Open Tabs

BobWP:
Hey.

Nathan Wrigley:
Hello there.

BobWP:
How you doing?

Nathan Wrigley:
I’m doing all right. I’m slightly nervous.

BobWP:
Slightly nervous? A little bit, yeah. What do you think about Open Tabs?

Nathan Wrigley:
Open Tabs. Okay, so I guess we’re talking about a browser. Yeah.

BobWP:
Oh.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, no.

BobWP:
Yeah, we can.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
Okay, let’s do that.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, go in that direction. Okay. Okay. So Open tabs, as in. In a browser. I have too many. I have way too, way too many open tabs. In fact, I have so many open tabs, I have an extension built into my browser to manage the open tabs, but all it does is it just puts the problem off until another time. So I just store them in this thing in the vain expectation that at some point I’ll come back and look at them. And of course, I never do. And now my Open Tabs extension is, I don’t know, about 8,000 and counting.

BobWP:
So. So you keep all these tabs open all the time or you.

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, so this thing kind of puts them in a silo and remembers where they were, but they’re never open. Actually, I have to go into that.

BobWP:
So it’s kind of a, like, bookmarking history of writing.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yes. Yeah. And. And it’s going way back into the dawn of the Internet. And I. The stuff that I will never need, I at, but I just use it as a. Like a refuse bin. I just, you know, keep chucking stuff in there, and it gets full up, so I make the hole bigger and then just keep throwing more stuff in and make the hole a bit bigger until. Until there’s no point in using it anymore.

BobWP:
But. So you’ve never went back through them or did once while.

Nathan Wrigley:
Okay, so it’s a bit like I now look at it with fear. The task of going back through it is like days. Days of stuff. What I should probably do is just delete the whole tab thing, the. The extension, and just. That’ll get it to zero.

BobWP:
Then it’s like, what’s the point? You know.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’S a metaphor for life, Bob. This is.

BobWP:
So how many tabs do you have open right now?

Nathan Wrigley:
Okay. Right now. Okay. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. They got eight over there. I’ve got another eight over there. I would say I’ve got about roughly.

BobWP:
That would open right now. Yeah, I have two tabs. One of them is this.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, you see, you. You’ve got a much more slimmed, dare I say it, stoic way of leading life, you know, whereas I’m much more cluttered, it would appear, however, in my defense, many, almost all of the 45 that I’ve currently got open, that haven’t ended up in that extension, that recycle bin, that hole in the ground, they’re actually useful. So all of the 45, at some point in the next few days, I will go into. So it’s things like I’ve got Gmail open, I’ve got my website open. I’ve got a variety of different websites open. They’re all, all things.

BobWP:
Okay, so you don’t, you don’t close your, you don’t turn off your computer, you just leave it on all the time, or does it remember the tab?

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, yeah, so I use that option when you shut down the computer which says reopen everything, exactly how it was. And that’s not good because.

BobWP:
No, that isn’t good.

Nathan Wrigley:
It is good in that I’m not consuming power. At least, you know, that’s the, the environmental side is quite good. But I’m just right back where I started there.

BobWP:
Yeah, I was gonna say, then you. Then you waste a bunch of time figuring out where you were yesterday.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s a first world problem.

BobWP:
Potentially important today.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, well, and none of it is important. I, I had this great piece of advice in, in long, in the past, long before I got into web development, I had a job. I may have told you this before I had a job. And in this job there was lots of paperwork and, you know, things that needed to be done for compliance and what have you. And on my first day at work, this lady came up to me and she said, you will, you will create so much paperwork and it will just get bigger and bigger and bigger and this mountain of paperwork will get you down. And she said, what you need to do is just throw it all away periodically. Just chuck it in the bin. And she said, and she told me a story. She had this mountain of paperwork. She had not been told that it would build up. She had not been told to throw it away. And then one Christmas she was going to take it all home to finally deal with this mountain of paperwork. And she was just about to leave the office and the only thing that would cope with the size of it was a bin liner, like a trash bin liner, you know, a plastic bag that wouldn’t typically go in a trash can or something. So she filled that up and then she thought, okay, great, I’ve got it all, I’ll deal with it at Christmas. And then she went to use the bathroom and she came back and the janitor thrown it all away. And she panicked. I thought, oh, I’M in such trouble, you know, all of this important paper, all of these things, these tasks that I have to carry out. And then she went home at Christmas, panicked about it, worried about it, and then came back in the new year to discover the, the beautiful truth that nobody cared. And, and all of this paperwork had been unnecessary the whole time. And it just took that, like, that mental leap to say, I don’t care. And then she developed this philosophy, which was, if somebody sends me a piece of paperwork, I’ll bin it. And, and if they ask for me, if they ask me for it back, I’ll just say, sorry, I seem to have lost it. Can you send it to me again?

BobWP:
Oh, if it’s important enough.

Nathan Wrigley:
Exactly. Right. So if somebody needs the thing that they’ve sent you, that they’ve offloaded to you and they really need it back, then they’ll ask for it a second time and, you know, I’ll apologize and I’ll give it back. Well, I’m like that with tabs. I appear. I’m just building them up and worrying about them and there they all are. And really what I need to do is, like you suggested, switch the computer off and come back with no tabs. It’s a bit like that with my email inbox as well. I think I need to get rid of the 400 email I’ve got in there at the minute.

BobWP:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
So you weren’t. That wasn’t what you meant by open.

BobWP:
No, actually, open tabs is good because I was. I thought about open tabs and then I thought about open tabs. So I was actually thinking about two open tabs. Well, more than two. Not actually two open tabs, but two, quote, unquote, open tabs. I don’t know, maybe, maybe. I don’t know what I’m talking about.

Nathan Wrigley:
When I said open tabs, like in a browser, and you sort of seem to go, no, not that I. Then my head immediately went to, oh, you mean like in a bar where you open up a tab and everybody, you know, has a skin full of beer and you. Well, that’s true, yeah, I thought that’s what you meant by. But no, it didn’t mean browser thing.

BobWP:
Well, basically, when you think about it, all open tab lead to horrible things. I mean, open tab in the bar, open tabs in the browser.

Nathan Wrigley:
So, yeah, I remember. I remember when Firefox, I can’t remember which Firefox. So back in the day, back in the day, the early days of the Internet, I was like everybody else, you Know, using. I think it was probably Internet Explorer. Maybe it was version like 4 or something like that. And then Firefox Mozilla came out with their Firefox browser with tabs in it and suddenly you could have like two or three things open at the same time. Because previously if you wanted to have two things open, you had to open up two, two Internet Explorer sessions or Netscape Navigator or whatever it was called. And. And so you could only do one thing basically at a time. And Mozilla, which now turns out to have been a bad decision, Mozilla, because what you did, you laid the foundation for people like me to have 8,000 unnecessary things to worry about.

BobWP:
So do you have your tabs, not your bar tab, but your tabs on your browser? Now we’re back to that actually. Or you were talking about. But anyway, across the top or on the side?

Nathan Wrigley:
Okay, so all right, there’s a whole. Oh, I can never figure this out. So I’m on the, I’m on the left at the minute. I’ve. I’ve just recently installed. And it’s not a new browser, but it’s new to me. It’s called Vivaldi and it has the option to display them on the left on the right on the top or the bottom. So you know, the full, the full range of locations. And I’ve ended up with them on the left, but I’m on a wide ish monitor. Like it’s, it’s like cinema screen dimensions, you know, significantly wider than more or less. Every website would, would display it to you. So having them on the left is fine. But I’ve also got a laptop with a much more kind of four by three aspect ratio and having them on the side there kind of eats into the screen estate. But I much prefer was the ARC browser. I don’t know if you remember when that came around, there was a browser called ARC that mysteriously kind of went away recently. I don’t think they could make it work financially. But anyway, it’s had a sort of new lease of life elsewhere with AI and it was the first one that alerted me to the fact that you could have them on the side. And I really like it. I really much prefer it. If you, if you haven’t tried it, give it a. Yeah, that’s where I.

BobWP:
Have them on the side in Brave. So ah, yeah, yeah, they have them on.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah. Because I have my browser of choice.

BobWP:
I have some of my bookmarks on the top. So if I have open tabs on the top with bookmarks, it’s ridiculous. There’s too many things up there. I don’t know where I’m at any given time.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s definitely, it’s definitely a modern problem. If you were to go back, like, I don’t know, well, you could go back just 50 years. But let’s say, go to the Romans and say to a typical Roman, do you know what people are going to worry about in the future? And, you know, they’re worrying about starvation and warfare and being hit by an ax or something. And, well, people will be worrying about open tabs and how many tabs they’ve got. And the Roman will scratch his head and look at you and just think.

BobWP:
And people also, you know, on, like on X and all those wonderful places, they wear it like a badge when they have a lot.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, like I’ve got low score tabs.

BobWP:
How many tabs do you have open? I have 150. And I swear, people probably go and open a bunch just for they can get on the conversation and beat the next person.

Nathan Wrigley:
Do you have to post screenshots to demonstrate your loyalty to the cause? Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you’ve got them, you’ve got them aligned horizontally at the top and you’ve got, let’s say, I don’t know, any, any number over 100, how do you even get the mouse to go? Like, how thin is the slip?

BobWP:
When I have a bunch open? And I never usually probably have more than, you know, sometimes I might have 30 or 40 and it just, it’s either because I’ve clicked on a link and it opened it in a new window and it kept, oh, yeah, over there. Yeah, which, you know, some of them automatically do. And I’ll start looking over there. I’ll just think, what is this? And I actually, I’ve forgotten, oh, what was that? And then sometimes I’ve left something halfway done and I think, oh, I was filling out that form.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, just.

BobWP:
I kind of forgot about that.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, it’s like a whole different reality down there.

BobWP:
Yeah, it is.

Nathan Wrigley:
But the. It is a good way if you put them on the left. Actually, to be honest with you, I’ve never, I’ve never put so many in the left hand sidebar that, that they occupy more space than is available. I’m guessing it would start to scroll. I’m guessing, you know, the tabs would go below the browser window and you’d have to scroll up and down. I think my new rule of thumb is if they, if I need to start scrolling the tabs, I’M overdoing it. I need to start removing. It’s raining rain in the tabs. Just do what that lady did, chuck them in the bin and you know.

BobWP:
Yeah, because you see more of it and then the little things along the top, you actually see all these things listed.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yes.

BobWP:
You might see something really weird that you thought, oh, yeah, I did open that for a second. That was a mistake. Why did I leave that open?

Nathan Wrigley:
So, yeah, I am. I definitely have like this ongoing quest to find the perfect browser. And that is part of it is being able to wrangle tabs and things like that. And so I’ve tried them all recently. You know, I’ve got, I’ve got a Mac, so I’ve got Safari, which there’s so many of the things that I desire in terms of like chromium based extensions. They’re not functional, but I’ve tried that. I’ve tried Edge, I’ve tried Brave, I’ve tried this new one called Helium, I tried arc, I’ve tried the Orion browser from Kagi. And in the end I probably change about once every couple of months. I settle on one and think, this is it, this is browser nirvana. And then after a little bit of, you know, once I’ve become familiar and comfortable with it, some little grain of sand, some little moat will get in my eye and I’ll be like, whoa, that’s not good. They don’t do this very well. And I’ll go off again and I’ll have a whole new session of trying to discover. And often I’ll just go back to a browser that annoyed me in the past in the knowledge that it’s going to annoy me again.

BobWP:
Yeah. What I’ve noticed is that a lot of the sites I go to in Portugal here work in a lot of browsers. They’re the strangest thing. One of the weirdest things it does, and I don’t know if it’s some setting, but it’s when you’re typing in something in the field, you type in the first letter and the cursor bounces over in front of that one and you’re like, whoa. So you have to actually type in something else and paste it in and it can be very irritating. And then sometimes I’ll open up another browser and it’ll work and sometimes it won’t or something else will go wrong.

Nathan Wrigley:
And so you start to type but the following letter ends up being the preceding letter. So for example, if I typed in.

BobWP:
The word cursor just pops over there. So if you’re typing and you’re not thinking about it, you look up there and there’s absolutely nothing that makes sense in that. In that field.

Nathan Wrigley:
So it’s the hysterical thing that just happened in my head. The example I was going to use of how that could go wrong was your name. And then it occurred to me that.

BobWP:
That’S true, actually, that works.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s palindromic. So Bob works. Doesn’t matter if you type it left or right. It ends up. And if you’re.

BobWP:
And if you, you want to make it work, you have to type the letter and then move over, you know, the cursor over and then type another letter and then move it. It’s. It’s really weird. I don’t know if it’s something I. I absolutely have no idea. But, you know, life goes on. So I just often cut and pay something.

Nathan Wrigley:
Do you know what’s really funny about that I had a conversation with somebody recently and. And we thought that the Internet’s become a bit of a boring place. Like, you know, I love stupidity. I absolutely love stupidity. Yeah, you know, not, not like harmful, that. But I enjoy it when frivolous stuff happens. And so I wouldn’t wish it everywhere. But it would be kind of funny if somebody created, I don’t know, an extension to a form plugin in WordPress or something like that where that happened. That was the intended consequence. Okay. Every time you type, it’s going to skip to some random part of the preceding typing and then just dump the cursor there.

BobWP:
Let’s see how you can just let you type on and on and on and.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, then you look at, you know, if you’re one of those typers who looks down at the keyboard as you type, then you look up and it’s just a random selection of letters. That’d be great. There’s so many technologies that you could disrupt for silliness, though. That’s a great example. I’ve often thought that a menu, like a navigation menu on a website. Wouldn’t it be great if, as the mouse approached, the thing that you were approaching just started to move away so that, you know, I don’t know, you go into the about link and as you get closer, it starts to flee the place where it was. And so you move a bit quicker and then it moves a bit quicker and before you know it, you’re chasing the about link around the page and you never quite make it.

BobWP:
There’s been a few others I can’t think of, but Boy, there’s been some weird things that have happened, and it’s. Yeah, I’m not quite sure what’s going on. So, you know, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it. I think, how can I just get this done and move on? So I. It’s exactly what I do. But. But anyway, what were we talking about now?

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, we were talking about open tabs. You. You started it.

BobWP:
Okay. So. So actually I was thinking about open tabs because I was thinking about something else, and it led me back to that, which isn’t actually open tabs in the general form of open tabs. On the browser was something else, but that was people. Scientists have tried to understand my thinking for decades, and they haven’t been able to do. So I ramble a lot like this. I don’t talk a lot.

Nathan Wrigley:
On the podcast you occupy on the Linnaean system of taxonomy of species. There’s like. There’s all of the different insects and plants and animals, and then there’s just like a whole section with Bob just as well.

BobWP:
And no one dares do much with it. You know, they’re hoping it evolves at some point, but there’s little hope. No, I had this idea, you know, we’re kind of talking. You know when you talk shit and you talk about how different that is?

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah.

BobWP:
You know, I mean, it’s like you can. So you have to be careful. You don’t want to say, yeah, I’m talking shit here. I’m talking about. Which is a very more generalized, kind of weird way of thinking. But I. I remember. Remember that podcast we used to do.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, yeah.

BobWP:
Oh, yeah. And that was. That was what? That was a chess show.

Nathan Wrigley:
It was. And we. I’ve archived it somewhere. So I. I took the main domain down, but it’s archived somewhere. I’ll. I’ll. I can give you the link if you like.

BobWP:
Yeah, but it’s there.

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s still on the Internet.

BobWP:
I actually found out we had some fans. I think there were, like, maybe four of them. I found.

Nathan Wrigley:
Yeah, they were. All my children, actually. Miss it. And I paid them.

BobWP:
Yeah, that’s it. You know, it’s. But I was thinking about it and. Why don’t you describe what we did? I mean, what was the premise of it?

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh. So the idea is very similar, it turns out, to what we’re doing now that we would. We. So you and I. The first time you and I ever met was in a sushi restaurant in, I want to say, Porto, where you now live. And we sat next to each other and we got on like a House on Fire and we said, we should do a podcast. We should do a podcast with me and you in it. And then we couldn’t come up with a subject, so we just said, well, let’s just talk shit all the time, okay? And that allowed us the freedom to do whatever we liked. And so we started it. And the idea would be that one of us, we’d alternate. It would be you starting at one time, then me starting at the next time. I think we did about 18 episodes or something. And the opening line would be like, hey. And then I would go, hey. And then the person who was starting it properly would say, what do you think about? And then would say a word or a phrase or whatever. And the other person had no idea what was coming. So a bit like you just.

BobWP:
Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
Opened.

BobWP:
Familiar.

Nathan Wrigley:
And then the other person is like, then flailing around trying to figure out what the heck this podcast is going to be about. And it went on like that. And. Okay, so some people enjoyed that. Did they? Okay, that’s great.

BobWP:
Yeah. And I know we talked about missing it, but, you know, we have never really pursued it. So I. So I thought. Going back to Open Tabs, and now let me think how I thought about this. So I thought about, or I actually mentioned to you, hey, maybe we should bring it to Open channels, like once a month. You know, just get on there and do that format. Because it’s. It’s fun. It’s kind of. You know, hopefully we can get more than four people to listen, maybe five or six.

Nathan Wrigley:
But yeah, I could definitely increase the spend and get some of my friends. Friends.

BobWP:
And then that. But then I didn’t want. Really want to call the show. So I went into my random thinking and I thought, well, open Tabs, it’s kind of like an Open Tabs is kind of the same way when you think about it. Oh, it’s weird. But, I mean, we’re not going to call it Open Tab. I mean, we will call it Open Tabs, but it’s not like some official name. But I was trying to think of a different name, and that’s probably what I was asking at the very beginning. Browser tabs. We just decided to talk about that.

Nathan Wrigley:
Can I just ask, did you let me know it was called that? Should I have known that already?

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, so I’ve thought about that.

BobWP:
So it’s.

Nathan Wrigley:
I have no memory. You’re going to quickly discover that my memory is amazingly bad, even though you told me it was called Open Tabs. I had entirely forgotten that.

BobWP:
No, see I didn’t tell you that.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh I see. Oh good. Okay.

BobWP:
Yeah well I could lie and say I did and you think you forgot but you know anyway I thought it would be fun because we could do kind of the same thing. Keep it a little bit around tech or we can actually drive it. I mean it doesn’t have to necessarily, necessarily be about the open web but it could be. I mean in a sense everything we do is one way or another part of that. So I, I thought of that. I thought. One of the weird things I thought about was so how would I do my sponsors in this show? You know, I mean I usually drop an ad roll and I thought well would that make sense in the middle of our shit to actually drop an ad roll? Yeah and it kind of has me a little bit, you know, thinking how, how would I do it? You know, I mean got Omnisend, they, you know they have their great migration services for SMS and email then. Yeah. Woo. One of our sponsors and you know for your e commerce shop they have all this stuff to make it flexible scale. You just did the ads just. Yeah, no, yeah. Oh that’s true. You know.

Nathan Wrigley:
That’S how to do it.

BobWP:
Yeah. And we do have GoDaddy.

Nathan Wrigley:
But, but I love, I love GoDaddy and Omnisend and Woo. I love them all so much. They’re so good. Everybody should check them out.

BobWP:
Yeah, you should check them out. Yeah, you want to know?

Nathan Wrigley:
It’s just co opted me into advertising. What happened? I was taking over there.

BobWP:
Oh so so you maybe we’ll do this once a month, you know or something to me. Yeah.

Nathan Wrigley:
So same format then you’ll just drop.

BobWP:
Something and we’ll just drop in something and, and we can take it whatever direction we want. Another thing I thought about was be fun is if need we get talking about something and we don’t really know what we’re talking about which is often the case when you and I talk. Oh we could always open up AI and ask it and get some slop and, and share that and then we could act like we know what we’re talking about or actually share something that isn’t correct.

Nathan Wrigley:
You know I, I think that’s a great idea. We’ll just have to heavily couch it in caveat. The whole thing is like non. What is it like legalese talk like these two people have no idea what they’re talking about. Anything that they say should be taken with a pinch of salt.

BobWP:
Well we could Actually, you know, as we’re going along, we could pause and say, oh, let’s see what AI says about this. And we could ask it right there and then. And we’re not, you know, beating around the bush or anything, or we could just totally ignore AI and.

Nathan Wrigley:
Oh, no, I think there’s some fairly good comedy value in there if you get it to hallucinate some stuff. And we talk about that. There’s some new stuff that’s just come out like this. It was 11 labs this week. I think it was 11 labs. It’s a company that deal with, like, audio and voice and transcriptions and things like that. They’ve come out with real time transcriptions. So it will, I think, 50 milliseconds latency, something like that. So the AI will follow along with what we’re talking about. So if we could somehow get that in the conversation, it would know and then we could ask it and it would base what it says on what we have just said. Yeah, that would be kind of interesting. And then we’d get real Time slop. Yeah, Real time slop. That’s a great. That’s what we should call this show. Real Time Slop. Dear me, I’ve had far too much coffee already.

BobWP:
Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Nathan Wrigley:
Well.

BobWP:
Yeah, cool. Well, that’s. I think, what we’ll be doing, you know.

Nathan Wrigley:
Okay.

BobWP:
I’m trying to get back into podcasting a bit more here and there. Fun stuff, not controversial shit. And this is the kind of stuff I love. We’ll see if anybody actually, you know, tunes. Well, we’ll have to send special messages out to our four fans.

Nathan Wrigley:
Well, I was gonna say. I was gonna say we. We really should. I mean, what are you even doing listening to this? If you’ve got this far, I really think you need to think long and hard about what it is that your priorities are in life. Go and have a long, hard think about what’s important and. And then come back episode number two, which will be way better than this one.