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Comment by jay_kyburz | Hacker News Reader

I never understand the need for tab groups, once you get above 4-5 tabs you are actively working in, whats wrong with bookmarks?

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Bookmarks are perceptually longer-term than open tabs, so there may be more reluctance to save to a bookmark. (E.g., if planning a trip to Italy, do you want to bookmark some blogger's food recs for Rome, forever?)

But worse is, it relies on recalling the text in the bookmark's title to resurface it. You might not remember the page title, but you can always scan through open tabs.

I add a folder to my bookmark bar. All project related tabs get bookmarked there. When I'm done, I either delete the whole folder or file it somewhere.

I can also open all in tabs, if I really want to.

I wrote love the ability to associate a TTL with bookmarks. Let me bookmark for 3 hours or 2 days or forever. Of course the 3 and 2 are user choices.

Mostly the way I deal with this now is sharing the tab to another Firefox on a different computer then use it there and decide it's fate.

This is an interesting idea for a feature, that I think I would like too. I like to save things to maybe look at later and a TTL would manage automatically dropping them from bookmarks in case I never actually want to look at it later.

Work make me use Chrome, and I have recently converted hard to tab groups. I've found two main uses: one for a collection of reference tabs that I mostly want open or closed together (specific API references that are normally spread out over a few pages); the other is to organise groups of tabs for different projects I'm working on.

Both of these make context switching easier as I can quickly hide all of the tabs I'm not currently using, knowing they'll be just as easy to reopen later. In Chrome, tab groups can be saved too, so they give you a bit of the persistence of bookmarks.

I'm still a Firefox user where I have a choice, and I'm really excited to hear they're working on first-class tab groups

Think of it like memory hierarchies. Bookmarks are long term storage, tabs are registers. Tab groups fall somewhere in the middle, easy to reengage with and easy to put out of focus.

Bookmarks suck. They are slow and cumbersome to manage, especially when it's many related urls. And for working with them, I need to open them as a tab anyway, so why not stay there from the beginning?

I use Firefox's existing native support for tab groups that it's had since pre-1.0. They're called windows.

Cool until you restart your machine.

Do you mean "… and then it's not very cool anymore"? And if so, then why not?

I think they meant that you lose your windows after a reboot, because Firefox only restores one window, compared to all of your groups.

Firefox restores all windows.

If you close your windows in the wrong order, you will lose your tabs and pinned tabs.

Example: Have a primary window with you email, calendar and important sites pinned.

Then open another window and open a few tabs.

Then at the end of the day, close your primary window first, then discover you still have the secondary window open and close it as well.

When you restart Firefox you will get the secondary window and your "primary" window will be lost with all your pinned tabs.

I actually went down a rabbit hole of trying to log it as a bug, but the behavior is by design apparently.

You can reopen the window you're missing with ctrl+shift+n, the same way you open a formerly closed tab (only that's not n, that's t). I do agree it's irritating this isn't made more plain.

Use Ctrl-Shift-Q so that all windows are closed at once.

Bookmarks don't have tab history.

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