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Comment by deanclatworthy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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 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.

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

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.

https://workona.com/

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...

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

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.

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