This isn’t as useless as it seems. It is a visual representation of how old the tab is. And I control what “old” is.
To put it another way, it helps me recognize which tabs I am using. And which I am saving for later without having to evaluate the content of the tab.
One tweak… the coverage percentage can it be adjustable? Max = 100% looses all information about the pages contents, except the title.
Also also… if the images can be made translucent… you can make old timey effects like yellowing and decay.
Related work: Trello allows 'aging' for tasks. One can set them to become more transparent over time or turn into stained 'pirate' paper.
"Originally, I was thinking about blocking users from closing their overgrown tabs until they slash all plants, but I thought it would be too annoying... " I would ask that you please add this as an option :), might actually use it for that feature alone because I do accidentally close old tabs by accident without noticing that was meaning to keep open.
almost completely off-topic, but the demo video very heavy reminded me of http://www.traumagame.com/
I like to throw cress seeds into unattended keyboards
Classic joke at university was to sprinkle cress seeds on the carpet of someone's room and water it with a fine mist from a plant sprayer. In the morning the inhabitant would wake up to a neat lawn that had appeared overnight by magic.
OK, now I'm having flashbacks of astronomy Macintosh lab, late at night, too much homework (early 90's).
Fell asleep in front of keyboard, woke up to "Can of Worms" screensaver (never seen it before), had a heck of a start, wondering what the sound was, and what all those things were crawling all over the screen???
Cress is a word I haven't heard in decades. Got to get some cress!
This is so useless yet so cool!
It is absolutely! (But nobody better try putting this on my browser.)
It doesn't do anything for shareholder value, but I love it.
Unless you make ram
Need more of this kind of fun!
> Just for fun, you can pick your weapon of choice between the rusty machete, the chainsaw and the flamethrower.
I like it!
I have a ton of these tabs. I don't consider them "neglected" though.
Some things take years to come to fruition. You can't just go buy them at home despot.
Maybe younger people don't yet have an appreciation for things that assume an air of legacy and heritage after many years of "just sitting there".
When finally re-visited, they have a meaning that can only accumulate with the passage of significant time...
These useless programs are like what you used to see back in win98 or winxp with dancing monkey or scoopydoo walking all over your desktop windows, which I think later turned to human dancers before being used to distribute all sort of viruses.
sheep.exe was not useless, I loved it. you take that back.
It also creates a human feedback loop. It will train you to instinctively not keep old tabs open as you need to deal with the plants.
Why would you not want to keep them open?
If you have tabs sitting there unused for days, isn't that just a bookmark?
Bookmarks are so badly neglected tabs might be preferable. Firefox mobile doesn't even allow you to tag new bookmarks.
I use tabs as ephemeral bookmarks, yeah
Maybe there’s a better way
Resource conservation ( memory ), attention conservation ( focus, change for additional distractions ) come to mind.