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Comment by CuriousCosmic | Hacker News Reader

Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.

I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.

Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

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Vivaldi has this built-in, they call it Workspaces. It's the #1 thing I like about the browser.

Firefox had this to back in ancient times, it was called Tab Candy, Panorama, or tab groups, depending on the release number. Then they killed it because "nobody used it."

Hopefully this new vertical tab system doesn't suffer the same fate as Panorama...

Chrome finally added Tab Groups, so now it's OK for Firefox to have it.

I use this and love it. One of the most useful adons. Really helps me to differentiate work mode form non work mode. I do wish it was built in because it appears to do it a hacky way by using bookmarks. Which is fine, because you can think of these tabs like temporary bookmarks.

Usually how I do it is at my office desk I have a second monitor I hook my laptop up to. So I open a new window, let that be the group, and then I use my mac for the terminal and my ipad sits to the side with spotify and any chat apps, out of the way and easy to dismiss.

What's extra satisfying is I'm a tab hoarder. But you finish a project and get to see all those tabs go away.

It's using tab hiding, one of Firefox's non-standard extensions to the WebExtensions API. I believe this is also how Panorama used to work

By the way, built-in tab grouping is also on the list of features in development. Hopefully they don't go the Chrome way

That's good to know. I've found that it is helpful to add Auto Discard Tabs, if you're a real tab hoarder.

What is "the Chrome way"? What I'd like to see is that the addresses are not cached to ram, but either disk or swap (or a combination). I figure these tools are more used by tab hoarders as well, and if they're working as pseudo bookmarks (at least conceptually) I am very willing to trade some loading time and have non-active tabs have high niceness.

Unfortunately it doesn't work for pinned tabs - I use them for pages that I want to keep for longer and remember about them. Bookmarks are used for something that I store and go back to it seldom (e.g. when I store a recipe).

Tbh I do prefer that it doesn't apply to pinned tabs. I keep tabs pinned when I want them to stay in a window even when I switch tabs. Things like my schedule, etc that I generally want in one place to be able to easily look at regardless of what I'm doing.

Safari has this now too. It’s actually a pretty good browser these days.

It's great...except for all the standards it doesn't implement. Probably because they can't collect 30% from every web site.

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