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Firefox used to have this feature, but it was removed. You need to install this extension now: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups-pa...

Are the "groups" persistent and tied to the window? So if you change the tabs around, close the window, then "open" the group again, you will get exactly what you had?

They are persistent, but I don't think they are tied to a window (I mainly just use one). But your groups are kept as you left them after restarting.

I have 7 groups right now on my home machine, and that many or more on my work machine. Each has a few to a large number of tabs in it. I have about 28 in my current one. Each group contains tabs about a different topic, such as daily visit sites, searches and articles for ongoing development in a particular language, research into specific projects, or random lookups.

I also use the Tree View Tabs extension which show tabs in a hierarchical list on the left, instead of across the top. This is a better use of space for me and shows the relationships of tabs.

I am going to miss both of these severely if the XUL plugins go away this fall as they are saying. My web workflow is much more efficient with them, at least in Firefox. I like using Chrome, but with a lot of pages open I just have a squished up mass of tabs across the top that can't be easily read, it's a big bother.

Anyway, I wish there were more extensions for more browsers that improved the state of managing large groups of tabs by topic.

Last time I tried the groups that were opened when quitting firefox would reopen at next launch but you could not "reopen" a closed group. Having more than one window was asking for trouble as in risking losing all your groups and tabs because there another firefox window opened in the background or the downthemall manager window when you closed the main firefox windows.

Workaround is to always quit firefox using the ctrl+q shortcut, though at times groups will reopen with the correct number of tabs but they're all empty.

Best bet is to manually save your session at times.

Unfortunately, this extension, too will soon die when Firefox no longer supports legacy addons.

I think there is a new Firefox experiment that behaves somewhat like this: https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/containers

IIRC https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-groups/?s... is a replacement

Container tabs is totally different, that's about basically having multiple profiles in one window. E.g you can have the work container logged into your work email and work stuff, and your personal container logged in to your personal email and personal stuff, and they don't know about each other. Like incognito, but persistent and within the same window.

That looks really good! I'll have to try it out first, but it makes me more hopeful about Firefox's future.

I didn't know of this one, is its tab management any good ? As in how do you move tabs around groups, open/duplicat/close tabs and groups ?

The 'simplified' in its name makes me doubtful it has any of the advanced features I need.

No idea, I haven't used tab groups in a year, so I've never tried the new version.

These "redone" addons that work post 57 start out pretty bare-minimum but they rapidly gain features.

I've been looking for something just like this for Chrome but haven't quite found it yet.

Will it work after the legacy addons support is removed? If yes, how can you tell? I couldn't find any related keywords I know on the addon's page.

According to its developer it is the only of his extensions that may have a shot at surviving webextensions, though requires a rewrite and dropping of some of the useful features.

  Tab Groups has a shot. I took on this project after it was
  decided to remove the built-in Tab Groups from Firefox, as
  I thought it could be a good and fun learning experience;
  it hasn't been, if anything it's been stressful and
  time-consuming. I don't really use groups outside of my
  development profile, with my browsing habits I only find
  them useful to a point, they're helpful for my
  development/coding workflow, but I've used them maybe twice
  in my main profile during normal browsing.
  
  Its core functionality and basic workflow probably can be
  made into a WebExtension, but only after an almost complete
  rewrite of the code (with some major work done on Firefox's
  side as well!), and still stripped down of at least some of
  its features. Many of the new groups features I've wanted
  to add since the beginning are impossible though, for the
  same reason as I mentioned above: they either don't fit the
  scope of what can be allowed through WebExtensions or their
  implementation would be far too complex to do on my own.

Yep. I found that feature very useful before. Really sad when it was removed.

Nope, it didn't have that feature, though it had some basic foundations. It got removed as several others firefox features for no good reasons.

There's also tab groups and tab groups helper but those are about to disappear[1] and make firefox useless for this use case.

[1]: http://fasezero.com/

I LOVE tab groups. I'm hoping a WebExtension version comes out before FF57.

It's impossible to go back once you get used to that UX.

Edge has this since Creators update. Unfortunately, Edge is pretty bad in ways that actually matter (UI responsiveness, reliability).

Edge is useless outside of recent windows version.

Vivaldi has tab groups, and lets you put the tab bar on the side (where it becomes kind of like a tree).

https://help.vivaldi.com/article/grouping-tabs/

I'm pretty happy with OneTab https://www.one-tab.com/

yes, OneTab is the thing! No need to have a million tabs open. It also lets you export the links as text

Wow, that's freaking awesome. Definitely using this from now on. Thanks!

same, has helped tremendously

I just want one feature added to it, the ability to just add one tab instead of all open tabs.

Right click on the page, select "only this tab to one tab"

Thanks ! did not know about this one. It lacks the ability to sort tabs by activity and is messy when you have 150+ tabs over 20 activities, also lack the visual preview of tab content but it's still useful.

You had all that in the old Opera browser, but people liked slower and more resource-consuming alternatives better.

I miss Opera 12 so much :'(

Otter[1] has made much progress in recreating the opera 12 experience.

[1]:https://otter-browser.org/

I miss it dearly too, buddy, it was a real joy to use.

Opera was a damn fine browser. Used it upto version 12 from version 6 onwards. IE sucked during those days. All those widgets that nobody knew about. Opera was too ahead of its times and now it has moved to chromium which is really bad.

I use separate browser windows across actual Ubuntu/centos work spaces to separate ny contexts.

My project context has a chrome window with all my task related tabs, my terminal window and my IDE. My communication context has my tickets, slack and other communications in it. Then there is one more context with podcasts, spotify or non project docs and reading.

It wasn't something I set out to achieve either, it just happened naturally once I started using shortcut keys to switch between workspaces.

> So I wish I could "save" a window (as a "workspace") under a name

Naming would be too much explicit action for my taste (might as well go back to the lost ancient art of bookmark management), but I think most usage patterns of grouping tabs in windows would work much better if each window had some kind of designated primary tab (leftmost tab?) defining a more permanent window identity than using whatever tab is currently active for window naming.

Planning a trip is spot on for my gripes with ephemeral browser window names: "The Maps Window" might have a hotel website currently active (that might get promoted to its own window if the hotel makes it to my shortlist) while two of five windows for candidate hotels have a maps tab (individual hotel surroundings) active. Now every attempt of going back to "The Maps Window" will be a voyage big enough to forget why you wanted to look at maps in the first place.

I use the one called Session Buddy. It allows to save all tabs in one chrome window as one session, and allows you to open all those anytime, as well as to export as html. Also, autosave session just like Microsoft office autosave function. I will post link from pc in few hours.

Not related anyway except as happy user

It's time to deprecate bookmarks in browsers, and add workspaces.

Don't touch my bookmarks! I have all my tabs in my headspace at all times, I need bookmarks to mentally organize my stuff in the short-term/long-term category.

If bookmarks are deprecated I'll have to save workspaces made up of a single page and I'll just feel silly.

Edit: Plus you can use bookmark folders as workspaces already I guess? I don't but you can, fairly easily!

Merge, not replace. If there's a special bookmark group that dynamically contains current tabs, then you have the best of both.

Let a group of tabs be a bookmark folder that has the "show" attribute set, and so dynamically tracks what is shown.

Want to show all tabs in a group/folder? Toggle show.

Bookmarks sucks ! link rot makes them useless and it's time consuming and tedious if not impossible to manage when you have a lot of them.

I use wallabag instead which is basically bookmarks with a local snapshot of content that you can easily classify and sort.

Can you just open a new window as a "workspace" and have tabs within that window?

In Chrome you can "Bookmark all tabs" by pressing Ctrl+Shift+D or right clicking any tab and choosing that option. Then just close the window and when you want to bring them back later, in the bookmark tree you can right click a folder and say "open all tabs in a new window".

They all reload, which is not ideal.

Also, they allow duplicates I guess.

Not the same thing. The behaviour isn't "persistent": If you add or remove tabs to the window, the bookmark folder isn't automatically updated. Re-bookmarking every time you make a change isn't an option. You also lose state (history, forms, scroll position).

The built in spaces feature of Firefox was quite good for making multiple desktops for different projects. It was still in Firefox the last time I checked.

I've been trying to work like this but I just can't. So far I found no way of actually confining each activity into its own window. Mainly because opening a new page from an external applications opens it in a seemingly random opened window. I finally abandoned the idea and just use tab searching extension

Folders of bookmarks?

Requires automatic two-way syncing. Browsers have, for a long time, supported restoring a bookmark folder into a window as tabs. But if you then change the tabs, the bookmarks aren't automatically updated. This is one of the missing pieces.

Additionally opening a bookmark fold as tabs does not support lazy loading so it will bog down your computer when you open all the bookmarks.

I speculate that general-purpuse virtual machine management software would fit the bill quite well

How would this help with the scenario described by the OP? Are you suggesting starting a new virtual machine instead of a new browser window?

Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting. VMs can be named, saved and loaded straightforwardly.

That's massive overhead for managing a set of tabs which is exactly what Firefox is trying to avoid.

This functionality exists with bookmarks.

FF allows you to bookmark all the tabs you have open into a bookmarks folder.

It also provides a button at the bottom of the folder "open all in tabs"

This works well enough for my taste, but I also use pinned tabs for stuff like fb messenger

But you lose the state the tabs were in, which means risk of losing hours of work and tedious work to restore each state.

Not even mentioning dealing with managing several thousands of bookmarks, duplicates, link rot, and so on. Definitely impractical for power users use case.

Hey, great idea ! I'm just use Firefox in the same way. Here i couldn't say thé fox is finnish. On linux it's thé best.

I'm using zeerka.com for exactly that: research projects that are saved as groups of links. And it's browser agnostic.

Along the lines of your analogy, I wouldn't have papers strewn all over the desk, I'd have them in a pile or in a folder. Reversing the analogy I feel this is similar to using bookmarks or saving a list of links.

"Session Buddy" on Chrome has been really useful for me.

It lets you save and group open tas and windows, plus export them as list. (No affiliation)

https://sessionbuddy.com/

I use onetab though it only saves the tabs and can only be exported as plain text but it fills all my needs.

I used to be a big OneTab user, but Session Buddy really is a lot better for reviewing, saving, loading, and editing your windows and sessions. If you've never used it, I'd recommend giving it a try.

Session Manager does the same for Firefox (not sure if it's been ported to the new addon model)