There are two types of people in the world: tab minimalists who have just a few tabs open at a time and tab collectors who have…significantly more. For minimalists and collectors alike, we’re bringing a new way to organize your tabs to Chrome: tab groups. This feature is available now in Chrome Beta.
It looks interesting, but since I keep strict tabs on my tabs, I rarely have more than 5-8 tabs open at once, so I don’t really need this feature. Any input from tab hoarders in the audience?
Firefox had it once, and then dropped it, I wonder if Google will follow suit. When that was available, I really loved the option to have a lot of stuff opened, just not clutter the tab bar. Then it went away and so did my browsing habits. I think the whole tabs metaphor isn’t working, and as result we have “pinned tabs” and all sort of tab grouping extensions and tab sorting… But I guess it’s the best we have going, until someone really figure this one out.
You can still add it to Firefox via an add-on at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/panorama-tab-groups/
It is actually a very different implantation since it shows only the tabs in the “current” group.
This is much better than Chrome’s grouping which will keep showing all your hundreds of tabs at once just color coded while with this add-on you can have hundreds open but only see the tabs you want to.
What we need with tabs is not the ability to add labels to consume limited horizontal pixels we have. What we need is the ability to separate our google/facebook etc. accounts from our normal browsing. I don’t want google to be able to match the nytimes pages I visit with my gmail account, vice versa.
Firefox offers a solution for that: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/
But of course google will not do that.
I’m using container extensively, not just for for multiple account, also for privacy. A necessary feature of any modern web browser, imho. Pity a mobile version of Firefox doesn’t support them.
Tab grouping would be a nice match to containers. I wouldn’t mind if they were both combined into a single concept.
As for tab hoarding – that’s a separate issue. I doubt people who don’t bother closing tabs would be tempted to start grouping them. I know I wouldn’t, and I am definitely on the hoarding side.
If I am researching something (often), I will open a bunch of tabs for subjects that seem relevant and then work through them. On top of that I may have references open to whatever I am working on. Then there are the standard webapps I use, etc. Tab groups seems like a great idea to me.
Doesn’t look as interesting as TreeStyleTab [1], but worth testing, I guess.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
If I have more tabs than I’m comfortable with about a topic I’m researching, and I can’t go through them quickly, I bookmark them into a folder.
If I want to momentarily separate two or three groups of tabs from each other, I put them in different windows.
If I need more than three windows, I consider my browsing behaviour to be broken and in need of fixing: some topic has to be bookmarked and postponed. I’m not able to properly focus on three areas at the same time anyway.
I’m also in the habit of closing and reopening some tabs quite aggressively: Gmail, Feedreader, WordReference, DuckDuckGo, and similar stay open for just the time I use them, Opening them again is fast enough to not bother keeping them around while I’m doing something else.
I used to use TooManyTabs and similar extensions, but they just encouraged bad browsing habits and in the long run made things worse. I don’t think I need tab groups, for similar reasons.
emarsk,
I’m the same way. I’ll use tabs to quickly open up links in the background. This allows me to finish navigating/reading what I’m on before moving on, but I generally don’t keep tabs open for very long. Tabs for me are more of a queue. When I’m multitasking between pages I actually prefer to move them between top level windows instead. For example having phpmyadmin open in one window while navigating a website in another.
It’s not that grouping doesn’t have value, but it’s kind of redundant with OS level abstractions. IMHO it’s better for unrelated tasks to go on different workspaces.
Some desktop UIs group tasks by application, but I’ve never found it to be helpful to my workflow and the added indirection just gets in the way for me. However I suspect it’s the same fundamentals at play, the same people who tend to keep clutters tabs in a browser probably clutter their taskbar as well. I rarely open more windows than will fit in my taskbar. So whether grouping is useful or not is dependent on just how cluttered you allow things to become.
At a point 1600+ tabs opened, mostly documentation and things I opened to read later but never did, hence it accumulated. Anyway, I could locate myself pretty damn good because of the tab icons and I memorized their patterns, so it was about scrolling this way, more, more, no too far, here it is…
I now keep things lighter, like 300+ tabs only.
Yeah, I should use favorites, but then it’s the favorites that gets overcrowded.
I should spend time reading the tabs I open (interviews, news, …)
Kochise,
Wow. I’d like to see that, haha.
How do you even de-dup that many tabs?
In Firefox, one big help is that the address bar’s dropdown will offer to switch to the existing tab if you try to navigate to something you already have open.
There are three types. I refuse to use tabs in the first place.
I like to “alt+tab” between each separate thing I have open without the irrelevant implementation details of each separate thing (e.g. if something is a web page or PDF file or application or ..) creating nonsensical corner-cases that ruin visibility in my “global list of things I have open/can alt+tab between”.
Have you heard of ctrl+tab?
Yes; it doesn’t solve any of the problems and mostly just makes things worse.
Imagine you have 3 things open – some documentation, some source code and your emails. Can you alt+tab between them all, or ctrl+tab between them all? If you use tabs the only correct answer is “I have no idea., Which ones are web pages and which ones aren’t (and why do I need to care)? Please shoot me so I don’t have to put up with this inconsistent bullshit”.
Looks useful. It would be nice if they integrated with bookmarks. It’s all just a lists of URLs. Right now I find bookmarks way too many clicks to manage.
I’m a hoarder and I need help.
For me this is a frigging nightmare. I already spend all day listening to office staff complain about the slow response from their desktop / workstation, how some App isn’t working, why they can’t get a website connection. Only to find they’ve 20 browser tabs(some duplicating sessions) and a dozen programs all open at once.
In particular a lot of legacy code never assumed multiple sessions would come from a single device, of course they shouldn’t, but they can and so they do!
I hope the management of those tabs is very very good, but sooner or later I expect some poorly designed plugin or chrome update to put the boots into performance and I’ll be inundated.