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Chrome tab management; Chrome cache management; OneTab; developers and use logic

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evamaria:
I won't fall on fellow DCs' nerves by endlessly repeating how happy I am to have switched from IE to Chrome, you will have understood this. But now, it's my task to "personalize" Chrome a little bit - which is a pure joy, having all those "extensions" around, BUT some of thise get just rave reviews, and then, ain't but crap, or something similar at least.

First, there is many ERRONEOUS "info" about Chrome's cache M (for management): Many "info" will make you believe the setting "Menu - Settings - Show advanced settings - Privacy - Content settings - Cookies - Keep local data only until I quit my browser" (my gosh!) will clear cookies, history and cache after closing down Chrome - some of them even outrightly will state so.

This is all rubbish.

It seems that some time, Chrome HAD a similar setting (in their early "twenties" perhaps), but they have done away with it, in order to better sell your browsing history (and there is no tool to automatically (!) do away with all those awful Flash cookies, anyway, so you have to regularly go to that macromedia site by your own).

Current state of affairs is, you have to use an extension for clearing your history and your cache (or do it manually; and with such an extension, you don't need those Chrome settings above anymore, anyway...).

As for relevant extensions, multiple sites propose Click&Clean, so I installed that one, but in fact, there are many more, and I suppose they ain't any worse:

History Eraser (from the same developer), ClearCache, OneClickCleaner, CleanTheJunk, NoHistory, SimpleClear, Browser Privacy Clean-Up Assistant, or then BetterHistory (which is something different and could be useful in some instances). ("The winner takes it all" - "nowhere", these alternatives get any coverage, so "they all" install C&C, but well, it seems to do what it promises to do, then!)



And now for tab M and use logic hampered by developers' technical incompetence:

In IE8, this was totally awful, the prob being you get from one link to the other, and at a certain moment in your browsing session, you will have opened 60, 80 or 120 tabs: On my XP system with 2 GB of working memory, response times are totally down in such circumstances.

How to manage such links "for later"? Doing bookmarks? Not handy! So many a times, I left my comp on, for the next day, and even further days, and of course, at some time all of this will become totally corrupted, and you will lose all your finds you will not have properly "processed" then.

Now this in Chrome: First, memory M is MUCH better than with IE, even without that incredibly effective AdBlock running, but WITH Adblock running, it's pure joy to have dozens of Chrome tabs open, in direct comparison with IE: Acceptable response times, no real problems.

But then, from a less compare-it-with-total-sh** but more objective, "2013" pov, having dozens of tabs open in Chrome isn't THAT fun, since you will have to process them (= some checking, some hdd storage if there is something of value for your current research subject, etc.) in a row, which is not really possible without leaving your comp on for days, depending on the subject, and not speaking of any "navigation" between such pages, virtually impossible here, i.e. you have to go "one-by-one", then process the page that presents itself to you, and close it, in order to have, many hours (and / or some days) later, a Chrome state from which then you could close down Windows and your pc.

So there is one extension that only gets rave reviews but which is almost useless though: OneTab.

I installed it, b/o all those rave reviews, and the idea behind it is simple: Close down all your currently openend tabs, but have them stored in one "container" tab, so it's sort of a "local, intermediate bookmarking service" - this also frees your working memory, but my pov is twofold here:

- for one, this freeing of the working memory, most of the time, isn't even really necessary
- and then, whenever you click on such a page, it has to be reloaded, from the web it seems (judging by the response times then)

So, in the end, immediate availability of these pages would be preferable, in most circumstances, but an OPTION to have them cleared from working memory in extreme cases, would indeed be helpful.

Now for my saying it's almost useless, and to explain that part of the title saying that some developers don't code in a logical way, from the users' pov:

In practical use, whenever you have got too many tabs open in your browsing session, you would click on OneTab's symbol, and then have all these pages relegated to the container tab.

But afterward, you will need to "open" these tabs again, in order to process them: "Restore all" would do this, and since you can even form "groups", this doesn't seem to bad at all.

Where things GO BAD, though, is when you will be PROCESSING these re-opened tabs:

Of course, you assume that they will vanish from OneTab list whenever you close them down, or to speak the truth:

There are THREE scenarii in which you would need such a tool:

- in the scenario above where the tool serves for clearing "tab clutter", when there are too many tabs opened at the same time
- in a totally different scenario where you would like to constitute groups of bookmarks for further use
- in a combination of these two where you would use it to de-clutter your tabs, but here and there, you would even want to preserve SOME tab for further use, instead of getting rid of it after processing it

Now, getting rid of tabs is almost impossible with OneTab, since whenever you then close one of your re-openend tabs, it will NOT vanish from the OneTab list, and unfortunately, this makes this tool almost unusable for its intended main use, since you never really know which one from all these pages listed there is ready to be deleted from there, too, manually, and which one has to be preserved, since most of the time, doing research, these pages are rather similarly-named, and, as already said,

there is no back-synch whatsoever from your closed tabs to their listing in the OneTab list.

But again, OneTab is not marketed as a permanent-bookmark tool, but as a tab M tool, and as such, evidently, it's a total failure.

So let's muse about the background: The developer has no knowledge / expertise, presumable, to DO that back-synch between closed-down tabs and his list. Of course, two routines would be needed:

- the usual control-F4 one, for "close current tab AND delete this page from the OneTab list", and then
- a special key combi, let's say, shift-control-F4, for "close current tab BUT preserve it in the OneTab list for further access to it"

It's evident the first alternative would be needed in most cases, for making OneTab the tab M tool it wants to be, AND, indeed, the second alternative would be most helpful for SOME such tabs, but only some... and it's evident the developer doesn't know how to code this, so he codes some appealing offering that at the end of the day is almost useless.

Question is, why those rave reviews, then, on https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en ?

Some interesting extensions I'll have to check out:

Tabs Outliner (very interesting thing, with which OneTab won't work together anyway...)
Tabman Tabs Manager
TabsPlus
Awsome New Tab Page
Vertabs
TabsSaver
SaveMyTabs
TooManyTabsforChrome
Sidewise Tree Style Tabs
TabWrangler
and perhaps some more

But as we see here

1) sheer programming incompetence of developers prevents many good ideas from being realized, and worse:

2) instead of doing nothing, they then realize what they are able to do, and which is not much, and worse:

3) they even get rave reviews for such deceptive tools

Awful. And yes, why not pay some 20 bucks for a tool that lives up to its promises, but good-enough free tools that only do the minor part... the part the developer was technically able to program, leaving out the relevant, really important part... life's too short to be endlessly bothered by such minor software.

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