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.
Wrong! I have a very sophisticated system for managing my tabs. I'm very breadth-first when browsing the web and I also switch contexts a lot. Tabs are like a big Todo list for me.
For a while, I would get really frustrated when chrome would crash and close all my tabs, but recently I found a ln extension that keeps track of my tab history as a big tree! Yippee!
I use tabs exactly the same way! I also use windows for context switches. Right now on my work machine I have one personal window, and 5 other windows of 10-20 tabs each.
Closing a window after doing all the "TODOs" is insanely cathartic
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 :)
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.
My exact thought! I have numerous tabs open, and have zero interest in fiddling with an approach like this. I don't think this can ever be faster than opening a new tab, for me. Safari on iOS added a feature last summer to auto-close tabs after a certain age, and I love it.
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.
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.
Move them where? I'd love to be able to right-click and move to a designated browser window because I use window titler so each window has a subject name. In firefox you can only move the tabs to a new window.
> Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group
Wow, thanks for this. I know most of Chrome’s hidden features. Don’t know how I missed this one. I tend to reorder tabs and then use “Close tabs to the right”.
In Chrome, I always stop one tab before all favicons disappear (at this point tabs lose almost all their utility). In Firefox, where tabs scroll instead of being squeezed, I end up having ~100 tabs open before I decide it's time to kill some of them, as it takes too much time to scroll the tab list around.
Also, it's a hidden feature, but you can already Shift+Select a group of tabs, and close/move/etc the whole group.