Tabs are a huge part of the web browsing experience. Recently, a new feature called “Tab Groups” has been adopted by nearly every major browser. If you’re not using Tab Groups, you should be.
The concept behind Tab Groups is pretty simple. It allows you to combine multiple tabs into groups that can be labeled and moved around together. Tab Groups are available in Google Chrome across desktop and Android, and also in Microsoft Edge, Safari, and Firefox. The feature works about the same on all platforms.
RELATED: How to Enable and Use Tab Groups in Google Chrome
Keep Everything in One Window
Before the Tab Group feature arrived, the easiest way to keep a bunch of tabs together was to put them in a separate browser window. The downside to this is you could end up with a bunch of open windows, which doesn’t help with clutter.
Tab Groups allow you to keep all your tabs in one window, but still create partitions for different things. You don’t have to remember which window has your tabs for a specific project. Everything is in one place with colors and labels for easy finding.
Plus, if you do want to break the tabs out into their own window, putting them in a Tab Group means you can grab all of the tabs at once. It’s the best of both worlds.
Visual Organization
As mentioned above, Tab Groups can be labeled and color-coded. If you’re someone that keeps a lot of tabs open at all times, these labels can make a huge difference in how you view the browser tabs.
The more tabs you have open, the smaller they get and the less information you can see. However, if you use Tab Group labels, you’ll always know the red group is for that project you’ve been working on, while the green group is for holiday gift shopping.
Simply put, the website favicon and page title don’t always paint a picture of what you’re doing. Tab Group labels and colors are a much better way to see what’s going on.
Save Tabs for Later
One of the reasons why people tend to end up with tons of tabs open is they’re afraid to lose something. You think “I might need that tab again, so I’ll just leave it open.” It’s digital hoarding.
One cool feature of Tab Groups is the ability to collapse all of the tabs in the group into a single tab. So if you’re constantly finding yourself with a million tabs across the top of your browser, you can clean things up by collapsing the groups.
If your device can handle it, you could have dozens of tabs open, but only a few labels across the top of the screen. Now you don’t have to feel so bad about not being able to let go of all those tabs you might need again.
A Place for Everything and Everything in Its Place
If you haven’t figured it out yet, the moral of the story here is organization. Without Tab Groups, your browser tabs are sort of a wild mess. You click a link and the page opens at the end of the tab list, there’s no order to anything, and you can forget what you have open.
Tab Groups introduce some semblance of order. For example, if you’re in a Tab Group and you click a link, that page will open in the same Tab Group. Done using those tabs for the time being? Collapse the group and move on to the next thing, no hard decisions about if you’ll need them again or not.
Add a little organization to your web browser and multitasking won’t seem so daunting.
