25 ms·

Coming to Chrome: a new way to use tabs

• y42 6y ago
  I am a tab minimalist, but still i am looking forward to this. Been using this in the official release for a while now (activate it via chrome:flags). Only thing i am missing is persistency (keep the group if tabs are closed) and some kind of collapsing.
• wyldfire 6y ago
  > tab collectors who have...significantly more Guilty as charged. I have a hard time saying goodbye to some of those tabs sometimes. Tab minimalists react in horror. Meh -- they're missing out. > Now, with a simple right click, you can group your tabs together and label them with a custom name and color. I'm afraid that this might just free enough pixels to allow me to collect yet more tabs. ;)
  • nieve 6y ago
    Don't feel too bad about your tab hoarding, I'm at 3 windows with 4630 tabs and I'm pretty sure I'm closer to a stress test than a user. Chrome can't function with 1/20th of mine and Firefox runs smooth and fast. Restarting with loading all the session data takes seven or eight seconds total. It can't just be the different multi-process models so I'm pretty sure that the Chrome team can do better.
    • slater 6y ago
      4k tabs?!? D:
      • Zancarius 6y ago
        Some of us need help. We're crazy. I've hit close to 10k before when I felt like being incredibly mean to my browser by never closing anything I opened for about 3-4 months.
        • tgbugs 6y ago
          Man, I know I have a problem, and I thought it was bad at about 700 tabs across 25 windows (virtual desktops are enablers for the window count). But seeing this thread I clearly need to up my game/download more memory.
          • nieve 6y ago
            You definitely have a windows problem! Do you end up using large numbers of desktops as topic workspaces for them?
            • tgbugs 6y ago
              In principle yes. The problem is that they loose their topicness and quickly become "oh this was the closest virtual desktops to where you were in the grid with an empty space." This is largely because I made the mistake of originally implementing the transition system as a grid (this was 5 years ago or so). Since then I realized that I basically want a button that will let me create a new topic space, and then remove that space automatically when I close the last window in it. Figuring out how gc stale topics (I can recreate them from memory) and/or discover which topics already have spaces is the hard part (I have had the ability to display topics on desktops via conky for years and that doesn't seem to have helped). I have also thought about trying to decouple how spaces are associated per monitor, but couldn't figure out a way to interact with such a system that wouldn't leave my brain lost somewhere in even higher dimensional virtual spaces than it already is!
              • Zancarius 6y ago
                Reading your comments put into words a behavior pattern I didn't fully recognize I'd adopted, though certainly not to the extreme as you (or with the direct intent). I noticed that my tab + window use started to balloon when it occurred to me that rather than dividing virtual desktops by task (one for dev, one for email/general browsing, etc) I could start moving browser windows from each instance to different locations based upon whatever I was doing (or for that matter, application-specific tasks). It's an exceedingly simplified (and admittedly very dumbed down) version of what it sounds like I understand you're doing, but the strange thing is that I found expanding your mental state across virtual desktops with the granularity of a browser instance/window/set of windows is an oddly freeing phenomenon. It's a sense of euphoria I don't think the average Windows user will fully appreciate even with the integration of virtual desktops in Windows 10 since most are typically not familiar with it!
      • parenthesis 6y ago
        I'm not feeling so crazy now about my current 490 tabs.
    • Zancarius 6y ago
      I think I found my kindred spirit! I have one Firefox instance presently at 3 windows and 3379 tabs and another with 10 windows and somewhere north of 2300 tabs. I wouldn't dare do this under Chrome/Chromium. On my system at least, I've noticed that Firefox does get less responsive around 8000+ tabs. Mostly it's just the start up that complains. Sometimes I'll get annoyed and mass-bookmark/close tabs (filed under date of closure). Do you ever do that or do you usually filter through things on an as needed basis?
      • nieve 6y ago
        For finding things I just use search in Power Tabs. Filtering down usually leaves me with a list I can scan through quickly. When it comes time to clean up I cheat by using that as well - filter my tab list, then select individual or groups of tabs to close. Generally I'll start by closing all tabs from news sites like the NY Times and WaPo under the assumption that they're probably stale, then clear out a bunch of HN tabs, and most often then switch to digging through the github ones to see what's actually relevant anymore. StackExchange and Reddit tend to get slashed pretty hard as well. Basically filter, viciously select, then close and I can blow away a thousand tabs in a couple of minutes. The highest I've ever gotten was around 6000 on old Firefox for Linux and I did see some slowdowns then, but that was on a seven year old laptop.
      • errnoh 6y ago
        Oh, there are kindred spirits here. I've recommended this on other tab-related discussions but Tab Stats is one of the few Firefox addons that have been worth using as a tab hoarder. Allows me to see which pages are open in multiple tabs and then deduplicate them if needed, or just looking at (or closing) open tabs based on domain. (I'm not affiliated with the creator and it's not without its own annoyances, but still easily recommendable to anyone with thousands of tabs open)
        • Zancarius 6y ago
          Awesome. I don't find it too tedious to go through and nuke things I know aren't useful long term (they're usually shunted to a separate throw away window for this reason!), but there's no easy solution for tab deduplication. What you've linked looks like it fits the bill! Thank you!
    • ksec 6y ago
      Thanks. Now I am not feeling as bad :P My Safari had 1K+ Tabs and I finally spend some time last week closing those down to 150Tabs. Normally Safari dont work as well as Firefox with that many Tabs, the trick is to restart Safari from time to time ( So Tabs are not Active ). AND do NOT press the Tab Overview Button. Which somehow reloads all the tabs, make your Mac insanely slow and would kill your SSD. As you wont have enough memory it literally page hundreds of GB if not TB to your SSD. Reported this to Apple a few times and never heard anything back. I really wish there is an option where Tab Overview is just a list of tabs and doesn't load them up. I think most of us are using Tabs as a sort of live reading list or Bookmarks. And as anyone may guess, never really got to finish it. Ok now I wrote that I should try to clean those 150 tabs down to at least a few dozen.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• skavi 6y ago
  This looks great. Definitely feels like something that should have existed for a while. Hopefully this will encourage some “tab collectors” to convert their groups to bookmark folders. I use Safari on my Mac, but its behind in tab management. I especially miss being able to drag multiple tabs at once between windows.
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    Interestingly, moving multiple tabs is one of the few places where Safari on iOS can do something that Safari on macOS can’t.
• _ZeD_ 6y ago
  Soo it's just a label thing? Can you hide groups and show them later? It seems to me chrome is still behind Firefox and his tab group extension https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/simple-tab-groups/ https://addons.mozilla.org/it/firefox/addon/simple-tab-group...
• ygra 6y ago
  I liked what IE ... 8? has done abck in the day where opening a new tab from another one will create a colored group, so you kinda have automatic grouping that allows you to tell at a glance "Oh those all belong to the same tvtropes tab rampage, but I'm looking for that other thing now I was looking at before".
  • frosted-flakes 6y ago
    IE8 through IE11 had the coloured tab groups.
• barryvan 6y ago
  This seems to be a mixture of the "collections" feature from Firefox Mobile (Beta/Preview) and Firefox's container tabs, but without the security / isolation benefits. From what I can tell, the main benefit seems to be in relation to identifying similar-looking tabs. It's unfortunate that they didn't bake in the same security and isolation benefits of Firefox's container tabs, or the "put aside and come back to it later" functionality that (old) Edge and Firefox Mobile's "collections" bring. I'm also not sure how adding _more_ to the tabstrip will improve utility in Chrome, where tabs so quickly become impossible to manage because the strip doesn't scroll.
  • mkj 6y ago
    A bit tinfoil hat, but could it be an attempt to head off Firefox Containers which would be a threat to Google Cookie collection? That's certainly my main use case for containers, using Google Music without telling the rest of the web about my Google account.
    • metroholografix 6y ago
      https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private https://github.com/atomontage/chrome-private
      • floatingatoll 6y ago
        This looks very useful, but it combines valuable profile management work with disabling various web features per the author's opinions. Sadly, disabling those features by default makes it significantly easier to fingerprint users using this script (which is precisely the opposite of its intentions). So I forked it and set those features to be disable-if-requested rather than disable-by-default, so that people who just want to manage separate profiles have an option that doesn't make them easier to fingerprint: https://github.com/floatingatoll/chrome-private/ https://github.com/floatingatoll/chrome-private/
        • metroholografix 6y ago
• metroholografix 6y ago
  While Google finds new ways to offer reduced functionality, here's how I use tabs in Chrome: https://github.com/atomontage/osa-chrome https://github.com/atomontage/osa-chrome
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • Hitton 6y ago
    That actually seems like rather convenient, if I were emacs user on Mac, I would give it a try. That said, you gotta agree that this time google actually adds functionality that might be useful to some, unlike more common scrap-important-adblocking-api-to-screw-everyone.
• saagarjha 6y ago
  Using space in the already crowded tab area might not go over all that well. Couldn’t they have moved the tab group indicator to not be inline?
• RHSeeger 6y ago
  I just want the title bar back, above the tabs, on the mac. It's so frustrating trying to move/select the window with a tiny sliver available to click on.
  • quink 6y ago
    AltDrag · https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/ https://stefansundin.github.io/altdrag/ Does both traditional <Alt-left click-drag> and <Alt-middle/right click-drag> to resize as known on X11. Edit: Whoops, Windows only, sorry. But the same problem exists on Windows too, and I'm sure a corresponding solution exists on Mac. On X11, of course, it's built in.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • wingerlang 6y ago
    Top right seems to always have space. You can also drag any window from any side by dragging perpendicular to the resize direction. It’s still small but I never heard anyone complain about precision there. And then there’s window manager if you’re a power user. I also think you can move any window with three finger via system settings.
    • RHSeeger 6y ago
      > Top right seems to always have space. Top right isn't always visible when trying to click a window to bring it forward > You can also drag any window from any side by dragging perpendicular to the resize direction. It’s still small but I never heard anyone complain about precision there. Interesting, I hadn't seen that before. It's still a small space and annoying to grab, but it's better than now knowing about it. > And then there’s window manager if you’re a power user. Not sure what you mean here. > I also think you can move any window with three finger via system settings. I use a mouse and full keyboard. I've never been able to interact with the mac well without them.
      • wingerlang 6y ago
• buremba 6y ago
  It looks cool as a person who has at least 20 tabs open in Chrome almost always but it would be much better if we could also use different profiles in the same Chrome window. As they demonstrated, people usually would like to use labels such as work, personal, etc. but it's not really useful if I can't log in my GSuite and personal Gmail in the same Chrome window.
• quanlou 6y ago
  oh now they learn from firefox, but maybe grouping like this would easier for them to do the ads targeting
• bangonkeyboard 6y ago
  Why doesn't my down arrow key work on this page?
  • saagarjha 6y ago
    blog.google breaks it, as has been noted before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22949003 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22949003
    • bangonkeyboard 6y ago
      Found it. In https://www.blog.google/static/blogv2/js/all.js?version=4.3 https://www.blog.google/static/blogv2/js/all.js?version=4.3 {key:"onKeyDown",value:function(t){var e=t.preventDefault;this.isToggle(document.activeElement)?(e(),!this.header.isKebabOpen&&this.header.openKebab(),this.getFirstLink().focus()):this.isLastLink(document.activeElement)?this.isLastLink(document.activeElement)&&e():(e(),this.focusNextLink())}} There's a logic error in the nested ternaries: event.preventDefault() is called in every branch. Fixed: {key:"onKeyDown",value:function(t){var e=t.preventDefault;this.isToggle(document.activeElement)?(e(),!this.header.isKebabOpen&&this.header.openKebab(),this.getFirstLink().focus()):this.isLink(document.activeElement)&&(e(),!this.isLastLink(document.activeElement)&&this.focusNextLink())}}
• larkinrichards 6y ago
  Is this a new method for Google to keep tracking cookies active? I know many people who leave tabs open for months. Using tabs for “read later” seems questionable, performance wise.
• gkoberger 6y ago
  Maybe I'm wrong (EDIT: seems I'm wrong!), but I feel like the people with dozens of tabs open (guilty) aren't the ones who use organizational features? Also, it's a hidden feature, but you can already Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group.
  • floatingatoll 6y ago
    One Firefox extension "Tree Style Tabs", popular with dozens-of-tabs folks, has near a quarter million users. I imagine they will be objecting that tab groups don't go far enough :)
    • quietbritishjim 6y ago
      And it addresses gkoberger's concern that people who are messy with tabs won't bother to organise them, because it organises them for you: opening a link in a new tab automatically makes it a child of the tab that had the link.
  • mcbutterbunz 6y ago
    I'm just thinking out loud but I wonder if there was an easier way to visually identify certain tabs that seem related. Right now all I have is the favicon but there are so many favicons that look similar its difficult to tell them apart.
    • frosted-flakes 6y ago
      I love how Internet Explorer would colour-code tabs that were opened from another tab (open in new tab). It worked really well for search engine results; opening a bunch of results in new tabs would visually group them together by coloring those tabs differently. Similar in concept to Chrome tab groups, except completely automatic, which is super useful. It was easier to keep track of same-site tabs because they tended to be in different colour groups, or all in the same group, and I think IE had a minimum tab width that was actually usable. If I remember right, you could also move an unrelated tab into a group by dragging it between two tabs in the group, although this seemed like an unintended feature.
• pmontra 6y ago
  Others already wrote about Firefox tab groups and containers. I do use containers but I use a different way to group tabs. I'm using Ubuntu with Gnome shell customized to look like the old Gnome pre 2014, or was that 2012? I have a virtual desktop per customer and one Firefox window per desktop. One "customer" it's my own pet project of the moment and another one is where I keep my email, WhatsApp web and Telegram desktop and other social media in their own private container tab. So I group per window and I need less functionality from the browser because I rely more on the OS. I believe that Gnome calls those desktops Activities but I disabled nearly all of the Activities related stuff. I have hotkeys to move to desktops and I use them like old school virtual desktops, a fixed number of them. IMHO yhe less the screen moves the better it is.
• akersten 6y ago
  Neat, and works well for the toy example with 4 tabs open. I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think. They seem to be aware of this too, since none of the screenshots in the post have anywhere near what I would consider a significant amount of tabs open. I use the tree style tab extension on Firefox[0], which I cannot live without. Horizontal tabs become useless after about 15 of them are open. Tree style, 50 tabs are just as easy to navigate as 5. I really wish browsers would build this in as a native feature. [0]: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  • rohan1024 6y ago
    On my 1080p monitor most of websites still keep white spaces on either side so this makes sense.
    • zo1 6y ago
      I blame "mobile" for that. All that whitespace is such a waste of space, and all this after a gigantic push away from 4:3 screens to 16:9 wide versions.
      • fomine3 6y ago
        Reading text with 1920px 100% seems to horrible. I prefer narrower width.
  • razster 6y ago
    That’s a great addon. To be honest this would work great in a piece of software my company creates. Our clients can add there own custom tabs, this would help greatly...
  • matsemann 6y ago
    Can't remember why, but I ended up using Sidebery instead of Tree Style Tabs. So that's also a nice alternative.
• qubex 6y ago
  What I find hilarious about tabs is that it’s basically a full reimplementation of a multitasking interface within a MDI (Multiple Document In Window) context: we came up with windows for different applications and for different documents within that application, and then for the browser we went back and revised the conventional wisdom.
  • kevsim 6y ago
    I guess nothing stops us from running one tab per window but I have to say I'm not keen to go back to that. What we be the advantage there over tabs in your opinion?
    • qubex 6y ago
      I’m not arguing for the multi-window alternative. Indeed in MacOS I quite like the tabbed interface for applications. It just amuses me how when the problem re-arose, we solved it differently than we had previously.
    • sergeykish 6y ago
      Window manager can * group windows in virtual desktop * search by title * put side by side * display fullscreen * manage shortcuts Some window managers can't. Browser work around with tabs. It's fine for most of the users, it's missing opportunity for some. At least I was not able to disable tabs completely.
    • DonHopkins 6y ago
      Why WOULDN'T you want to be able to use tabs on all of your windows? And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to move any tab to any edge (top, bottom, left, right) of any window? And why WOULDN'T you want to be able to group and stack and tile tabbed windows from different applications together?
      • abjKT26nO8 6y ago
        What I would like, is Emacs/Vim-style buffers. When you don't have one open, it's completely invisible. When you want to switch to it, you perform an incremental search for its title. No need to hunt for things on the screen. A lot faster and a lot more tidy wrt what's currently visible on the screen. No distractions.
• fatfingers 6y ago
  horrible
• fatfingers 6y ago
  will there be an option to disable this? it's ugly
• zonk_ 6y ago
  Reminds me a little bit of Vivaldi's Tab Stacking feature [0]. Yet, it looks less useful, especially for tab hoarders as mentioned in the other comments here. But progress is progress and maybe we'll end up with something better than the Tab Stacks in the end. [0]: https://help.vivaldi.com/article/tab-stacks/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/tab-stacks/
• mrtksn 6y ago
  This looks nice but in my experience, it is unrealistic to have Chrome with many tabs open on a laptop. The machine would slow down, drain the battery and force me to close tabs before I need to classify them. Did that change too? IMHO a feature as a tab limiter would be more productive for me at least, forcing me to close or archive tabs before opening new ones. I have ancient tabs of great finds that at some point I need to decide what to do with but never come around and don't really remember what was so great about that tab.
  • crucialfelix 6y ago
    The Great Suspender is essential for that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspender/klbibkeccnjlkjkiokjodocebajanakg?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/the-great-suspende...
    • mrtksn 6y ago
      Thanks, it looks like there's a Safari version too. This may change things!
    • jmchuster 6y ago
      i've found "Auto Tab Discard" to be a much better alternative
• john_moscow 6y ago
  This is nice, but what I really don't get is how come the most popular browser in the world in 2020 not have an native option to go through the tabs in the most-recently-used order. This is major productivity improvement compared to ctrl-tabbing the tabs in their physical order. IIRC, multi-tabbed IDEs figured it out somewhere in the 90s and it has become a de-facto standard since then. But nope, Chrome doesn't support it, making the Ctrl-Tab hotkey effectively useless if you have more than a handful open tabs.
  • Guillaume86 6y ago
    This is my number 1 pet peeve with chromium browsers, drives me crazy that they won't implement this properly. It doesn't look like the new Edge will either (no reaction on MRU features requests). Every few months I go check https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5569 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=5569 to see if someone sane decided to reopen the issue but no luck until now.
  • TMWNN 6y ago
    The only extension that I've seen implement this closer to right is CLUT https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-used-tabs/cobieddmkhhnbeldhncnfcgcaccmehgn https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/clut-cycle-last-us... (specifically, the "Quick switch" and "Normal switch backward" keybindings). Every other one I've tried does not. I only wish that a) it would visually display the tab history the way Firefox does, and b) being able to shorten the Normal switch backward timer, so I could use that only.
• dmitshur 6y ago
  What I would find very helpful is if Chrome on macOS could reopen all its windows on their original spaces—rather than all on the same space—when it needs to restart to install a new version. Having all Chrome windows from many spaces for different tasks re-appear all on top of each other is quite frustrating.
• hossbeast 6y ago
  Vertical tabs, Chrome. Come back to me when you have Vertical Tabs.
  • frosted-flakes 6y ago
    Chromium Edge is getting vertical tabs, and from the screenshots it looks like a decent implementation. At the end of March, the blog post said it was coming to the Edge Insider Preview "in the next few months". Animated screenshot: https://46c4ts1tskv22sdav81j9c69-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/prod/sites/2/2020/03/67cf527900048a6d657f159efd3146bf.gif https://46c4ts1tskv22sdav81j9c69-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-... Microsoft blog post (scroll down to #2): https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/03/30/the-top-10-reasons-to-switch-to-the-new-microsoft-edge/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2020/03/30/the-t...
    • baby 6y ago
      No nesting :/
  • baby 6y ago
    Vertical tabs with nesting, nothing less.
• ernesth 6y ago
  Opera was doing this ten years ago. They used to call it Tab Stacks[1]. Note that Vivaldi has this feature[2]. Or is this chrome feature different? [1]: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/hands-on-opera-11-tab-stacking-vs-firefox-panorama/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2010/11/hands... [2]: https://help.vivaldi.com/article/tab-stacks/ https://help.vivaldi.com/article/tab-stacks/
• leephillips 6y ago
  The one enhancement I wish Chrome would make to their tabs is give me an option to make them less than ½-inch high.
• ggm 6y ago
  Move tab one left. Move tab one right. Move tab far left, move tab far right. Keyboard acceleration?
• russellbeattie 6y ago
  Tab minimalist here... It won't help the others. They just don't pay attention to tabs. It's like a mental blind spot for them... Maybe an outright disorder. They just keep opening new tabs every chance they get. I once sat over someone's shoulder and watched them continue to click the same link in a message over and over again to look at a JIRA while we were debugging something. Every time, it just opened up a new tab. And they just didn't care. That was how to open up that bit of info. 10, 20, 30 tabs... They just kept piling up. I almost lost my mind This is a techie, mind you, not some random office worker. It was mind boggling. What Chrome really needs is an auto close feature. Default to like 10 tabs max, with the option to increase for power users. Oldest tabs without any activity get whacked automatically. The world would save gigawatts of power overnight.
  • jmchuster 6y ago
    You'll create an infinite number of tabs if you have the following rules: - if you will open multiple links from a page, keep that tab, and then open each link in a new tab - each tab is a train of thought -- don't overwrite a tab's train of thought, always open a new tab to keep your trains of thought distinct - only close a tab once you know that train of thought is fully complete - don't interrupt your current train of thought just to evaluate if an earlier train of thought is complete (and therefore whether you should then close that "tree" of tabs) AKA garbage collection for your mind, that only allows you to run stop-the-world when no other processes are running
    • hawski 6y ago
      That's exactly how it is with me. Also it is often more convenient to open a new tab and search again for something then to find it in one of already opened tabs. It would be perfect if beside Google search results the browser would show tab results (with full FTS) and history results. I would prefer to have it there instead of search bar's completion. Then if tabs would really be just history of opened tabs the browser could do some LRU GC.
      • jmchuster 6y ago
• drukenemo 6y ago
  My greatest problem with Chrome and tabs is its tendency to “forget” pinned tabs when restarting. I’ve lost pinned tabs quite a few times and don’t trust Chrome to keep them. This never occurs with Safari and Firefox in my experience.
• chrischen 6y ago
  I use tabs essentially as low-friction bookmarks/todo items. I'd use bookmarks more if it were as low friction as just keeping the tabs open. I definitely don't enjoy having a bunch of tabs crammed in a horizontally constrained space.
• mozey 6y ago
  Or use this strange hack to group tabs: "File > New Window"
• s-km 6y ago
  Tested this out a few months ago, got real excited when I saw they had a beta thing for it but was let down that you couldn't collapse and expand tab groups down to just their titles. The functionality should even be there-ish already, since pinned tabs collapse down to just the site's favicon.
• elfchief 6y ago
  I'm pretty certain that I'm not going to be using any new tab organization feature, if it requires me take explicit action to get the benefit. If I was reasonably capable of organizing my browsing, I wouldn't currently have 468 tabs open to start with...
  • baby 6y ago
    Check tree style tabs.
• ggregoire 6y ago
  Am I the only one to use windows as tabs groups? Shift + click on tabs to select multiple tabs, then right click > "Move Tabs to New Window".
  • tgb 6y ago
    That's what I do, but I still keep only a small number of tabs open in each of a small number of windows. But FYI you can just drag the tab(s) down and they'll form a new window.
  • muststopmyths 6y ago
    hah, me too. In addition I move groups of windows to different virtual desktops to further organize my thoughts. Nice thing on Windows is that Alt-Tab in a virtual desktop only switches between applications in that desktop. So once I switch to a particular "context", I only have to work with tabs/windows in that flow. I need a tab to have more than just a favicon for context, so this works for me.
• ken 6y ago
  This works for Google because they want you to only use Chrome. That's how Google engineers work. For the rest of us, it's a reminder of how increasingly troublesome it is that window managers are tied to the OS, and (on 2/3 of the major OSs) locked down so any third parties that want to innovate here are limited to doing it only for their own application. This looks like just the sort of thing Dan Ingalls meant when he said "We in computer software insist on stepping on the toes of those who came before us instead of climbing on their shoulders".
• tuananh 6y ago
  I would love if Chrome can assign a domain + account to a group automatically. Without this, I don't think I can make use much of this feature.
• remarkEon 6y ago
  Cool, something similar exists in Firefox (with an extension). Still not going to switch to Chrome, though. I have the Chrome browser open once or twice a week because, as one can imagine, gmail works better in Google's browser - but once I finish fully migrating everything to protonmail and my own @ I'll have no reason to ever use a google product again (run a NAS I can access remotely, collaboration in Microsoft Office works "good enough" and tbh I prefer the version controlling for what I need it for, DDG is at least at parity with Google search and is frankly better for images).
• fun387lm38 6y ago
  Downloaded the Chrome Beta for Linux and this doesn't work: Nothing about tab groups or colors when you right-click on a tab.
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  Why don't they give me vertical tabs?
• logicallee 6y ago
  I'm in the tab collector category, but after I read something I don't need it sticking around in my autocomplete. If I want it saved I add it as a bookmark. For this reason I just use incognito mode. On Android, every so often Chrome decides to just discard all my open incognito tabs. (This is also described here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/40fe10/incognito_tabs_automatically_closing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AndroidQuestions/comments/40fe10/in... .) Could you fix this bug. Namely, please do not discard open incognito tabs without confirming with me. I am sure I don't discard them accidentally (by closing the browser or something) as I am quite careful not to throw away my reading. I wish Chrome would do the same, and be more careful about just throwing away whatever I'm reading. I feel this is as good a place as any to leave my comment so it is noticed.
• andrewstuart 6y ago
  I have needed "the tab problem" solved for many years. I've tried and never stuck with any third party solution. I work in specific "modes/projects" and each mode has several tens at least of tabs open. It would be great if I could somehow switch between work modes and see all the relevant tabs for that mode.
  • Non24Throw 6y ago
    Control+N a new window for each mode is what I currently do. Then Super+<backtick> to cycle through them (if you’re on a Mac) It’s not perfect though. If you accidentally open a few tabs in the wrong mode there’s no easy way to transfer them. And I’ll often forget that another window is open in the background
    • aembleton 6y ago
      If you are using Tree Style Tabs and they are all children of a parent tab then you can just drag the parent tab over to the other window.
• KKPMW 6y ago
  The way to deal with tabs for me is to be a "tab ascetic". Majority of the time I have only a single tab open. Sometimes 2. With 3 it gets uncomfortable.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• DroitThemes 6y ago
  Alwz prefers firefox over chrome.
• chrisyeah 6y ago
  A great next iteration would be to let users fold/unfold those groups, so that you only have one visible "tab" per group in the top bar. This would really help the "tab collecters" (like me, who had to close 78 tabs some weeks ago).
  • richrichardsson 6y ago
    I can't see any benefit really to this new feature they announced without what you're suggesting. If they add the ability to collapse groups, then I would probably use it, otherwise I can keep my tabs just as organised without a need for some colour hints.
    • chrisyeah 6y ago
      Same. I was really excited first when I saw this feature. After installing it, I barely use it now. It helps a bit for a first overview, but my tab bar is still super full.
  • Deemos 6y ago
    In Chrome Dev version there is a flag for "Tab Groups Collapse", but it doesn't work yet, so it's coming.
• romwell 6y ago
  Great, yet another Opera browser feature finally becoming mainstream! It only took a decade[1]. [1]https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Opera-11-Launches-Tab-Stacking https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Opera-11-Launches-Tab-Sta...
  • kactus 6y ago
    This is still the best implementation of this feature and no other browser has gotten it right, yet. Even Blink-based Opera now fails in this regard.
• greggman3 6y ago
  I just wish the OSes would alt-tab through all tabs in all apps instead of just top level windows. Yes, other forms of tab organization might be useful but my productivity would go up more if I could more easily swap between the last 2-8 things I did in a consistent way. As it is sometimes alt tab works, some times it doesn't. It all depends on what the last few things I did were and is therefore infuriatingly inconsistent. I tried "Witch" on MacOS to fix this but it's got its own set of issues since it's having to hack around to do its job.
• 0mn1 6y ago
  If you want to use Chrome(ium), but also have modern features and privacy focus, just use Vivaldi.
• skocznymroczny 6y ago
  I usually stick to 5-6 tabs at a time. I don't understand how can people deal with 40-50 tabs or more.
  • apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
    I'm with you. I don't like it when I have more than a few open at a time. I also don't like having unread email or chat messages because of the same impulse. They're to-do items that haven't been done yet so I deal with them and move on.
• baby 6y ago
  Why don’t they just put tabs on the side? It makes no sense to me. Tree style tabs has solved this issue a long time ago.
• simzor 6y ago
  This is great. With this comes to Firefox. I guess Firefox has a kind of similar feature (Containers), but this new Chrome feature looks way nicer, even though it might not have containerization.
• oerpli 6y ago
  I would like tab-management to work as follows: - Export Tabs as list. Format could be something like URL;TITLE[;GROUP][;...] - Import list as Tabs: The inverse Then I could use existing tools (xsv,fzf,vscode,excel) to do whatever I like with my tabs. Some things may be lost (cache, scrolling position...) but I wouldn't care as they don't work anyway with modern websites.
  • morsch 6y ago
    Tree style tabs supports exporting tabs/trees as lists. I don't think importing works, though.
• ilSignorCarlo 6y ago
  Just learned about this Min[0] browser yesterday. It uses the concept of "tasks" to organize tabs. Still haven't really tried it, so can't really recommend, but since it's not really well known (I guess) I thought it was worth sharing. [0]: https://minbrowser.org/ https://minbrowser.org/
• murat131 6y ago
  I'd love if a browser supports horizontally and perhaps vertically splitting the browser window/tab like you can in iTerm or tmux or terminator and let us view multiple pages at once in a single browser window area. Whichever page is active owns the address and toolbar.
  • teh_klev 6y ago
    Absolutely this ^^^
  • Deemos 6y ago
    Vivaldi has this feature.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• bbx 6y ago
  It seems to me I’m in the minority by being a minimalist here? I have at most 10 tabs open. Same for Sublime Text open files. I regularly close all but one tab/file just to reset my cognitive load. This does force me to rely on the history from time to time, which I must say is a true pain in Chrome. You can’t even search or filter by date. Also, revisiting a page will move it up the top of the list, which is annoying because I lose all previous instances of when I visited the page. As for the grouping of tabs, there’s always been a way to group them: a new window. I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window. I guess this new feature tries to solve the same problem.
  • stOneskull 6y ago
    Around 10 open, I'm looking to press OneTab. It's break time. Tabs are grouped by time, but it works for me
  • flear 6y ago
    > I wish there was a feature to drag+select a group of tabs and send them to a new window There is! Press CTRL while clicking individual tabs OR press SHIFT while clicking the first and last tab you want to move to a new window. Selected tabs appear slightly brighter. Then, just drag. This works in Chrome and Firefox.
    • bbx 6y ago
      Oh my… You just changed my life. Thanks so much for this. (I really should have RTFM).
    • lukasdanin 6y ago
      I wish I could upvote you twice. Whenever I need to separate my tabs from the main window I have to adjust them individually, which is a real pain if you have more than 10 tabs open.
  • joshschreuder 6y ago
    I'm with you, I hate having huge numbers of tabs open, in both IDE and browser land. Some of the devs on my team end up with 30-40 files open in Visual Studio at a time and it just loses me.
• xyst 6y ago
  Time to order more RAM for this bad boy
• moogly 6y ago
  Those labels leave even less space for actual tabs. This looks very misguided to me.
• rtalvar 6y ago
  I hope they port this feature to Brave.
• lord_erasmus 6y ago
  I feel like the hidden that feature that allows you to select and move multiple tabs is severely underrated. I'm a tab hoarder but not disorganised, I tend to work on multiple things at a time and what I'll do is everytime there's more than 4-5 tabs on a specific project, I'll move them to a new window and hide the rest. That way, I'm not bothered by the other subjects in my view and the current "workspace" is still easily manageable. I fail to see the point of this change this late in the browser history as it would surprise me if powerusers didn't already have their own way of managing tabs
• Vinnl 6y ago
  As a hoarder, tabs act somewhat as low-effort bookmarks: instead of having to explicitly bookmark sites, I have to explicitly not-bookmark them (i.e. close the tab). In other words: "organising" my tabs is the default and takes no extra effort. Additionally, when I'm done with something, cleaning up is really low effort as well: I close several tabs in a row, and can relatively quickly judge which ones to close. In other words: this just seems way too much effort for me...
• yoavm 6y ago
  Shamesless plug: I've built a tiny WebExtension for Firefox that I believe is the fastest way to jump between tabs ever, with the keyboard. It's for those of us who have more than 15 tabs open. You basically click a one key, and then fuzzy search through your tabs until there's only one option left, and the tab opens. Alternatively you enter the tab number and it opens. It's probably one of my most useful weekend projects. https://github.com/bjesus/teleporter https://github.com/bjesus/teleporter
  • databhishek 6y ago
    This is actually really nice! While I don't have a lot of tabs open at once, dragging my mouse over and clicking is really tedious. Even though the Firefox address bar allows you to switch to already open tabs, it's still not seamless. This is great for noticing the name at a glance and switching quickly.
    • yoavm 6y ago
      Thank you! Super glad you liked it.
  • the8472 6y ago
    Note that the URL bar already has a similar feature. Ctrl + L, %, <search for tab name>
    • yoavm 6y ago
      Yeah, but it never worked for me. For some reason it lists only a fraction of my open tabs. Also my extension allows me to jump faster between tabs using their tab number, and easily close tabs by prepending a zero to their number.
• maelito 6y ago
  I hope this comes to Android as well, in desktop or tablet mode.
• kalium-xyz 6y ago
  Folders are back?
• bad_user 6y ago
  I use Tree Style Tabs in Firefox, but I have mixed feelings about it. It should help me visually find tabs, but truth of the matter is that it doesn't. Horizontal tabs become useless after 10 tabs opened, indeed, but vertical tabs become useless after 30 tabs opened. Opened tabs also consume a lot of memory. It's why I now use Auto Tab Discard, which works, but then gets in the way because by Ctrl-Tab-ing you end up hitting inactive tabs that you did not want, which are then reloading and it's annoying. What does help me in finding tabs is tab search via the address bar. In Firefox it works great, you can also prefix your query with a `%` to limit your search only to opened tabs. Chrome also provides a way to search open tabs. It's not as good as Firefox's and you have to enable it yourself, but it's fine [2]. [1] https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html https://add0n.com/tab-discard.html [2] chrome://flags/#omnibox-tab-switch-suggestions
  • scriptsmith 6y ago
    Your situation sounds similar to my own. The following two extensions have helped me solve the '30 tabs' problem: TabSearch does the same thing you're doing with the search bar, but with fuzzy searching and more customisability which makes finding tabs a bit easier. Close Discarded Tabs is a very simple extension I wrote for myself that acts as a sort of garbage collector for Auto Tab Discard. You can customize Auto Tab Discard to discard tabs in a way that purges irrelevant tabs to your liking, and then if you notice the list of tabs looks a bit overwhelming, just click the trashcan and all the discarded tabs are closed. If you want to make sure you don't close a tab you wanted, just quickly scan through the list and click any that you want to keep. TabSearch: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab_search/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab_search/ Close Discarded Tabs: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discarded-tabs/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/close-discard...
    • bad_user 6y ago
      Hey, thanks for "Close Discarded Tabs", it's precisely what was missing :-)
  • TheArcane 6y ago
• Yoric 6y ago
  Hey, Firefox tab groups!
• flobosg 6y ago
  I've been trying to control my tab hoarding in Chrome by limiting the amount of open tabs with the xTab extension[1]. It seems to help, even though I can bypass it by opening another window. As a side effect of this my browser windows tend to be organized by topic. [1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xtab/amddgdnlkmohapieeekfknakgdnpbleb https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xtab/amddgdnlkmoha...
• Lorin 6y ago
  As a tab collector this is useless to me. I rather have a way to automatically move certain domains to specific, separate windows to keep things organized.
• maxbaines 6y ago
  Wow all you 'many tabbers' I only ever have about 4-6 tabs open before I feel cluttered and close some.
• rasz 6y ago
  Tab groups, and only 10 years after Opera! https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Opera-11-Launches-Tab-Stacking https://www.practicalecommerce.com/Opera-11-Launches-Tab-Sta...
• cybersol 6y ago
  I have a dream. What I really want was likely not possible when tabs were invented, but should be now. I want least recently used tabs to automatically fade away, but still be fully known and searchable the way that 'search my computer' or 'google search' works. With search filters like last hour/day/week/month. And it seems like history should be kept per tab, not altogether. This way I keep a minimal-to-medium number of active tabs, but have all those magical things-to-do, pseudo-bookmarks, or other things that cause open tabs to grow and grow available via a quick search interface, auto-magically.
  • scep12 6y ago
    The great suspender will get you part of the way there.
    • mkarliner 6y ago
      Agree, need it a lot because of Chrome memory hogging.
  • almostarockstar 6y ago
    This is a wonderful concept. Absolutely love the idea.
  • rayrag 6y ago
    Try OneTab addon - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...
  • jyrkesh 6y ago
    As others have said, OneTab is great, but also check out the Shift+T fuzzy tab search in Vimium: https://vimium.github.io/ https://vimium.github.io/
• kbos87 6y ago
  Everyone I work with seems to always have about a million tabs open at all times, myself included. Maybe they’ve figured out a way to manage them, but for me, it’s hard to keep them from becoming anything other than a disorganized mess. I use a couple of plugins that really help like the Great Suspender for managing memory use, and the this looks like it will definitely help. The thing that puzzles me is that this seems like an obvious step progression in tab management - but it’s also the first real move to help people with a widespread challenge that’s been around for many years. Is this the rate of improvement we should expect from Chrome?
• newscracker 6y ago
  In my experience, Chrome has never been the browser for people who want to open more than a handful of tabs and keep them around for sometime. It becomes sluggish and makes the whole system sluggish. I see similar issues with the new Microsoft Edge (based on Chromium) and Brave (also based on Chromium, but somewhat better). “Tab collectors” is a derogatory term to describe anyone who needs to do some research on some topic and needs to open up tabs, links from them and figure out the topic(s) they’re dealing with. Yes, this can devolve into a collector situation if not managed well. But not everyone who has a need for it has to be insulted this way, especially from technical users, where daily work can easily turn into opening several tabs and windows at once. That Google Chrome isn’t designed or optimized for heavy usage will not go away just because they throw a new feature to group tabs. You may be able to group them, but will the browser be any less sluggish with the addition of this feature? That’s what I’m interested to know. For users of a few tabs, tab groups may not be as useful since they’d already be doing the grouping with windows. For users with many tabs, tab groups isn’t going to be useful as long as the browser can’t handle many tabs.
  • kwanbix 6y ago
    I have tried it already and it is of no use for me. I want a way to group tabs in different Chrome windows and assign the Chrome window a name, so that I can have: Work Window, News Window, Personal Window, Communication Window, etc. and in each of the windows the related tabs. Today I can do that, but each "chrome-window-icon" shows with the name of the tab that is open, and not the "chorme-window-name" (Work window, etc). In Windows 10 I used an app to rename the instances of Chrome but I cannot find a solution under Linux (Ubuntu).
  • snazz 6y ago
    Chromium can easily handle five hundred or more tabs on my machine. It's certainly a RAM hog, but that's to be expected. Maybe it's swapping on your machine? Firefox does a slightly better job when you have more than a thousand tabs open, but they both benefit from a tab suspender extension.
• kebman 6y ago
  I use about a gazillion tabs. My biggest problem is losing them, or having to re-open them after a restart. Though sometimes a fresh start can be relieving. My next biggest problem is running out of memory when running other programs alongside Chrome. Perhaps it's due to how I like watching YouTube a lot, which seems to suck my RAM dry. I have 16 gb RAM, but even then I sometimes get hiccups, and the culprit seems to be Chrome. Not sure what to do about it, aside from closing tabs. I know it's probably a bad habit to open several programs as well, but using the Adobe package together with a browser is kind of a must, at least if you're juggling several projects at once. Same for programming, but Sublime Text is hardly a resource hog. If this works between sessions, and perhaps even between computers, AND it saves memory, then I'm sure I'll fall in love with it. I've had other solutions suggested to me, but installing yet another plugin is not appealing to me. Though after reading this thread, I think I'll perhaps give Vimium a try.
• rayrag 6y ago
  It looks good when it's only few tabs, when you have more than 20 tabs you don't even see a favicon. I don't understand why tabs don't have minimum width. In firefox you always see favicon and first tree letters and there are arrows that help you scroll through tabs.
• aljgz 6y ago
  Anyone who keeps many tabs open and is a keyboard centric user, how can they use chrome? In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab. I'd expect chrome to have an option to change this, but no, you need add-ons, and those just offer other hotkeys. Nowadays, I keep my tabs open in, if I need another identity (like my work-related account in a cloud provider), I use opera. Chrome is only for: any site that only works in chrome + debugging my own web development activity
  • nvr219 6y ago
    Firefox containers finally "clicked" for me and that's what I use for identities now. I have my personal container, work container, and work-login-as-admin container. It's great. I can open a twitter link as my work twitter or personal twitter with a right-click.
  • apocalyptic0n3 6y ago
    > In Firefox, when I press ctrl-tab, it takes me to the most recent tab. In Chrome, this takes me to the next tab. Coincidentally, this drives me nuts with Firefox and is always the first option I disable. If I open 10 tabs from a single page, I want to be able to cycle through them with the keyboard easily. Having CTRL+Tab go to the most recent tab completely ruins that.
    • LocalPCGuy 6y ago
      Yup, I disable "tab = most recent" both in IDEs and Firefox right off the bat. I don't understand it at all.
• polote 6y ago
  Who is this for? I don't see anyone who can use it. If you have less than 10 tabs you don't need to group them, and if you have more than 10 you will spend your time having them in the good group. And at the end what is the benefit oh having groups?
• 101404 6y ago
  Ff container tabs but without isolation? Isn't that what the window manager is for?
• forgingahead 6y ago
  Great, more free persona classification for their advertising engine
• appleflaxen 6y ago
  The web browser is essentially an operating system within your operating system. This update is making the browser-os work more like a window manager. tabs are to chrome as application windows are to OSX.
• mkarliner 6y ago
  Useless. I need to be able to collapse groups
  • vntok 6y ago
    Don't be so dismissive. Collapsing groups is coming up, you can even enable its preview version through a chrome flag.
• philonoist 6y ago
  Vivaldi is too sweet to let go and switch to chrome. They are at least 10 years ahead in tab management and it is enlightening.
• Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I thought Google was pausing non-security Chrome updates during the COVID crisis, what happened to that?
  • snazz 6y ago
    This feature has existed for a long time under chrome://flags. They skipped Chrome 82 for COVID: https://www.chromestatus.com/features/schedule https://www.chromestatus.com/features/schedule
• mikece 6y ago
  I don't see anything here that isn't possible with OneTab except that the tabs are all open. At least with OneTab I can (manually) move tabsets between Chrome and Firefox as well as between machines: https://www.one-tab.com/ https://www.one-tab.com/
• kmclean 6y ago
  Are these separate containers (like Firefox containers) or just some UI to visually group certain tabs?
  • TheArcane 6y ago
    The latter
• notaplumber 6y ago
  This type of separation would be better served with having multiple chrome user profiles. Like one for "work" and one for "home".
• in9 6y ago
  this seems to me like another opportunity for chrome to be a memory hog, specially with the extra UI features. But I am glad to be proven wrong here. Judging by the comments there seems to be a use case for a lot of the user base.
• Shaddox 6y ago
  What's a good browser for personal use nowadays? I have Firefox on my desktop but on mobile the experience is very lacking, with many pages downright breaking. I'm currently trying out brave which seems to at least block ads and tracking.
• yxhuvud 6y ago
  Sigh. Just give us proper tree style tabs already :/
• warpech 6y ago
  I still dream of a web browser that manages to combine browsing history, bookmarks, tabs and multi-device sync in one interface.
• chadlavi 6y ago
  what's the use case here that's better than just having separate windows for separate concerns?
• pombrand 6y ago
  This should really have the option to collapse the tabs in each group (only showing the colored dot or group name).
• heyflyguy 6y ago
  Oh what memory will we use!
• msoad 6y ago
  When I feel I have too many tabs Open, I simply close the entire window. I don't understand tab hoarders. I've watched them use browsers and they almost never revisit those hoarded tabs. They actually start from a new tab and search or type in a URL when they want to go back to previous tabs. Chrome should make this behavior more obvious to do. Like LIFO queue for tabs which popped tabs turn into history entries and keep a max number of tabs visible.
  • basch 6y ago
    The problem with history is it loses spacial relativity. How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs. Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls, by understanding their distance from each other and the rules of how they open. Another thing tabs do, is allow you to designate what NOT to return. If you use something like GoToTab [1], it will specifically NOT return results that have been closed. Merging everything to history doesnt give you that separation between "not relevant in the future" and "maybe relevant in the future." [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goto-tab/hjfkaobgkmaeomgdhmhhipdbjdhhjkoi?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/goto-tab/hjfkaobgk...
    • Izkata 6y ago
      > How does one tab relate to another. Which sites opened which tabs. > Tabs are a poor but semi-adequate way to preserve the relationship between urls, I recommend Tree Style Tab [0], which fully preserves this relationship. When one tab opens another, the child tab automatically becomes a child in the tree, making the whole thing very self-organizing. Also being a tree, the parents can be expanded/collapsed, if there's a group you're putting aside for the moment. That's for Firefox, at least. It looks like there's a few that other people have made for Chrome [1][2], but I can't speak to how well they perform. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-style-tabs/biiammgklaefagjclmnlialkmaemifgo?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sidewise-tree-styl... [2] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oicakdoenlelpjnkoljnaakdofplkgnd?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tree-style-tab/oic...
• crazygringo 6y ago
  I'm always very happy to see UX innovation, so kudos to Chrome for that. However, I just don't quite see the point of this particular feature. If you only have a handful of tabs open (like the 4 in the example), you hardly need to bother to categorize them. While if you have a ton of tabs, you can already use different windows (one for personal, one generally for work, one for a specific project, etc.). Shift-selecting and dragging multiple tabs at once makes it pretty easy. What "tab collectors" seem to universally like truly is tree-style tabs, so you can see the titles of your 40 tabs and see which one opened which. I suppose I can just hope that maybe they're taking baby steps toward that?
• jpswade 6y ago
  This is fixing the wrong problem. Tabs aren't broken, browser history is. When I tried to find a web page from a certain date a few months ago, it was almost impossible to find. I actually think Internet Explorer used to have quite a good history. That's what we need, not better tabs management.
  • kovek 6y ago
    It would be great if the browser history showed a tree of what URL I opened from what other URL. It would make it easier to backtrack my work at times.
  • Someone1234 6y ago
    It is even worse in Firefox, half my history is just outright missing. It is like it only saves the final page each tab was open to instead of anything I browsed using that tab in the interim. Not to mention the UI for Firefox's history is pure garbage of the worst kind. The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad, the fact that it isn't a screen and some kind of dumb pop-out /thing/ that cuts off content is terrible. No time-stamps either, or way to organize the flow of browsing (e.g. under what tab/window it was open in). If it worked correctly it would still be bad. But it doesn't work correctly making it the worst part of Firefox right now, it has been broken for over a year. PS - The history-missing bug is still active as of right now. Half of the pages I visited this morning just outright aren't listed at all. I was searching on google using a site: modifier and middle clicking open dozens of tabs, almost none are listed only the root searches.
    • turnipla 6y ago
      > The fact I have to go three menus deep just to open the history screen is bad History is never more than 2 clicks away: - Open Library button, click History - Open History menu (macOS) However, yes, core browser functions seem to be stuck to what they looked like in the year 2000 for most browsers. Only Safari basically tries to reinvent its UI every couple of years.
      • 6y ago
• rezeroed 6y ago
  Nope. Not much use. I've discovered Opera has workspaces, unfortunately limited to five, but exactly what I want for tab management.
• maverick74 6y ago
  Amazing. Chrome discovered the wheel!!! Oh wait... no it hasn't! Firefox already had something similar, only more advanced!!!
• Aweorih 6y ago
  Something like a group collapse feature would be nice here
• makecheck 6y ago
  From the screenshots it seems they give space priority to the name of each tab group instead of the tabs themselves (when space was already at a premium). In one example, 3 tabs were barely intelligible yet the group name was fully visible. It would be better to have: - An alternate short name or icon that is automatically used when there is no space (common?). - Relocated tab group name, e.g. small text “above” the tabs instead of stealing space from the tabs. - An option to have no name at all, relying on other distinctions only (some people are color blind so you always need a non-color option; maybe different patterns of border lines, or shapes?).
• justapassenger 6y ago
  It’s sad that operating systems gave up, before even trying to, to properly organize content with windows managers. There’s really no good reason why browser needs to have tabs, and have that exclusive ecosystem, not available to rest of the apps on the system. I’d love to be able to group and manage my windows as easily as tabs.
  • snazz 6y ago
    Sway and i3 let you use tabs nearly anywhere you can use windows. I'm not a huge fan of tabs outside of the browser anyway, but it works well.
  • jannes 6y ago
    You could give Groupy a shot... https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/ https://www.stardock.com/products/groupy/
  • fomine3 6y ago
    Windows 10 Sets feature looks like it but it has gone. https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10s-sets-feature-is-gone-and-not-expected-to-return/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10s-sets-feature-is-go...
• RMPR 6y ago
  At first glance it seems like it's the Multi container extension of Firefox without cookies isolation
• wazoox 6y ago
  Nothing can beat Tree Style tab in Firefox. You can make "folders of tabs" and whole hierarchies. For "tabs collectors" like me who have 40 tabs always open this is a must. My current setup : I have 5 pinned tab on top of the tree. Below I have a "github" group of tabs. Below I have a set of tabs opened on different parts of an app I'm working on. Below is a group of documentation tabs. Below is another group of articles I plan to read at some point. Below I have the HN tab, with a tree of articles and comments. I can't imagine going back to horizontal tabs. This is just much too good.
• Nemi 6y ago
  See this is a good idea but suffers from a UX problem: it is just way too cumbersome to create a new group and add new tabs. When I am on a roll I just want to hotkey a new tab open an start typing a search query for something. ctrl-t and type is just too fast and keeps me in the zone. What if they added a new hotkey for opening a new tab in a new group? ctrl-g is taken, so something like ctrl-shift-g? Whatever it is, you get the point. Open a new tab in a new group. All tabs opened from a group stay in that group. So, say I open a new tab group to search for something in google. I then read through the results and middle-click several items to open in new tabs. All those tabs should stay in the group. That way I can easily jump around to other tab groups and see what group had all the references to my question. I can then do this for several topics and keep things straight.
• teilo 6y ago
  As much as I like this, why is it so hard to have tab management that just works? I have six pinned tabs that I always want up. Important things like Gmail, Calendar Drive. Stuff that should never change. I don't want to have to remember to open links in a new tab from pinned tabs. It should know that pinned means pinned. Perhaps if they enabled group persistence? I'm hoping this rather obvious feature is in there. My solution has been to use a tab manager with a saved session that I can always recall when my pinned tabs break (such as when Chrome crashes, and loses my session entirely).
  • aesthetics1 6y ago
    One of the great features in Chrome is that you can open your recently closed tabs with CTRL+SHIFT+T. This will bring back an entire window full of tabs and even works between reboots. I usually have a dozen tabs open and when I reboot, I simply open up Chrome again, CTRL+SHIFT+T, and I am right back where I was.
• 72deluxe 6y ago
  I find tabs in Safari and Chrome fairly difficult to navigate when using them (I have many open and scrolling through loads isn't that useful); I find Safari's overview mode (pinch out on iPad or Mac) far more useful because you can see what you're after.
• modzu 6y ago
  how about close to the left?
• sprinfo 6y ago
  The Vivaldi web browser[0] found a great solution to this problem years ago. Tab stacking, tab tiles, and native tab hibernation. I've been rocking it for 3+ years now, and I've got to say it is the best browser out there. [0]: https://vivaldi.com/ https://vivaldi.com/
• draw_down 6y ago
  I just group them into windows. This is nice and I bet it will get a lot of usage, but too fiddly for me.
• tsp 6y ago
  The concept is totally flawed. Having 10+ tabs open is as chaotic as it was before. Too bad, Google missed a chance to solve a problem many people seem to have. At least here on Hackernews I am reading from time to time that people have the same problem I have – tab hoarding. So far only one third party extension helped me with this – Workona [1]. It makes it possible to switch between tab groups. The downside is that the company behind it has a complete overview of browsing behaviour and at some point they want a monthly fee (6$ / month) for the unlimited account, which I am going to pay if no better solution comes around. I also tried Firefox tree view, but it is missing the feature to switch tab groups. [1] https://workona.com/ https://workona.com/
• macrael 6y ago
  LOL "tab groups" AKA "windows". You can have this life today! When you have a tab that doesn't fit in with the others, pull it into its own window. When you're done asking google a question, close the window to close all the tabs associated with it. Use cmd-` to cycle through windows and expose to find a specific one! I am happy to see them doing something new with tabs, I'm just sad that so many people seem to have stopped using the oldest GUI metaphor in the book in favor of monolithic browsers.
  • snowwrestler 6y ago
    This is what I do, but for me it only works because window management is so quicky and easy with Expose gestures on my Mac. Doing the same approach on Windows drives me crazy and I end up wanting to have all my tabs in one window so I can find them.
• FalconSensei 6y ago
  What's the use of the groups if they don't collapse?
• luckman212 6y ago
  > There are two types of people in the world He lost me on the opening sentence.
• pkamb 6y ago
  I hope this does not change the usability of large numbers of tabs in Chrome, which are still completely usable when they shrink down to Favicon size. In contrast to Safari, which never shrinks tabs below ~1 inch and instead changes the tab bar to an awful horizontal scrolling/carousel view. Safari tabs are completely unusable past around 15 tabs when it starts hiding and resizing the tabs on the edges. It's the main thing preventing me from switching from Chrome to Safari.
• gnusty_gnurc 6y ago
  For the love of god, google, please give me vertical tabs. It's been years. I'm happy using Firefox or Vivaldi, it pains me whenever I have to open Chrome.
• aledthemathguy 6y ago
  innovation in 2020
• mvkel 6y ago
  Here’s an idea: make the list of tabs vertical
• fao_ 6y ago
  My favourite part is how they're taking something firefox had for years and then removed, and presenting it as an innovation!
• Tyrannosaur 6y ago
  I miss Opera 12's tab groups. https://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/9738/opera-how-to-stackgroup-similar-tabs/ https://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/9738/opera-how-to-stackgroup...
• fomine3 6y ago
  I'm happy to see tab hoarder folks here. I should improve hoarding system.