On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better.
But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
> on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving?
My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible.
We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history.
I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff.
I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are.
On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge.
I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world.
I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
Multiple tools from multiple people make it less likely that the entire ecosystem is going to collapse, but makes it likelier that any one tool will stop working.
But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software).
The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it.
I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.
When you ctrl+S to save a page, by default the first attempt fails, as evidenced by the warning icon in the Downloads button. You click it again to save it, and naturally it redownloads and reexecutes the page and all its resources again. Likewise if you save an already open image, more often than not even when it was just loaded, it will need to be downloaded again.
The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better.
But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.