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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> I'd love to have fewer windows open ;P. But like, each of these windows has a number of tabs in them, and there is only so much space to see tabs.

So why not use TST or similar (which you're obviously aware of)?

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Selling me on Tree Style Tabs -- and thereby an analysis of the downsides I see to the specific browser/extension configuration I need to have to get such a feature in practice today -- seems very unrelated to why anyone uses or wants tab groups ;P. I have access to tab groups and am not using them, because I don't understand the workflow for them, and all the demos feel contrived: users for whom supposedly a mere five or six tabs are so many they need to be organized into groups.

(FWIW, it is certainly highly related to why all of these users aren't satisfied by using an existing extension that implements tab groups: most of the reasons people describe also apply to why I am happier figuring out how to live without an extension for this. I personally believe it would behoove Firefox to lean heavily into being the one truly hackable customizable browser--steering towards things Chrome would balk at--but they have been running in the other direction now for many years and I am sad.)

As I said: I would definitely support any of these browsers implementing native "tree style tabs", but I don't (at least, yet) understand the workflow people are using for "tab groups" a la Chrome (the feature in question on this post that people want Firefox to integrate). I do want to understand, though! I legitimately am curious how people are concretely using tab groups, as the feature doesn't make sense to me currently but apparently a lot of people want it...

In my case, I have a single window for Firefox (except for when I have another opened in privacy mode). I then have a - wide - variety of more or less topic-based tab groups. So when I'm doing something re AI, I switch to that group, or Emacs, or work, or Python, etc. Sometimes things get crossed, but eventually I send tabs I want to preserve/defer to their proper groups. If I open a new tab and start typing something that's very similar to an existing tab, I get the option to switch to it, even if it's in another group. And whenever I want to access and iterate on some particular topic, whether for 5 seconds or 5 hours, all the context is just a group switch away.

I do similarly with Sidebery (a TST-like extension) which has 'panels' (groups of tabs or tab trees that you can tab between). A nice bonus is that you can assign containers to panels too, so they automatically open in the right place, you don't mix cookies between 'work' and 'personal' or whatever, etc

And for me having that as sort of 'super tabs' in the sidebar is nicer than flicking between multiple windows, but I can imagine some would prefer the more tangible separation.

+1 sidebery

I'm not trying to sell it to you, it's nothing to me what you use! I was just curious since you seemed to describe the same problem/pain that's why people use it, but you did mention it so it's not like you were unaware of it.

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