Tab groups in the Yandex browser. How to make it convenient to work with a large number of tabs in the browser. How to get tab groups back in Firefox

For most of us, the browser is the most popular and most frequently launched program on the computer. We use it to listen to music, watch movies, check mail, and so on. And although browsers are updated almost every week, they have enough problems. One of them is not the most convenient work with a large number of tabs.

In fact, working with tabs is like that joke about cats. Don't like cats? You just don't know how to cook them. You just need to learn how to work with tabs and use the appropriate browser functions for this. And you will not be able to understand how you lived before.

Keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys)

Hotkeys are a very convenient way to manage tabs. Especially when the tabs get so tiny it’s even awkward to click on them.

• Ctrl + Tab- switching between tabs to the right side.
• Ctrl + Shift + Tab- switching between tabs to the left.
• Ctrl + W / Cmd + W on Mac- close the active tab.

These are just a few combinations that will allow you to quickly switch between tabs. Keyboard shortcuts exist. And some of them might force you to use your keyboard instead of your mouse to control your tabs.

Remembering open tabs

When you constantly switch between your browser and another program, chances are that you could accidentally close the browser, and then you have to reopen everything. And it is good if you remember what you have discovered. All this headache can be saved by the function of the browser, which allows you to remember which tabs were open before closing it.

Enable this feature and thereby free yourself from unnecessary work in the future:

• Google chrome: Settings → Initial group → Continue from the same place.
• Firefox: Preferences -> General -> When Firefox starts -> Show last opened windows and tabs.
• Apple Safari: Preferences → General → Safari opens at startup → All windows from last session.

Adding tabs to favorites

Another quick way save open tabs to work with later is to add them to a separate folder in bookmarks. To do this, right-click on the tab and select "Add tabs to favorites". Item name may differ in different browsers but it is easy to understand that this is exactly the item you are looking for. As a result, a folder with the site addresses you need will appear in your bookmarks. Next, right-click on this folder, select "Open all bookmarks" - all the tabs are again in front of us.

Sorting tabs by individual browser windows

Who said that all tabs should be in the same browser window? You can sort your tabs into different windows. For example, you can move all the tabs that relate to one project to one browser window, and everything related to entertainment to another, and so on. Just drag a tab to an empty spot on your desktop and a new window will open. Another way is to right-click on a link or bookmark and select "Open in new window" from the list.

Selecting multiple tabs at once

You can perform various actions not with one tab, but with several at once. But for this, you first need to select these same tabs. Hold down the Ctrl key (or Cmd on Mac) and select the ones you need in this moment tabs. That's it, now you can close them, reload them, add them to bookmarks and so on.

Pinning tabs

Modern browsers from good developers have a great "Pin Tab" feature. This is very convenient if you keep a particular tab open at all times. For example, it could be a tab with Gmail or a music service. Once you pin a tab, it will be more difficult to close and take up less space on the tab bar. Just right-click on the tab and select the desired item from the list.

Restoring a closed tab

Sometimes it turns out that you accidentally close a tab that you didn't want to close at all. The hand twitched or changed its mind at the moment of closing - anything can happen. To reopen this tab, you can, of course, go to your browser history and find this site. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + T (or Cmd + Shift + T on Mac in Chrome and Firefox and Cmd + Z in Safari) to bring this tab back. Also, right-clicking on any tab in your browser can help you.

Tab groups in Firefox

Almost five years ago, developers added to Firefox browser very cool feature called "Tab Groups" or "Panorama". She practically does the trick described above. It's about using different browser windows for tabs. Only here all this is done more beautifully, and you do not need to create many windows. A couple of clicks, and you have already switched to work with another project, or, conversely, have fun after work. To launch tab groups, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + E or Cmd + Shift + E on a Mac.

Hopefully your work with a lot of browser tabs now becomes a little easier.

For most of us, the browser is the most popular and most frequently launched program on the computer. We use it to listen to music, watch movies, check mail, and so on. And although browsers are updated almost every week, they have enough problems. One of them is not the most convenient work with a large number of tabs.

In fact, working with tabs is like that joke about cats. Don't like cats? You just don't know how to cook them. You just need to learn how to work with tabs and use the appropriate browser functions for this. And you will not be able to understand how you lived before.

Keyboard shortcuts (hotkeys)

Hotkeys are a very convenient way to manage tabs. Especially when the tabs get so tiny it’s even awkward to click on them.

• Ctrl + Tab- switching between tabs to the right side.
• Ctrl + Shift + Tab- switching between tabs to the left.
• Ctrl + W / Cmd + W on Mac- close the active tab.

These are just a few combinations that will allow you to quickly switch between tabs. Keyboard shortcuts exist. And some of them might force you to use your keyboard instead of your mouse to control your tabs.

Remembering open tabs

When you constantly switch between your browser and another program, chances are that you could accidentally close the browser, and then you have to reopen everything. And it is good if you remember what you have discovered. All this headache can be saved by the function of the browser, which allows you to remember which tabs were open before closing it.

Enable this feature and thereby free yourself from unnecessary work in the future:

• Google Chrome: Settings → Initial group → Continue from the same place.
• Firefox: Preferences -> General -> When Firefox starts -> Show last opened windows and tabs.
• Apple Safari: Preferences → General → Safari opens at startup → All windows from last session.

Adding tabs to favorites

Another quick way to save open tabs to work with later is to add them to a separate folder in your bookmarks. To do this, right-click on the tab and select "Add tabs to favorites". The item name may differ in different browsers, but it is easy to understand that this is the item you are looking for. As a result, a folder with the site addresses you need will appear in your bookmarks. Next, right-click on this folder, select "Open all bookmarks" - all the tabs are again in front of us.

Sorting tabs by individual browser windows

Who said that all tabs should be in the same browser window? You can sort your tabs into different windows. For example, you can move all the tabs that relate to one project to one browser window, and everything related to entertainment to another, and so on. Just drag a tab to an empty spot on your desktop and a new window will open. Another way is to right-click on a link or bookmark and select "Open in new window" from the list.

Selecting multiple tabs at once

You can perform various actions not with one tab, but with several at once. But for this, you first need to select these same tabs. Hold down the Ctrl key (or Cmd on a Mac) and select the tabs you currently need. That's it, now you can close them, reload them, add them to bookmarks and so on.

Pinning tabs

Modern browsers from good developers have a great "Pin Tab" feature. This is very convenient if you keep a particular tab open at all times. For example, it could be a tab with Gmail or a music service. Once you pin a tab, it will be more difficult to close and take up less space on the tab bar. Just right-click on the tab and select the desired item from the list.

Restoring a closed tab

Sometimes it turns out that you accidentally close a tab that you didn't want to close at all. The hand twitched or changed its mind at the moment of closing - anything can happen. To reopen this tab, you can, of course, go to your browser history and find this site. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + T (or Cmd + Shift + T on Mac in Chrome and Firefox and Cmd + Z in Safari) to bring this tab back. Also, right-clicking on any tab in your browser can help you.

Tab groups in Firefox

Almost five years ago, developers added to the Firefox browser very cool feature called "Tab Groups" or "Panorama". She practically does the trick described above. It's about using different browser windows for tabs. Only here all this is done more beautifully, and you do not need to create many windows. A couple of clicks, and you have already switched to work with another project, or, conversely, have fun after work. To launch tab groups, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Shift + E or Cmd + Shift + E on a Mac.

Hopefully your work with a lot of browser tabs now becomes a little easier.

Today we are ready to announce that the version of Yandex.Browser that we are working on as part of the Cousteau project is joining its main beta. We know that many people here use it, and now you will have the opportunity to switch between the new mode and the traditional interface.

At the end of November last year, our team first presented to the public their vision of what Yandex Browser will be like in the future. To be honest, we didn't expect there to be so many public reviews. For comparison: the stream of proposals and bug reports sent from Cousteau turned out to be even larger than after the release of the very first version of Yandex Browser in 2012. It is not surprising that throughout December we have been actively engaged in the analysis of your messages, which largely determined our scope of work for the coming months.

We want the Yandex Browser beta testing participants to be comfortable tracking changes in the Cousteau project and not have to use two different assemblies for this. Now I will tell you about the results of our work on the new browser over the past month.

Disable grouping of tabs

One of the most popular topics that our users spoke about was the location of the tabs. In the beta version, they will still remain at the bottom, but we are working on different options and continuing to experiment. We want to tell you about them separately. And today I would like to touch upon the issue of grouping tabs. Moreover, many support requests were dedicated to her and allowed us to create a list of priority fixes.

We talked in detail about the ideological rationale for grouping tabs last time. Now let's share with you the statistics that pushed our team to work on this opportunity.

Contrary to popular belief, most users don't need two or three tabs for their daily life on the web. Moreover, about 10% of us open more than ten tabs for our tasks. And almost 3% use over 20. For example, for me this is a normal working state. Can you imagine what two or three dozen open tabs are in a browser? I know colleagues who have hundreds of tabs open.

It would be wrong to simply count the number of open tabs and, based on this data, introduce forced grouping. Based on the basic idea that sites are applications, we initially focused on grouping by domain, but it was impossible to make a decision without checking. In particular, it could happen by accident that users with 20 tabs have 20 different sites open, and there is no question of any benefit in this case. And here's what we counted:

The results showed that more than ten sites were open for 4% of users versus 10% for tabs. What does this mean? That grouping really makes sense for many users, but not for everyone. We understood from the very beginning that there is a risk of complicating life for those with only a few tabs open. And your messages after the launch of the alpha confirmed the fears.

The simplest solution would be an option in the settings to enable / disable grouping. But the question remains: should grouping work by default? Should we focus on those who work with two or three sites at the same time? And where is the line beyond which the grouping is definitely needed? Such questions spur our further work. Among several options, we, for example, consider an algorithm in which the grouping would be offered to users who have overcome the threshold in N simultaneously open domains.

Background tabs

Another problem, confirmed by support calls, concerns opening tabs in the background - when you are through context menu links choose "Open in a new tab" (or click with the middle mouse button). In our alpha, such pages sometimes opened inside inactive groups, and it was completely unclear where to look for it now.

To solve this problem, it was necessary to somehow distinguish the tabs open in the background from all the others. And at the same time, select the inactive group in which such a tab appears. I didn't want to reinvent the bicycle (because they really wanted to fix this situation already in the first update), so we used in a known way- each background tab now has circle markers. Recall that in a similar way, we mark those search suggestions that are formed based on the history of visits.

It would seem that the background tabs have been selected successfully, it is not difficult to find them. We decided to build the assembly and test our solution on volunteers. There were no problems with the circle. Background tabs are now visually more noticeable. The problem lurked on the other hand, and for the time being it was successfully masked by the inconvenience of searching for tabs. It consists in the following. If the background tab opens in an inactive group, then you need to make two clicks to get to the content. This is a whole click more than we are used to.

The only sane, non-clickable option we've come up with is to temporarily disable grouping for such tabs. You open a background tab, but it doesn't belong to the group, but sits next to it until the group is viewed or expanded.

The order of activating tabs

Another area for us was work on the order of opening tabs. Recall that at the moment, after the active tab is closed, the focus goes to the tab on the right (standard logic in Chromium). Not the most perfect mechanic, we agree. But special problems it did not call exactly until the moment when the group appeared. Now users are faced with a situation where, after closing the rightmost tab, a tab from a completely different group became active in the group. It is not so easily perceived.

Therefore, in the beta version, we implemented a new, experimental logic that is well known to many users of the old Opera. It is not the tab on the right that becomes active, but the one that was used earlier. This is not yet the final version, but it would be interesting to know the opinion of the community right now.

Optimization for weak computers

The graphic effects used in the new Yandex Browser work quite well (let's discount the fact that yesterday it was alpha) work on computers with modern video accelerators (conditionally labeled as HD). However, there is equipment that, unlike us, is not at all happy smooth blur and other graphical delights in the browser. We do not want to close our eyes to this, so we are constantly looking for ways to optimize.

At the first stage (that is, already in the current beta), Yandex Browser will disable blur and replace it with a white fill with opacity 0.9 for devices with weak video cards (GMA). A compromise option. Not very impressive, but you can already work.
There is also a third category. These are the most problematic video cards that can even be banned at the Chromium level, or the browser does not have access to work with such devices. Such equipment will not cope with even the simplest opacity, so in this case we will use a simple white backing.

This is what we have already done for the first beta. In future releases, we will try to talk about our other plans aimed at increasing productivity.

Bookmarks

From the very beginning, we did not hide that we did not plan to cut bookmarks from the browser. However, they did not just copy them from the current traditional interface to the new one. The usual bookmark bar, located under the address bar, does not fit into the new interface at all. And it's not about the design. There is no big problem in making it translucent (although such a solution would lead to difficulties in working with transparency in some situations). And not even that we do not have a classic address bar in this place. Another line in the header is again a path to the clutter of panels and the "striping" of the browser.

In current versions of Yandex Browser, there is an option that is quite popular among users, which allows you to display bookmarks only by clicking in the address bar. This way, bookmarks are just one click away and don't take up space when you don't need them. It is this experience that we applied in the new interface, moving bookmarks to the Inside Out and a new tab.

Switching between Cousteau and the traditional interface

As mentioned at the very beginning, the new beta version of Yandex Browser allows everyone to choose the interface in which they are comfortable working. The corresponding item can be found in the main menu.

We never tire of repeating that the bug reports sent to us (or just comments on Habré) matter. We listen and react. Sometimes not as lightning fast as we all would like, but it really works.

Something else. The emergence of Cousteau

45, Mozilla no longer ships its browser with a tab group feature, arguing that too few people have used this feature.

As a result, the “tab group” and “group your tabs” icons are no longer present in the web browser interface. Version 44 was the last one where they could be observed.

In addition, the key combination Ctrl + Shift + E, which was previously responsible for grouping, no longer leads to any actions.

In fact, a warning about the imminent disappearance of the "group of tabs" function could be observed in Firefox all Lately directly in the grouping interface itself:

The link "more" there led to this official page, explaining that given opportunity will soon be removed from the browser, and all grouped tabs will be saved to your bookmark directory.

The grouping feature debuted in Firefox 4.0, released in spring 2011.

This mechanism was developed under the codenames Panorama and Tab Candy by the famous usability expert Aza Raskin, who, alas, has not worked at Mozilla for a long time.

Thanks to this technology, it was possible to easily divide tabs into groups that did not overlap on the tab bar. That is, only one group was visible at a time, while others could be called from a special interface.

How to get tab groups back in Firefox

Revert the grouping of tabs to the browser Mozilla Firefox can be done using the Tab Groups extension. Let's clarify that this module is not an easy attempt to imitate functionality previously available in a web browser. Tab Groups uses the original code for the Panorama function from versions of Fire Fox prior to Firefox 45.

As a result, you will get all the opportunities that you had before. Moreover, Tab Groups should pick up the groups of tabs that were already available before the transition to new versions of Firefox.

The extension is completely free and has an excellent user rating in the Mozilla directory. After installing it, the combination Ctrl + Shift + E becomes operational again, and the Group your tabs icon appears in the upper right corner above the address bar.

However, in addition to returning the previous functionality, Tab Groups also introduces a little new. In the grouping interface, notice the gear icon.

It leads to a new options page. There are, however, very few of them at the moment. For now, you can only configure hotkeys, animation display and backup.

While most modern browsers have tools to manage the large number of open tabs with web pages, google browser Chrome still doesn't offer built-in tools for this. However, the Chrome browser has recently supported extensions, so it’s not surprising that enthusiasts have created a number of add-ons for these features, and the authors from the Instant Fundas site have collected the 10 best of them.

is the most popular among users of the Chrome browser. Clicking on the TooManyTabs icon in the toolbar displays a menu with a preview of all currently open tabs. Less important tabs can be moved to the list of "suspended tabs", after which these tabs will no longer appear in Chrome browser but will be saved in the TooManyTabs menu for later viewing. In addition, users can create multiple custom-named tabbed columns to easily organize saved tabs into categories.

is another powerful tab manager for Google Chrome that hides itself in the address bar and automatically organizes all open tabs, recently closed and linked tabs so that you can view them with ease. Some open pages can be blocked against accidental closure.

allows you to view open tabs as thumbnails. By clicking on a special button in the toolbar, the user can see a preview of all pages, and then quickly jump to the desired one.

looks somewhat more complete and visually appealing compared to the aforementioned TabPlus extension. The Tab Sugar extension was created based on the Firefox Panorama technology (it will officially appear in Firefox 4) and almost completely repeats the appearance of its progenitor. The Tab Sugar extension supports tab grouping, categorizing, and adding tabs to a group by drag and drop.

includes 4 almost identical extensions that solve one main problem - when too many tabs are open, their titles become unreadable. The solution to this problem in all four extensions is approximately the same - the tabs are displayed in a vertical menu, where you can navigate between them using the mouse or using the arrows on the keyboard. With this vertical menu, you can close tabs, swap them using drag and drop (only in the Tab Menu and Vertical Tabs extensions). In addition, the search for tabs is supported - both by the titles of the tabs and by the URLs of the pages opened in these tabs (in the Tab Menu, Vertical Tabs and Tab Glutton). The Tab Switch Plus extension offers users a simple tab list with no additional functionality.

allows you to view open tabs in multiple windows at once. It is enough to click on the Tab Manager button in the toolbar - after that a dialog opens with graphical tab icons in all open browser windows. Tabs of different windows are marked with different background colors as belonging to different groups. To move a tab from one window to another, you just need to drag the tab from group to group. Also, tabs can be dragged to create new windows or to transfer to the trash.

provides tab control in a "flip" style, with thumbnails scrolling using the mouse wheel. Users are offered 6 ready-made color schemes, support for keyboard shortcuts (without the possibility of changing) and several visual effects. This extension does not provide significant help in managing tabs, but visually it looks very impressive.

Of course, this is not a complete list of tools for managing tabs in the popular Chrome browser, but at the moment they are really the most powerful and convenient tools available.