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Google Chrome Will Finally Help You Organize Your Tabs (techcrunch.com) 54

Google Chrome is rolling out a new feature to help you better manage all your open tabs. The company announced today the launch of "tab groups" for the beta version of its web browser, which will allow you to organize, label, and even color-code your tabs for easy access. The feature will make its way to the stable release of Chrome starting next week. From a report: To use the new feature, you can right-click on a tab and choose "Add tab to group." You can then select an existing group to move the tab to or create a new one, which you'll also name and label. The company had been testing this solution for several months before today's public release, as some had already spotted. Based on this early research, Google says it found that many people tended to organize their tabs by topic -- like a project they're working on or a set of shopping and review sites, for example. Others, however, would organize tabs by urgency -- labeling them things like "ASAP," "this week," or "later." Google also suggests tab groups can be used to help keep you focused on task progress, by grouping them into areas like "in progress," "need to follow up," and "completed."
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Google Chrome Will Finally Help You Organize Your Tabs

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  • by Kohlrabi82 ( 1672654 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @02:48PM (#60056972)

    Whoever does not understand Opera 12.x, is doomed to reinvent it.

  • Automatic (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bhcompy ( 1877290 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @02:59PM (#60057010)
    I just want automatic color coded tabs by subdomain. IE used to do this at some point, but I haven't found an easy way to replicate this in Firefox or Chrome. Bouncing between 5 different servers on the same domain but different subdomains(like prod, dev, test, etc) can lead to stupid errors, and the automatic color coding helps
    • by rho ( 6063 )

      That's a really good idea. Very useful. I did a version of that where I bashed the CSS background-color to red/yellow/green depending on subdomain, but it's very hacky and useless once the designer gets his mitts on it.

    • IE will still do this, even the latest versions. Just go to IE options, Tab options, and turn on "Tab Groups". Although IE rendering and performance is so terrible I wouldn't really use it to achieve this, it is still there.
  • Still no vertical tab bar?

    Amazing FF extension - tree style tab - to auto group tabs in trees is invaluable. Dark theme too!

    • Agreed. Tree Style Tabs is the killer app that makes me unwilling to use any other web browser. (Yeah, I've tried that completely inadequate and clumsy Chrome extension that puts tabs in a separate window. It's as inadequate as a slug is as a substitute for a live Norwegian Blue parrot.)

      Tab groups looks like it might be a baby step in the right direction, but on modern monitors, with their 16x9 aspect ratio, side tabs are a massive win as soon as you have more than half a dozen or so.

  • How can you have so many tabs that you no longer are capable of keeping track of them? Is this like hoarding, only instead of not being able to throw away cat litter, you are unable to click the little X on your tab?
    • by nwaack ( 3482871 )
      There are a surprising amount of people who don't close tabs or applications when they're finished with them. Not sure benefit they think this bring them, but I see it all the time.
      • I find they get overwhelming pretty quickly. So I try to keep my tabs down to about 5/window, yes I actually close out the 6th tab or move it out of a window, and I often drag them back and fourth between windows to keep each window sort of organized. I think that makes me weird.

        Anyways, I think keeping tabs open for long periods of time is sort of on the wasteful side. It's not like if I had 10 tabs open I'm switching between all 10 of them constantly. I'd like to see the ability to park tabs in some w

        • Yeah I hate having a lot of tabs open, I only do that temporarily. What I do, using Firefox, is I shrunk the bookmarks toolbar into the same row as the address bar and reduce it to 2-3 folders. Then you can just drag tabs into those folders when I don't need them open. This doesn't work quite as smooth with Chrome however since you can't seem to drag tabs into the bookmark bar or a folder.

    • Not sure how it is for other people, but I have a window for some social media site (like say Twitter), and as I encounter interesting things to read or watch later, I open them in new tabs. Eventually I'll get around to looking them over and dismissing, but that may take some time so I might build up 20 or so tabs.

      That said I don't see what kind of organization this use of tabs really need, since it basically does not matter what order they are in.

    • Some corporate applications (Atlassian, looking at ya) require having dozens of tabs open at the same time. I have to switch between them quite often. The BI web app I'm using is the same. Dashboards, reports, catalog browser, I gotta switch between them every 15-20 minutes or so.

      • This drives me crazy. It's a shame that online advertising abused pop-out windows so badly that they are now very poorly looked upon. And I realize you can configure browsers to actually allow pop-out windows on a site by site basis, it does little when most sites don't even bother supporting that situation any more.

        I'll give you a great example of where pop-out would be better than tab or something like a jquery dialog. My time sheets software with work, if I want to go back and review older sheets, say

        • by thogard ( 43403 )

          "I have to either leave the page to find it, or click links using ctrl+click to force it into a tab, then drag the new tab to my other monitor."

          This is why "open in a new window" has been around for decades.

          Tabs are a poor hack to fix bad window managers.

        • Drag the tab out and it will go in a new window. Win+left and right arrows are awesome to quickly split the screen between windows.

    • Well, I play an online text rpg where I often need to have multiple tabs open for info, activities, etc. Now, a fair criticism might be that it should be designed better, but there are some real limits to what you can effectively do in a text driven game. Right now I have 8 tabs for that game open, and since they all have the same favicon it's not easy to tell them apart.

      Home page, guild page, market page, overview map, forums, wiki, etc. Sure I could bookmark them all and constantly switch back and forth,

    • It isn't necessary, Google just wants another pile of private user data to monetize.
    • In my mind, and I suspect other people's, bookmarks are for long-term saving. Which means there isn't a clear UI for pages I'll need to return to tomorrow. Or pages I haven't gotten to yet but want to use/read within the next day or two. Something that let's me take pages off with one click, like I can close a tab with one click. I end up with a bunch of tabs open to pages I may need in the next day or two.

    • Just because you don't have 100 tabs doesn't imply that no one else does as well.

      It is easy to have multiple tabs depending on what job you do -- especially with multiple monitors.
      i.e. Examining a Jira and related bugs, monitoring services, looking at documentation, logging into vendor websites, looking up potential questions/answers on Stack Overflow, reading /., etc.

      Plugin such as Tabs Outliner [google.com] let you group, save, and load "tab sets" for later use. Not everything needs to be permanently bookmarked. Tem

      • I don't know about anyone else here, but I work on more than one project at a time. Right now I'm trying to replace the OS on my smartphone (requiring lots of research), and update some old Python2 scripts to Python3. Neither of these activities is doing much for my blood pressure.

        Long ago in the days of punchcards and listings, I worked for a company that was in its death throes. Their programming staff worked in a roomful of desks. As staff trickled out the door, management kept on shoveling the departees

    • How can you have so many tabs that you no longer are capable of keeping track of them? Is this like hoarding, only instead of not being able to throw away cat litter, you are unable to click the little X on your tab?

      Oh, I close them when I'm done with them. But...

      1) Something I want to get back to soon, but not right now, but too ephemeral to justify cluttering up my bookmarks.

      2) Multiple tickets I'm working on.

      3) Pages I keep coming back to a lot.

      and any number of other reasons that are good and sufficient for me.

      The tendency of some software designers (*cough* Apple *cough*) to decree "I do not care HOW you want to use our product, WE KNOW BETTER and WE WILL DICTATE HOW YOU USE IT, and will do everything in our powe

    • By doing work that requires extensive documentations, and sometimes searching for complex solutions? Having a few API doc opens, while also searching clues about a specific issues that emerge with the conjunction of three different tools, and also having a few tabs open for management/mails/calls is easy.
  • “...can be solved with another layer of indirection.”

    - David Wheeler

  • not done yet (Score:3, Informative)

    by BKDotCom ( 542787 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:05PM (#60057034) Homepage

    The feature kinda sucks / feels half-implemented.
    What's the point if you can't collapse/minimize the group? This adds yet another "tab" to the tab-bar that displays the name of the group

  • by xack ( 5304745 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:17PM (#60057062)
    Browsers are gonig in a constant cycle of adding and removing features as fads come and go.See here [mozilla.org].
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's not quite like Panorama was, it's actually got less functionality.

      Panorama was one of those things that sounds good on paper but is actually a terrible idea. Open tabs can be broken down into three categories:

      1. Tabs you are actively working with.
      2. Tabs with state you want to preserve because the web is bad at preserving state.
      3. Tabs with info you want to keep but haven't found a good way to store.

      2 doesn't really have a good solution. Panorama didn't fix it because it just unloaded and reloaded tabs

      • Amen to 2 and 3.

        Closest I've found to being able to do that is using Firefox Readerview. If all you're looking for is to snapshot a single webpage, bring it up, go into Readerview mode, and Save As the entire web page. Then replace the aboutReader.css you got with one that's been suitably tweaked to render the page without junk headers and footers.

        After combining everything and fixing paths, if you're very lucky, you'll have a bundle you can store, or use Calibre to convert to a monolithic format. If you're

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          I like Joplin because as well as adding my own notes it supports tagging and other organization features. It has cloud sync too (Owncloud supported).

      • by DeVilla ( 4563 )

        Panorama was one of those things that sounds good on paper but is actually a terrible idea. Open tabs can be broken down into three categories:

        I don't agree at all. I separate tabs into groups based on topics & tasks along with some that just need to sorted or looked at later. These might sound like things that you could use bookmarks for, but that really doesn't cut it for me. To me bookmarks are pretty static and for rather indefinite storage. They are rather slow when you want to jump back into dealing with a group of tabs and error prone when it comes to keeping them up-to-date when you want to keep the active state of a group of tabs

  • Wow! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by onyxruby ( 118189 ) <onyxrubyNO@SPAMcomcast.net> on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:33PM (#60057108)

    This feature has been around for years elsewhere. How about the ability to put things in multiple rows? Seriously, there is no good reason you should be stuck with one row of tabs.

    • Because we already don't have enough vertical space! The absolutely last thing I would want is my fucking tabs stealing another what? 5% of the page?

      I'd rather be forced to use more than one browser window before I had tabs that wrapped.

      • That is the wonderful thing about having an option. If you do not like the option you can choose not to use it. For other people having the option would be very valuable.

  • by Way Smarter Than You ( 6157664 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:56PM (#60057182)
    Unless you're either forced to by work or you don't care about your privacy.
    • What privacy? It doesn't matter what browser you use, you have no privacy on the internet. Even a browser that respects your privacy, is used to access web sites that do not. One way or another, you are tracked everywhere you go.

      • Tracked by who? The government? Vote differently. Google? Vote with your browser.
        • Tracked by Google, and Facebook, and dozens of other ad agencies. Just about every web site on the internet sends your data to numerous places. Take a look at the javascript behind any non-trivial site, and you'll see numerous calls to third parties. These calls are sending your data, with IDs that can be correlated, to those third parties. The third parties in turn sell the data to whoever will pay for it.

  • by Vlijmen Fileer ( 120268 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:57PM (#60057188)

    "Chrome"??
    I'm seriously confused as to the apparently somewhat high umber of people using that horrible Internet Explorer 6 of the 21th century.
    Did people forget with what goal and massively harmful impact Microsoft pushed IE6? Are they too blind or naive to see that the means are different, but that the goal with which Google (recently joined by Microsoft) pushes this Chrome thing is /precisely the same?

    • The difference is that Microsoft controlled the OS and the Browser, and tried to use their OS monopoly position to also control internet development. Chrome is in no position to control the OS or prevent people from using a different browser.

    • IE6 vs Chrome: Chrome actually updates and follows standards.
      The other options are:
      - Firefox: didn't listen to their users for over a decade and kept adding things nobody asked for. Even if they're back to being the best browser on the planet, they don't have any significant marketshare anymore so they can only try to follow what Chrome does.
      - Opera: got sold to China. Should be self-explanatory.
      - Safari: Limited to macOS and iOS. Hopefully they'll keep their standards compliance up to the same level as Chr

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      "Chrome"??
      I'm seriously confused as to the apparently somewhat high umber of people using that horrible Internet Explorer 6 of the 21th century.
      Did people forget with what goal and massively harmful impact Microsoft pushed IE6? Are they too blind or naive to see that the means are different, but that the goal with which Google (recently joined by Microsoft) pushes this Chrome thing is /precisely the same?

      Except the browsing engine is open source, since Apple derived WebKit from KHTML, Google derived Blink f

  • ...sort of: I have many windows, each with a related set of tabs. I made a javascript page that sets the title and I use it as the first tab, which I select when I minimize it so I can find that particular set easily.

  • browsers help to organize my tabs. bah hum bug!

    The only reason they add new pretend features is to get users to upgrade and be forced in to using all the under the hood stuff they hid in the update.

    Just my 2 cents ;)
  • Tree Style Tabs (Score:5, Informative)

    by labnet ( 457441 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @04:51PM (#60057392)

    I’ve used Piros Tree Style Tabs plug-in for Firefox, well forever. Chrome had an experimental side tab many years ago but some dweeb developer at google said no one will ever use this and removed it, thus I stopped using chrome.
    Because I’m a design engineer, I’ve often got 50+ tabs open at once, and the treestyle tab plugin is brilliant.
    I also move the windows taskbar from bottom to left because Hollywood sucks. 16:10 was sooo much better than 16:9
    Now get off my lawn.

  • by drew_kime ( 303965 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @04:53PM (#60057406) Journal
    There was a Mozilla plugin that did this at least 5 years ago called ... wait for it ... Tab Groups. Yeah, great innovation there Google.
  • I would like all the tabs, tab groups, organized as a tree on the right window pane.

    That way I can see more of the tab titles, instead of just the first 6 or 8 char. There are times the tab heads are so small not even the icon shows up.

    It should be a full tree. Control clicks adds a child node to the tree on the left.

  • I guess nobody's able to do it right way and bring innovations except good old Opera team, with Vivaldi browser.
    Actually, tabs are only reason I use it for now and both Chrome and Firefox suck at doing. Vivaldi has figure out how to manage hundreds and tabs with low memory usage.

  • by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @05:56PM (#60057568)

    I mean, sort of. Everyone has been able to group tabs by simply opening another window and use it to group tabs together.

    • And then you have to try to find which window, in your stack of windows, has the tab you are looking for!

      • Yeah! Isn't it fun?!

        Joking aside, to do that I simply use macOS' "Exposé for the currently selected application" feature.

  • There is (was) an extension for Firefox to do this. Anything for Chrome?

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