What I really want is for my tab groups to sync across devices. I have to use a bunch of computers for various things (I have a half-dozen laptops tethered to their own VPNs) but they all exist for me to do work. News bulletin: it is impossible for me to segregate my work perfectly across 5 organizations. I can sync my tabs, but what I really need these days is a way to sync my tab groups.
> it is impossible for me to segregate my work perfectly across 5 organizations
I used to have 3 different browsers for 3 organizations. They all had same websites usually e.g. Email, social media sites for each organization respectively. Then I had another browser like FF Developer Edition for development, One more for Education and another in VM which gets invoked when needed for checking out URLs from unknown people.
I'm power-conscious, So I usually buy laptops with low-TDP (15W) CPUs but capable of running at least 32GB Memory for my aforementioned browser requirements. I run tasks requiring more compute power on cloud.
Lately I've limited by browsers to 3(Main/Development/VM), invoke 1 more when necessary. I was able to reduce the browsers by Using desktop Mail client with multiple accounts, adding multiple accounts to Twitter web, Automated posting to social media using Ayrshare (Stopped operating social media accounts which doesn't support it).
have you tried using multi-account containers? it's perfectly suited for segregating different identities like work/bank/shopping/social/whatever all in the same browser instance. that plus temporary containers for "privateish" windows is awesome. I am not sure why that's not installed by default if it's not as it is really great.
Does Firefox not support multiple profiles anymore? I would have thought that this would be the natural solution, to have a different profile for each rather than a different browser.
I'm using tabmanager.io for this purpose, i.e. syncing windows as group of tabs. But I know similar features to this extension for tab-groups are currently being added.
What I want is tab groups by concept or activity. Let’s say I’m looking for info on a new grill I’d start a new tab session and give it a quick name of ”grill” and it’d group all tabs and history under that. I could expand and collapse it and otherwise go back to other things tab groups.
I thought I wanted this, too, and I've used every Firefox extension under the sun to try and achieve it, from the original panorama that was part of Firefox to tree style tabs to a few grouping extensions using containers.
Turns out that almost anything which makes it less painful to keep open large numbers of tabs, also makes my tab count explode.
I think I understand the reason, too: the easiest time to close a tab is immediately (after you're done using it). That's when you have the most context, so you are in the best position to say "I don't need this tab any more". The longer you wait, the longer you'll have to spend figuring out what that tab was about, so you can decide if it's safe to close. Or, of course, you could deal with that later... (And we know how it goes from here).
There is utility in grouping tabs within a working session. Browser windows work pretty well for this, as long as your OS / window manager has a sane way to switch between multiple windows of the same application. There is also utility in being able to hide and restore groups you're using frequently but not constantly, like a side project you're working on at night or on weekends. Again, a window manager with a "workspaces" feature is clutch. Beyond that, there are rapidly diminishing returns.
You can pull those features into your browser via extensions, of course, but I've found they require too much care to avoid the "hundreds of tabs" issue. I'd much rather have a tree style or grouped history than anything with state that I need to manually clean up.
This Chrome extension allows you to name and annotate your entire browser session in a tree structure, and unlike TST on Firefox, it is not limited to a single window. In addition, it allows you to unload entire subtrees, and you can restore subtrees (or the whole session) on another computer.
Tabs-outliner helps me zoom out and see the forest of currently opened tabs (and very handily lets them also be closed to save memory and reopened days or weeks later when required again).
Also every month or two I dump all my mobile chrome tabs over to my desktop Chrome, so that I can close all tabs on my phone.
i.e.
History -> Tabs from other Devices -> Open All
Then I backup, search, and group my URL history hierarchy in the the tree-view of Tabs-outliner
I use the Tree Style Tab addon in Firefox for exactly that purpose. The addon doesn't have the concept of named groups, it is just an extension to organize tabs in a tree... but that's more than enough.
Starting with a keyword search on the parent tab, all subsequent links are opened in child tabs that can be expanded / collapsed. When collapsed, the parent tab's title are the keywords, so it's a nice visual way to have the whole sub-tree "filed" into a single named entry.
There are even a couple extras that allow me to long-middle-mouse-click a parent tab, and it unloads from memory the whole sub-tree. It's a pretty neat addon!
Have you thought about doing this with bookmarks? I do exactly this that way and it's ...just great? You can nest folders within topics and while one's active you just click the star once to put the page in there. I think people usually admit their tab collecting is just a mental vicious-cycle, like hoarding, and I don't really see why reinforcing that behaviour with a 'better tab system' always wins out over simply.. using the well-designed system for doing what you're attempting - bookmarks. E: I should add when you come back to 'Grill research' you can click "open all" in that or one of the subfolders, so is that even slower than several dead tabs refreshing on view?
This may be what you're looking for, I've been using it for a few weeks now and it's really useful. I use it in conjunction with Notion and they have been a power-duo.
OneTab will do something like this. If you click icon it will send all tabs into one group and if you name that group you can later add current tab, tabs on left or right or all opened tabs to this group.
If you use a laptop my experience with Vivaldi is that under both Windows and Linux it is a giant battery drain. Also if you use a touchpad gestures for your browser navigation it currently doesn't support doing so.
A very similar feature comes out of the box with Vivaldi[0], which I have been trying out recently. Whilst I'm particularly enjoying all the configurability so far, it's too early for me to recommend it.
I really like Vivaldi, but at this point it’s not performant enough for me to use it on all devices. On a new MacBook Air, the UI visibly lags at times, and when doing video calls it’s unusably slow. I’m looking forward to future versions where this is hopefully improved, although on a stronger machine it’s probably fine.
What is the appeal of Vivaldi browser? I know it is started by Opera's CEO but it is closed-source (only the chromium part is open-source). The only feature I like is tab split view.
Interesting, but would not really use it unless it could auto group by url. I don't want to have to set things up. Like if I have more than X tabs for a site, group them automatically. This would be great when debugging/learning and I have 20-30 tabs open and more than half might be to one new site that contains the docs for x thing I'm doing/learning.
I wonder if tab reordering is possible, creating pseudo-groups by merely placing all related ones next to each other. Then shift-clicking them could enable tearing off a new window containing all related tabs, which I 100% get isn't the same, but might not be totally worthless, either
yeah that would do it. i didn't notice that... I guess like the other commenter said it could be done with a pseudo tabgroup kind of thing where you move the tabs in a specific ordering but you'd lose the coloring that is native to tabgroups in chrome.
Neat! Thus should be a native feature. Speaking of should-be features, ever since groups came out I’ve wanted the ability to save and load named groups.
Readit News
I used to have 3 different browsers for 3 organizations. They all had same websites usually e.g. Email, social media sites for each organization respectively. Then I had another browser like FF Developer Edition for development, One more for Education and another in VM which gets invoked when needed for checking out URLs from unknown people.
I'm power-conscious, So I usually buy laptops with low-TDP (15W) CPUs but capable of running at least 32GB Memory for my aforementioned browser requirements. I run tasks requiring more compute power on cloud.
Lately I've limited by browsers to 3(Main/Development/VM), invoke 1 more when necessary. I was able to reduce the browsers by Using desktop Mail client with multiple accounts, adding multiple accounts to Twitter web, Automated posting to social media using Ayrshare (Stopped operating social media accounts which doesn't support it).
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...
I hope Chrome adds this to their own tab group feature set soon because it’s pretty nifty!
Turns out that almost anything which makes it less painful to keep open large numbers of tabs, also makes my tab count explode.
I think I understand the reason, too: the easiest time to close a tab is immediately (after you're done using it). That's when you have the most context, so you are in the best position to say "I don't need this tab any more". The longer you wait, the longer you'll have to spend figuring out what that tab was about, so you can decide if it's safe to close. Or, of course, you could deal with that later... (And we know how it goes from here).
There is utility in grouping tabs within a working session. Browser windows work pretty well for this, as long as your OS / window manager has a sane way to switch between multiple windows of the same application. There is also utility in being able to hide and restore groups you're using frequently but not constantly, like a side project you're working on at night or on weekends. Again, a window manager with a "workspaces" feature is clutch. Beyond that, there are rapidly diminishing returns.
You can pull those features into your browser via extensions, of course, but I've found they require too much care to avoid the "hundreds of tabs" issue. I'd much rather have a tree style or grouped history than anything with state that I need to manually clean up.
This Chrome extension allows you to name and annotate your entire browser session in a tree structure, and unlike TST on Firefox, it is not limited to a single window. In addition, it allows you to unload entire subtrees, and you can restore subtrees (or the whole session) on another computer.
Also every month or two I dump all my mobile chrome tabs over to my desktop Chrome, so that I can close all tabs on my phone.
i.e. History -> Tabs from other Devices -> Open All
Then I backup, search, and group my URL history hierarchy in the the tree-view of Tabs-outliner
Starting with a keyword search on the parent tab, all subsequent links are opened in child tabs that can be expanded / collapsed. When collapsed, the parent tab's title are the keywords, so it's a nice visual way to have the whole sub-tree "filed" into a single named entry.
There are even a couple extras that allow me to long-middle-mouse-click a parent tab, and it unloads from memory the whole sub-tree. It's a pretty neat addon!
Actually, it has, but it's seems to lack UI-Integration for whatever reason. I use this bookmarklet for some years not to create a Group-Tab:
javascript:(function(){window.open("ext+treestyletab:group?title=NewGroup&temporary=false")})();
To rename it, just click the title inside the group-tab.
https://workona.com/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...
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[0]: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/#Create_a_n... -> "Option 3|4"
Last i tried, it was pretty buggy on video sites.
> What is the appeal of Vivaldi browser
It's browser made for power users. Bunch of features built in with a lot of flexibility.
Few of my favorites: Vertical Tabs, "Stack tabs by host" (this extension practically), Hibernating background tabs.