Monday, April 22, 2013

Firefox ProTip: Group your Tabs

One nice feature of Firefox that I thought unnecessary at first, but have recently grown to love, is tab grouping.

At first Firefox doesn't obviously have this feature, you kind of have to know about it to start using it. If you are lucky you might see the tab groups icon in the tab bar (at the for right next to the + for adding a new tab, it looks like this: ) but for most of us, we have to turn it on.

To turn on tab groups, right click in an empty area on the tab bar next to your last tab. For some of you finding an empty area in the tab bar might be a challenge, but it's worth it, trust me. in the right click context menu click on customize.That will bring up a menu full of icons to add to the toolbar, like this:





Find the tab groups icon in there and drag it to the tab toolbar.


Now you can start grouping tabs by clicking that button, which will bring up a window with icons for each of your tabs. Just drag a tab icon off the window into space and it will form a new tab group. Drag other similar tabs into that tab group, and optionally give it a name. You then just click a tab to go back to the normal view and you will find you are only presented with the tabs in that group. You will be able to switch between tab groups by clicking the Tab Group icon, or pressing CTRL-SHIFT-E and then selecting a tab from the group you want.

I use this routinely to keep tabs for some topic I'm researching together and separate from social media tabs that I might also want to have open, but don't need to have staring me in the face.When Somoene comes to my desk asking me for help on something, I create a new tab, quickly hit CTRL-SHIFT-E  and make a new group for it and I am ready to work on that problem and keep it's links seperate from everything else I'm working on. This helps prevent accidentally closing other things when that problem is resolved as I can just kill that tab group and move back to whatever I was working on before.

Give it a try. If you are a tab addict it is well worth trying.

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