Tabs are so useful for organizing your work, that we are providing more tips for managing tabs in a browser.
A few months ago, we published the post Managing Tabs in a Browser. It describes how to use Favorites, the browser extension OneTab, and Chrome’s tab groups.
Here we will delve deeper into how OneTab and Chrome’s tab groups work, in order to give even more organization tools.
For this example, let’s assume that every morning you open three websites in Chrome. Boston.com, the Weather Channel, and a local news website. You might have these sites bookmarked or you might type them in each day.
Now we will show you a better way to manage these three sites using both OneTab and Chrome tab groups.
Managing Tabs in OneTab
OneTab is a browser extension that can be added to most popular browsers. Read our previous description about its basic functionality if you are not familiar with it.
To set this up, open the three websites that you want to save as separate tabs in a Chrome window. Click on the OneTab icon in the top left of your menu bar. The icon looks like a blue funnel.
The result will be a grouping like this one, with the three tabs listed. Click on the word More at the top of the group to see the additional actions for Naming, Locking and Starring the group.
Name the group NEWS. Star the group to keep it at the top of your OneTab list.
Tomorrow morning when you open Chrome, you will click on Restore all for this group on the OneTab page, and all three tabs will open.
You can create many groups of tabs for different purposes. Make sure OneTab is set up to open new pages while still retaining the list.
Managing Tabs using Chrome Tab Groups
A prior blog post introduced Chrome tab groups. The real power of the tab groups lies in setting them up and using them consistently.
Using the same example above, open the three pages and click on the Bookmarks menu.
Choose Bookmark All Tabs.
This will allow you to type in a name for this group. Make sure you have selected the Bookmarks Bar.
The new folder will be visible on your bookmarks bar. To open it, right click (or Control click on a Mac) on the folder to choose Open All In a New Tab Group.
You can choose a color for the tab name and underline. You have created a tab group!
Click on the tab group name to close the group, as shown below. Click again to open the group as shown above.
This facility allows the user to focus on particular groups of web pages, and switch between those groups quickly.
In this final example, we have 7 tab groups defined. When we open each of them in New Tab Groups, they open in the same window.
By clicking on the tab group name, you can open and close the tabs in the group. This allows us to work on different collections of pages easily without having to manage several windows.
Google’s blog post about managing tabs using tab groups is here.
If you would like more tips for managing tabs in a browser, just call or email and we’ll be happy to assist you! If you have specific questions, or if our terminology isn’t clear, please use our contact form to send us a message. Thank you!