Show HN: Open-Source Chrome Extension for auto-grouping tabs by URL patterns | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Open-Source Chrome Extension for auto-grouping tabs by URL patterns

github.com

140 pointsmasterofnull50 comments

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).

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.

It does, I used different browsers for memory reasons as I needed them only occasionally and not open all the time.

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.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account...

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I do use FF containers and its great, But for my use case I found it to consumer more memory as I don't need the websites open all the time and so pinned websites on different browsers were efficient for me.

Safari in the upcoming macOS Monterey and iOS 15 do exactly this, syncing tab groups between all of your devices :-) well, Apple devices anyway.

I hope Chrome adds this to their own tab group feature set soon because it’s pretty nifty!

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 may have misunderstood your request, but the feature you want (Tab group) was recently added: https://www.google.com/chrome/tips/#organize

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.

https://workona.com/

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!

It would be nice to have nodes in the tree that don't actually correspond to tabs though. For this specific use case of grouping.

I've got the perfect gift for you - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tst-more-tree... A companion extension to TST by the original author.

> The addon doesn't have the concept of named groups

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.

You should have a look at Vivaldi

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.

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.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbo...

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggk...

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 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.

Workona allows you to switch between workspaces by name, but requires an account setup

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?

neat idea, but it doesn't respect pinned tabs, and the UI is buggy. uninstalled for now.

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.

[0]: https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-stacks/#Create_a_n... -> "Option 3|4"

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.

Last i tried, it was pretty buggy on video sites.

Video handling definitely got better in last 6 months.

> 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.

Two of your 3 favorites are not unique to Vivaldi, is there any other feature worth the switch besides "Stack tabs by host"?

Even stack tabs by host is not unique with this extension is it? :)

It's made for power users as I said, for example you can change the right click menu on the tab bar and have only things you care about in there instead of 1000 options. I bet there are other "unique" features, but that's not the point.

If you are happy with chrome keep using it.

I don't use chrome (and I don't think anyone mentioned chrome in this comment thread about Vivaldi), I was just curious if Vivaldi was worth a try.

Sure, why not if you're curious and have a few mins to spare. It's free

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.

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.

That would be an awesome feature for this plugin to include. Hoping they add it. I'm using this plugin now and it's very pleasant.

What is the difference to the other extensions like this? Like https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mark-tab-manager/f...

neat webext but I'm curious why no firefox release? after a brief perusal of the code it doesn't look like the code has any glaring incompatibilities.

It looks like this utilizes Chrome's tab groups, which Firefox doesn't have.

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

tab reordering would be possible but the shift-clicking on the tab group would have to be some other mechanism like a context menu action or something along those lines.

Oh, apologies, I meant the _user_ would be responsible for shift-clicking and tearing off those tabs; I haven't ever seen an extension that was able to do those kind of wholistic browser operations

ah i see... yeah an extension could theoretically do it but it would be along the lines of right click on a tab and then select a context menu action that the extension installs that would then do something like "break this group off into a new window"... fairly trivial to implement but I don't think it exists right now.

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.

Is “open source” really a feature for browser extensions? I don’t think I’d ever use a proprietary one.

_Cries in 1Password land_

They've done a good job publishing specs for their on-disk formats, but thus far I've never seen anything for their extensions. Ironically, it's a tiny bit easier now that their in-browser uses the same API as does the "thick" client, but (AFAIK) that API still needs to be fully reversed enough to implement a separate extension

Yeah, yeah, I know, "but bitwarden!" I just haven't expended the energy to stand up my own password management infra in order to compare the features

if you trust 1password to host your passwords do you not trust bitwarden? it's free for personal use across all your devices and opensource. if it were free without anyone paying for it I'd be a bit more worried about it but since there are paying tiers I think they are more reputable. That said the interface on the client doesn't have the best UX.

Playing some fun games with version numbers. 6.4.0 with initial commit 2 months ago.

Smart idea to utilize the new grouping feature! One thing I didn't realize until recently, you can click on a tab group name to collapse/expand the whole group.

well done!

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