Blog
Notes on building it
Mostly engineering, occasionally product. Written when a decision turned out to be more interesting than expected.
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Why Chrome uses so much memory with many tabs
What each open tab really costs, how the sleeping-tab settings in Chrome, Edge and Firefox work, and how to keep fewer tabs open without losing any of them.
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How to stop getting distracted while studying online
Block YouTube while you study, run Pomodoro rounds without leaving the browser and get told when to take a break - plus what a browser cannot do about focus.
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How to share many links in one message
Send a list of websites or a whole research session as one message - by copying the addresses, sharing a bookmarks file, or sending one link that carries them all.
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How to reopen your work tabs every morning
Have the browser bring back yesterday's tabs, open a fixed set of pages at startup, or reopen a page every weekday at 9:30 - and where each method falls short.
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How to organise hundreds of bookmarks
Clean up a messy bookmarks bar, sort folders alphabetically, find a website you bookmarked months ago, and work out which bookmarks were reminders all along.
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Lost a tab? How to find it in Chrome, Edge and Firefox
Search every open tab from the keyboard, jump to the one hiding in another window, and get back a tab you closed by mistake - built-in ways first.
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How to choose a tab manager - a checklist
What to check before you install a tab or session manager - permissions, where your data lives, sleep or close, tab groups, export and price.
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Chrome has no tab snooze, and Memory Saver is something else
Searching for tab snooze in Chrome turns up Memory Saver, which does the opposite thing. Here is what each one actually does, and which problem you have.
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How to save every tab before you close the browser
Bookmark all tabs, reopen on startup, and the recently-closed list - what each one actually protects you from, and the gap all three of them leave.
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How to save tab groups in Chrome permanently
Chrome can save a tab group now and most people do not know it. How to do it, and the four things it still will not do for the window you actually lose.
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How to close duplicate tabs in Chrome and Edge
Three ways to find the copies you already have open, including the address bar trick almost nobody knows - and the only method that stops them appearing at all.
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How to restore closed tabs in Chrome, Edge and Firefox
The keyboard shortcut first, then the menu that goes further back, then what to do when neither works - and why the browser's memory runs out sooner than you think.
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The paid tier gates nothing that makes a reminder fire
A licence that lapses must never cost anyone a notification. That one constraint decided what Pro could contain, and where the check is allowed to live.
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Why we stopped cropping the toolbar icon at 16px
Cropping in at 16px bought a bigger clock and cost the icon its colour. Chrome greys an icon to mean disabled, so a grey one reads as broken.
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The plural bug English cannot see
count === 1 is correct in five of our nine languages and wrong in two, where it misdeclines about a third of all counts. Russian's singular also covers 21.
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Dynamic import() is illegal in a service worker
Lazy-loading a 198KB parser off the cold-start path worked in the popup and threw in the service worker. The spec says it must. Here is why, and what it cost.
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A comment claiming a contrast ratio is not a test
The badge marking the most urgent state in the product measured 1.9:1. The palette had a comment asserting a number, and comments do not re-measure themselves.
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Getting reminded when tickets go on sale
A general sale is a page and a moment, and most reminder tools only hold one of them. What to set up so you are on the right page with a queue already forming.
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Remembering to chase the things other people owe you
The invoice, the reply, the review. Waiting-on items have no natural moment to be written down, which is why organised people still forget them.
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Reminders for the things you check on a rhythm
Invoices, renewals, status pages, the quarterly review nobody schedules. Recurring browser checks are badly served by calendars, and the fix is unglamorous.
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Keeping research tabs without keeping the tabs
Deep research generates dozens of pages you might need. Most you will not, and the ones you will have a moment attached. Sorting that out saves the window.
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When a browser reminder is enough, and when it is not
A browser reminder gets you back to the exact page. A calendar reaches your phone. Which failure you can live with is the whole decision, and often it is both.
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Coming back to where you stopped reading
Saving a long page usually means reopening it at the top and hunting for your paragraph. There is a better way, and browsers already support it.
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Reopening a page where you were reading, without a permission
A scroll offset needs a script in the reopened tab, and access to every site you visit. A text fragment needs neither, and survives a reflow an offset does not.
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Organising tabs without keeping them open
Most tab tools help you hold more tabs. If the goal is fewer, the useful question is what each tab is standing in for - and then replacing that thing directly.
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How to save a web page and actually come back to it
Saving is the easy half. The part that fails is the returning, and it fails for a reason you can fix - nothing you saved knows when you wanted it back.
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Why your read-later list stopped working
It worked for a month, then became an archive. Not a discipline problem - a queue with no time in it can only be visited on purpose, and eventually you stop.
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Bookmarks, read-it-later, or reminders?
Three tools that look interchangeable and are not. The difference is whether you have to remember to go and look - and for anything dated, that decides it.
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Chrome tab management, sorted by the problem
Groups, suspenders, session managers, vertical tabs, reminders. Five categories that get recommended interchangeably and solve five different things.
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What to actually do about eighty open tabs
Groups, suspenders and session managers all move the pile somewhere else. The tabs you cannot close are the ones with a time attached, and that is different.
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Why Latr has no server
Every reminder app wants an account. Shipping without a backend turned out to be a product decision, not a shortcut. What it costs, and what it buys.
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The bug that only existed in German
A repeating reminder showed the English word "daily" in all nine translations. The test suite built to catch exactly that never saw it. Here is the gap.
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