Would be nice to have an option on the desktop to mirror the feature available in mobile Safari where old tabs are automatically closed. In the iOS settings for Safari you can specify in the Close Tabs menu -> (Manually, After One Day, After One Week, After One Month). Would be nice if there was an "archived tabs" menu similar to other browsers where you can see tabs that were recently automatically closed.
Thanks!
As of Safari Technology Preview 172 (or just Safari 17 on macOS), there is a preference for closing tabs on a schedule (but no archive feature).
I think if Orion supported filtering the history for archived tabs (e.g. with search tokens or its own page), that would be good.
Closing tabs automatically seems like a very abrupt/unwanted behavior so would like to understand the use case for this and main differences to already implemented "low power mode".
This option never worked for me on iOS (Orion 1.3.6 (2), iOS 17.2.1). Tabs remain unchanged after many days even though I set them to close after 1 day automatically. It's the same problem as with Safari. Does this option work for anyone?
MichaSobczyk This is a thread for Desktop version. Please open a bug report separately (with steps to reproduce)
Vlad especially when using vertical tab layouts it's easy to open a ton of tabs and never close them. For the users that opt to enable the proposed feature, the cleaning work is done automatically, whether it'd be stuff you forgot to close or things that you open "for later" but then never actually click on. This is especially cool with an even shorter minimum time than on Safari (half a day), it feels good to wake up your computer every morning to a clean tab bar
it also can make you engage with open tabs in a more meaningful way. It's tempting to leave everything of mild interest open, but once you turn on auto-close you will need to go either view a tab you opened within the minimum time, or go through the effort to save anything that you want to see in the future. Tabs that you actually care about like research for school/work or really interesting articles will usually make the cut, random youtube videos you opened while procastinating or stuff you wanted to close anyway will not. They'll be gone after a while and won't distract you from whatever you have Orion open to really do
Arc Browser does that and I honestly think it is one of their killer features. They divide tabs in "permanent" ones and "fleeting" ones. First ones stay, second ones get archived after 24h. It feels weird, but when using it, it absolutely makes sense. Tabs that are archived are still accessible in the archive (history). I'd absolutely love for something similar in Orion, makes it so much easier to finish browsing for a day, move whatever you still need to permanent tabs and just start fresh in the morning.
tkg I second this, waking up to a fresh tab bar is so nice! I actually took a break from Orion and switched to Arc for a while to try it out and at first the auto-close function seemed dumb to me so i disabled it. but when i gave it a shot out of curiosity i ended up loving it! When i decided to switch back to Orion and opened it again I was immediately hit over the head with like two browser windows with 40 different tabs each and realized how much I would miss the auto cleanup feature
Arc has a bunch of stuff building upon the auto-closing feature like the "Archive" history, or a second option besides pins to exclude websites from being auto closed. these probably go beyond the scope of the suggestion @AD329 opened, but i think me and a lot of other users would be already be really happy about having some tab auto closing feature with a minimum duration that is short enough to clean up unused tabs by the next morning
tkg I totally agree. Having been used Arc for a while, this feature really eases my mental burden a lot. Facing with a ton of potentially useless tabs is definitely tiresome.
Big +1 to auto-close in Orion, too. It really is a killer-feature in Arc - it allows you to operate effectively "tabless", and you forgot about the tab-bar completely.
Thanks for following up!
In its most basic form, this is an option that specifies that after some period of time (normally 12 hours, or a day, a week, etc.), inactive tabs automatically get cleaned up.
This is effectively like 'house-keeping' - things you're not using eventually disappear, decluttering your tab space of stuff you're likely not working on.
This is typically paired with a very good "omni-search" style flow - that your search bar basically becomes a single place to search for open tabs, history, the internet, and so on. The tab area becomes a staging ground for recent pages (which will load faster), but you access all of these things through the same search method.
In Arc, they combine these things in such a way that you effectively don't even look at your tab system. You can totally hide it, and end up with a window that is only focused on the thing that you're currently doing. It's really compelling - tabs become an afterthought due to the omni-search, and if you really need to find something you were doing recently, the tree-style-tab view allows you to see your access-history (and from where they were accessed due to the nesting).
It sounds weird coming from a traditional tab setup (particularly with horizontal tabs), but I find that this closely mirrors how I think how about getting-things-done (eg. Todoist style). You're only really working on 1 or 2 things at a time, and as you shift contexts, you end up generating "cruft" from opening other tabs, links and whatnot. Knowing that the browser will clean these up removes a garbage-collection step from your tab management.
I know that Orion is not Arc - but they have some really interesting ideas on turning the browser into something that closely matches human-workflows. I don't use Arc anymore as I'm not confident in their security posture, but I deeply miss their UX.
Echoing my preference for this option too.
It should exclude pinned tabs, but I would LOVE an option to auto-close the rest. If I need to keep something, I will bookmark it or pin it (I come from Arc, so mentally those mean the same thing)
I'm considering a switch from Arc to Orion and this is a feature I will sorely miss.
Auto-closing tabs doesn't feel like suddenly losing work, it's about having a clean browser experience. Separating tabs I want to keep from ephemeral tabs that opened because I clicked on a link in my email or slack but I don't really care about. There are other Arc features that help with this but I don't want to go off topic.
Coming back to a "traditional" browser after a year or two on Arc feels like a lot of extra time spent manually auditing tabs to get rid of cruft.
