never with Firefox. The major point of me moving to FF actually was when Chrome lost 50 Tabs once again.

frontierkodiak• 3 years ago

Firefox reliably remembers my tabs, but never my pinned tabs-- which, of course, are the ones that I actually want to be preserved across restarts. In my dream world, pinned tabs persist forever, and are even accessible across devices, perhaps sorted into separate containers à la Sideberry.

mgdlbp• 3 years ago

Firefox's session is stored entirely within sessionstore.jsonlz4 in the profile folder (and backups, or while running, in sessionstore-backups) -- locate using about:profiles. It's a nonstandard lz4 container but you can find implementations, e.g. lz4json/lz4jsoncat in some package managers.

Once decompressed you have json lists of windows of tabs, including recently closed; for every tab, urls and titles of each entry in per-tab history, base64ed favicon, last selected time, and various less useful data (some still incomprehensible -- binary serialized or cache keys?). Cookies and data from extensions like treestyletabs are in there too.

OTOH... is there a currently working deserializer for Chrome's session files?

madphilosopher• 3 years ago

Indeed! Dumping this recovery.jsonlz4 file on the command line is how I inspect and archive all my tabs and windows. You can do this on remote systems, too, and Firefox does not need to be running.

The scripts I use to do this can be found here:

https://github.com/madphilosopher/dump_firefox_session

weaksauce• 3 years ago

I have a extension that does that almost pretty identically to what you are looking for... it does list out every page you have but doesn't list the url. there is an unreleased version that I use that has a tab dumping to json that I use for just that session restore reason.

Maybe I'll finish the updated version and release it soon.

feel free to check it out: https://github.com/fiveNinePlusR/tabist

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabist/

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabist/hdjegjggiog...

hnaccy• 3 years ago

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tabhunter/

Makes it simple to select all tabs and copy paste as url or url + title

It's also snappy for filtering and jumping to tabs especially when using the hotkey, I've used it for years with regularly over 5k tabs.

concordDance• 3 years ago

I just use Tree Tabs ability to export the entire sessions tabs.

My work laptop has around 30MB of old Tree Tabs exports I haven't gotten around to deleting.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-tabs/

sicariusnoctis• 3 years ago

With Sidebery (modern alternative to TST), the tab tree is automatically backed up every $time_interval.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-CA/firefox/addon/sidebery/

hitekker• 3 years ago

Great takedown in the linked thread. jhardy54 snarks that the author just needs to open a patch. When rsync presses, it turns out jhardy54's own patches have been completely neglected by the maintainers and he hasn't been able to merge them in.

sert121• 3 years ago

Onetab does it, and lets you export your links as a text file as well.

paulirish• 3 years ago

about:discards is almost this. (Chromium desktop)

gaws• 3 years ago

wish I could just visit about:tabs and see a plain text listing, one URL per line, of all the tabs I have open.

Tablist[1] does this

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tablist/

brimstedt2• 3 years ago

Pretty cool, but my advice to anyone is still "stop using tabs, you os already have a window manager"

beaugunderson• 3 years ago

tabs are great, why would I want 147 windows open? I can group my tabs by window; e.g. work, personal, side project, etc.

brimstedt2• 3 years ago

My counterquestion is: why use tabs as bookmarks?

Usually when you have that many tabs open, it's not because you read/work on the pages.

haunter• 3 years ago

Something in a similar vein: BTFS, mount a torrent file (or magnet link) as a read only drive https://github.com/johang/btfs

It's really good, and use it a lot of times. Doesn't seem to be an active project anymore though but it still works

sampa• 3 years ago

for Firefox I use this

lz4jsoncat ~/.mozilla/firefox/YOUR_PROFILE.default/sessionstore-backups/recovery.jsonlz4 | jq '.windows[].tabs[] | .index as $a | .entries[$a-1] | .title,.url'

danShumway2• 3 years ago

If anyone already uses Sideberry (and I assume TST will work as well) on Firefox and doesn't want to download an additional extension or doesn't want something quite this powerful, I wrote https://textmark.netlify.app/ a week or two ago, and I've been using it as a bookmark replacement.

Sideberry allows selecting arbitrary groups of tabs and copying them to the clipboard as an indented list of tabs. The site I put up will reopen those tabs, preserving the order and parent-child relationships between pages. It also uses `rel=noopener` to avoid a security risk I've noticed with similar sites in the past with parent-child page references. And it has no advertising and absolutely zero user tracking (aside from Netflify serverside logs that I can't turn off), since it's a project I made for myself and costs me nothing to run.

Also, the entire source (minus the favicon) is in one page, so if you want to self-host it yourself for extra protection, just view-source and copy and paste. It'll work on any static web host.

I've found this to be a hugely beneficial replacement for bookmarking. Bookmarks are too slow and cumbersome for me, so I end up not really using them. It's also annoying to enter descriptions for bookmarks, and I don't like that all of my bookmarks need to be in the browser at the same time. This allows me to copy tabs out to separate files (I use org-mode to sort everything). And then I just keep this site pinned and use it to reopen tabs later if I context-switch. It's the closest I've ever come to being able to actually manage my browser sessions and stop my tabs from growing out of control into the thousands.

I was going to wait to Open Source it and write up a better explanation of the workflow I use before sharing it, but it's appropriate to share it here. It's not nearly as powerful as what TabFS is talking about (and I'm very interested to look into TabFS more, since I've been thinking about roughly the same problem, and this looks like a potentially quite powerful setup), but it's a small system that has made a big impact for me over the past week or so, and since I was already using Sideberry it doesn't require me to install anything new or open any additional attack vectors.

mkl• 3 years ago

For some reason (to confuse everyone?) it's "Sidebery", with one r. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

danShumway2• 3 years ago

Thanks for letting me know, I appreciate the heads up.

_V_• 3 years ago

This looks quite nice - for some time I have been trying to list all tabs in Chromium window so I can stick it to proper workspace (I'm using i3) - one for general browsing and one for IM/socials.

If this can identify the window (PID or better WindowID like wmctrl -l lists) it will be perfect!

lerax• 3 years ago

Oh cool! it seems I am a first class citizen here! Linux + Chrome + Emacs user! I will test it

sabujp2• 3 years ago

I have to thank emacs OS (users) for this browser extension.

jacob019• 3 years ago

Can this be used like selenium for testing/scraping/automation? If you can open tabs, dump the DOM and inject JS, then I would think so.

TenJack• 3 years ago

This reminds me of Bookmark OS but not in the browser https://bookmarkos.com

arjvik• 3 years ago

What would it entail to add support for this to another browser?

Is there an API contract defined and documented anywhere?

I'm specifically hoping to use this with Qutebrowser

wraptile• 3 years ago

Qutebrowser already kinda does this. You can use environment variables to access most browser details in python user scripts. For example, QUTE_HTML points to file containing current tab's HTML.

It has been one of my favorite things about this browser as you can quickly write up easily maintainable user scripts in Python compared to whatever unmaintainable magic greasemonkey scripts end up being.

See more: https://qutebrowser.org/doc/userscripts.html

EFruit3• 3 years ago

I use a deeply modified fork of this every day. My changes have been:

1. Rewrite the backend in Go (I'm nkt qualified to audit the C version, and having Web Stuff™ interact directly with an unaudited C filesystem daemon makes my skin crawl)

2. Modularize it quite a bit to make it easier to add endpoints like...

3. Rudimentary Tree-Style Tabs support

4. Desperately try to improve the performance enough to navigate a sizable session (I have not yet succeeded)

Even after all this, I've come to the conclusion that the relationship is backwards: the filesystem representation needs to drive the browser, not the other way around.

It's my considered opinion that some hero needs to step up and build a browser that exists to render one tab and nothing else, shelling out for everything more complex than scrolling. Then the power users cwn supply their own tab/bookmark/window/filesystem schemes using whatever glue they prefer, be it python, node, shell scripts, Windows Explorer...

ramijames• 3 years ago

At that point it's just an OS.

MathMonkeyMan• 3 years ago

That's a good point. Browsers are desktop environments with a built-in application runtime. Maybe it's the "Inner-platform effect."

It's an interesting idea to pull bits of the browser back into the system, or alternatively to write a desktop environment that's also a web browser (ChromeOS?).

A former coworker used Plan9 at a previous job, and he said it was cool how you could draw a rectangle on part of a terminal, and pipe that text (as it changes) to another process. Maybe rethinking GUI (and web in particular) from a unixy/plan9y perspective is a worthwhile exercise.

I grew up on Windows, and then there was the browser, and now everything is just the browser.

alanbernstein2• 3 years ago

I just moved my bookmark management out of my browser because I wanted to use unix-y tools to deal with them. CLI instead of a GUI afterthought. I think you're absolutely right. I'd love to access browser history at CLI. And management of open tabs.

Care to share your fork? Go works better for me.

EFruit3• 3 years ago

FUSE proxy: https://gitgud.io/ee/gtabfs WebExtension: https://gitgud.io/ee/tabfs

Caveat _extremely_ emptor: This code works on my machine, and I have no recollection of how it came to be that way. There are undoubtedly bugs, both obvious and subtle, in both halves. The Go side is a pile of garbage (in no small part because of the countless interfaces it has to implement).

It is EXTREMELY unlikely that either the server or extension is compatible with its original counterpart. The filesystem layout itself has been reorganized more along the lines of /sys conventions.

UltimateEdge2• 3 years ago

Could you expand a bit more about your bookmark management strategy?

love2read• 3 years ago

Is your fork opensource? If so, would you mind giving a link?

EFruit3• 3 years ago

Yes, see the sibling comment, and for the love of all that is holy, heed the warnings. Use it at your own peril, and even then with caution and distrust.

soulofmischief• 3 years ago

What I want is foobar2000 + meets browser (decoupled renderer/chrome/css engine/javascript runtime/plugin system etc)

jolmg• 3 years ago

It's my considered opinion that some hero needs to step up and build a browser that exists to render one tab and nothing else, shelling out for everything more complex than scrolling. Then the power users cwn supply their own tab/bookmark/window/filesystem schemes using whatever glue they prefer, be it python, node, shell scripts, Windows Explorer...

That's basically uzbl. The core version has no tabs, no bookmarks, no history, and is extensible in whatever language. Seems it's been abandoned, though.

https://www.uzbl.org/

madeofpalk• 3 years ago

* > It's my considered opinion that some hero needs to step up and build a browser that exists to render one tab and nothing else, shelling out for everything more complex than scrolling.*

Is that not what your OS's 'native' web view API is?

rakoo• 3 years ago

As alluded in the post, we should all have switched to Plan 9 decades ago. Everything behaves like a file, which means you get a mountpoint for web stuff (https://man.9front.org/4/webfs), and use another application that reads and writes files on top of that (https://man.9front.org/1/mothra).

I fear the current web is too complicated for that. All hope is lost, the web cannot be salvaged.

iFreilicht• 3 years ago

Would suckless surf fit that bill?

https://surf.suckless.org/

yonz• 3 years ago

Genius! Gott love it when simple ideas create game changing improvement.

I have 168 tabs open and regardless of how hard i organize them, it's still a mess. I will give this a try today.

zemetras• 3 years ago

Working on a nodejs/electron app called "canvas" (code hosted on a personal gitlab inst for now), core functionality being organizing all your data into "contexts". A context is identified with a context url - fe customerA/projectP/reports, each url part representing a layer on top of your data, using roaring bitmaps and lmdb underneath. Switching your context to customerB/projectR automatically changes your tabs(socketio based poc ff extension), it also exports all your data(data/abstr/notes, data/abstr/tabs, data/abstr/files etx) as part of a webdav exported "virt" fs tree. While the concept is not new, paired with the cli iface the ux is a huge boost to productivity, witch chokidar based monitoring of downloads and desktop and minio/s3, my drsktop is finally used as a virtual work desk and not as a showcase for the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Stay tuned

zemetras2• 3 years ago

Working on a nodejs/electron app called "canvas" (code hosted on a personal gitlab instance for now), core functionality being organizing all your data into "contexts". A context is identified by a context url, fe customerA/projectP/reports, each url part representing a layer on top of your data, using roaring bitmaps and lmdb underneath. Switching your context to customerB/projectR automatically changes your tabs(socketio based poc ff extension), it also exports all your data(internally data/abstr/notes, data/abstr/tabs, data/abstr/files etc) as part of a webdav exported "virtual" fs tree. While the concept is not new, paired with the cli iface the ux is a huge boost to productivity, esp with chokidar based monitoring of the os downloads and desktop folders and minio/s3; my desktop is finally used as a virtual work desk and not as a showcase for the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Stay tuned

dcreater• 3 years ago

Does this load all videos and images into the filesystem for Onlyfans?

TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem

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