Sorting 400+ Chrome tabs in seconds

This article isn&#x27;t about sorting a list in Javascript. This is about grouping tabs based on category. That requires extracting the topic of a tab title and marching similar topics together into a small list; not something you can do in Javascript as reliably as a language model can.<p>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.<p>You may say &quot;that&#x27;s a ridiculous amount of tabs, why don&#x27;t you close them?&quot; but I&#x27;ve encountered tab hoarding myself back when Firefox could visually group tabs together. You can work on a small project&#x2F;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&#x27;t really need to bother anyway.<p>Everyone who&#x27;s going &quot;wtf sorting 400 items shouldn&#x27;t take a minute why would you do this&quot; clearly hasn&#x27;t read the article. If you can&#x27;t read the article because a site just got hugged to death, please with withhold your criticism until you&#x27;ve managed to find the article contents.

&gt; The idea is simple: Give GPT3 a list of items and ask it to return a list of categories those items belong to.<p>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?<p>(A really cool feature that Chrome doesn&#x27;t have would be the ability to search the <i>content</i> of the webpage as well.)<p>What about something simpler, both architecturally and computationally. Start with something boring, like BM25. In my experience it works surprisingly well. If that&#x27;s not good enough, then running a free model from Huggingface would be the next best option.<p>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&#x27;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.

My &quot;browser stack&quot; is based around Microsoft Edge.<p>- Vertical tabs are native and function perfectly.<p>- It sleeps inactive tabs to save RAM.<p>- 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&#x27;s the only time I use it, so it&#x27;s all good. Tons of extensions try to do this, but it&#x27;s nice not to have to use one.<p>- 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&#x2F;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.<p>Honorable mention extensions I&#x27;ve tried but ultimately don&#x27;t use anymore:<p>- Tab Xpert [3] It&#x27;s a full-featured tab session manager, one of the better ones I&#x27;ve tried. Very stable with an active, very responsive developer. Probably great for some people, but I don&#x27;t end up having so so many tabs that I find it necessary.<p>- 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&#x27;t realize how many SPAs with single URLs there are until you start using something like that.<p>I also recently got access to Arc Browser [5]. It seems great and I like a lot of the design decisions. Haven&#x27;t moved over to using it by default yet though.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;introducing-workspaces-in-edge-new-feature&#x2F;td-p&#x2F;2263507" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcommunity.microsoft.com&#x2F;t5&#x2F;discussions&#x2F;introduci...</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;auto-group-tabs&#x2F;danncghahncanipdoajmakdbeaophenb?hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;auto-group-tabs&#x2F;da...</a><p>[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tabxpert.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tabxpert.com&#x2F;</a><p>[4] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;clutter-free-prevent-dupl&#x2F;iipjdmnoigaobkamfhnojmglcdbnfaaf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;chrome.google.com&#x2F;webstore&#x2F;detail&#x2F;clutter-free-preve...</a><p>[5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arc.net&#x2F;</a>

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.<p>Combine tabs with different profiles and they get better organized.<p>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: &quot;What? Only 400 elements sorted? In a whole minute? What criteria did they look for to sort them?&quot;<p>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.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;kH2XH" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.md&#x2F;kH2XH</a>

Spoiler: this is part 1, chrome &#x2F; brave focused, no GPT3 or rust yet, just chrome APIs and JS.<p>The approach is to make an API (which calls the OpenAI API) and an extension that calls your API, so you don&#x27;t have to share your OpenAI API in your extension.

An alternative to using GPT could be NLP Clustering.<p>If you clustered hierarchically, you could even make groups <i>within</i> 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

I don&#x27;t know what this is, but I&#x27;m pretty sure I don&#x27;t want it.

Site is hugged to death &#x2F; dead for now.<p>Too bad there isn&#x27;t a service which automatically queues all of hn&#x2F;new to archive.org and archive.today for snapshotting.<p>Edit: @brokenmachine: LOL, good one. Thanks, I needed that.

No idea what this is since the URL is dead but it sounds like a joke based on the title...