Tab groups
The difference is only having to manage a single window vs multiple. In my opinion/experience, it's better UX to switch tab groups in the current window than find the tab in multiple windows.
Jerdle i agree. Tab groups are very handy, because they keep your windows clean. I hate it when i have more than 4 windows open at a time, so the feature was the thing that solidified my choice to switch to opera from chrome a few years ago.
Is the scenario described below a valid use case? If so, I would also be in favor of this feature.
I'm working on a project in a window with 10 tabs. I'd like to be able to save the tabs in that window as a tab group - including each tab's history and maybe even the window's history (to be able to reopen closed tabs later) - so I can close the window and come back to it (restore the tab group in a new window again) in a few days when I want to continue working on the project.
There are, however, various Chrome or Firefox extensions such as https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/session-buddy/edacconmaakjimmfgnblocblbcdcpbko?hl=en that offer similar functionality. I just installed Tab Session Manager from the Chrome Web Store https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-session-manager/iaiomicjabeggjcfkbimgmglanimpnae/ and it seems to be working fine.
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lexeter Tab group (in Safari) works the same way as minimizing a window holding the tabs. There is no benefit to performance or memory use. Tab groups are not 'saved', they are live, and just not shown. Therefore I am trying to find a concrete benefit to implementing tab groups vs simply using windows.
More info here:
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/12/how-safaris-tab-groups-consume-memory/
Vlad Thank you, I did not know this. Tab groups as implemented in Safari do not seem to be a desirable solution. Using an extension might be a better way to save tabs/windows. It would be convenient, however, to be able to sync saved tabs/windows with the iOS app. Not sure how this could be implemented when using third-party extensions.
Here are a few of my use-cases/favorite features for tab groups.
- I essentially treat my tab groups (in Safari/Chrome shudder) as bookmark suites. It's very nice to already have the webpages in a deterministic order, I can just navigate to my Jira tab group, and my team's scrum board is always in the first tab. Tab groups help keep me organized, and helps with muscle memory when using the browser.
- I really like being able to search through tab groups purely through keyboard shortcuts. This is something I believe Chrome supports, however Safari doesn't inherently (though, I believe you can search from the "tab group mission control" kind of page).
- One thing Safari has however, that Chrome doesn't, is if I try to open a webpage again, it will actually redirect me to the tab group. This might honestly be a bug rather than a feature, but I find it kind of nifty, and avoids me from opening the same tab redundantly and sucking up a ton of memory (very easy to do when rabbit-holing on something).
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I really like being able to search through tab groups purely through keyboard shortcuts.
How does this work exactly?
Basically our proposal is for feature to work similar to Safari, but instead creating another feature and calling it tab groups, we would just give windows a label and ability to switch from one to another via a dropdown.
We should have v1 of this concept ready for the next beta update.
@Vlad I'd like to make another case for the safari style tab groups.
Named Windows in Orion are pretty cool but they are just windows which are temporary, there is no sense of persistence. Yes tab groups don't actually save the state of the tabs but if you click on the red x button (safari) on a window that has a specific tab group opened it will close the window but will keep the tab group! in the named windows implementation (in Orion) if you close a window it's gone (I know you can re open it but that's not the point).
in other words tab group are mental separation of different tabs. Let's say you have a tab group named "shoes" where you have a bunch of open tabs to research a new pair of shoes you want to buy. At some point you want to go back to work and you switch to the "work" tab group. What happens is that "shoes" group it totally hidden, it's not minimised nor is it in still visible, it's basically tucked in until maybe in 3 days you have some free time to continue where you left off. same for the "work" tab group after work you might have some loose ends and you don't wanna loose those tabs but at the same time you don't to be bother by work during your non working hours.
This is also very different from bookmarks also because you maybe a lot of these tabs only matter for a short period of time while you doing the shoes research for example after which they serve no purpose and you can delete the tab group.
finally Safari has this feature where you can take create a tab group out of some tabs. This is important because besides the tab groups you can also just use safari normally but what if you open a fresh safari window start a new research or topic and then decide that you'll pause for now and continue later, all you have to do is to create a new tab group from the currently open tabs, give it a name and bam your progress is saved for later
I hope this use case makes sense
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Just to clarify, what Safari does is same from resource consumption standpoint
https://eclecticlight.co/2021/11/12/how-safaris-tab-groups-consume-memory/
the difference is that the user doesn't see it, so they assume they are not using memory.
Now where the difference currently exist is that Safari will also sync tabs to iCloud so they persist while we are working on this right now (together with bookmarks sync).
So lets separate persistence from the implementation of tab grouping. We used windows because that is what windows naturally do - hold a group of tabs so we get this "for free". Safari introduces one more level of abstraction, having group of tabs inside a group of tabs (window), which has no resource use benefit but has a software complexity penalty. We like keeping Orion as lightweight as possible.
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@Vlad thanks for the clarification.
I understand that Orion's focus is to be as lightweight as possible. My point was purely UX driven, my motivation for tab groups was never based on performance or memory usage. Also, the abstraction you mentioned is precisely the advantage I meant.
Putting iCloud sync aside (which as you said is a total different topic), Orion's and Safari's implementation might be identical from a recourses perspective and it's true that you get "windows" for free thanks to macOS but the usage to the end user is clearly different and I think we both agree on that. At this point it seems like it's a matter of avoiding software overhead for what is indeed a UX benefit but not significant enough to justify the cost, I totally get that especially with a lot of other work to be done.
All I could do at this point is propose a different implementation that could bring some resources advantage to make Safari-style tab groups more likely to make it to Orion 
: What if inactive tab groups where not in memory anymore and whenever you spawn a tab group it will simply open all the tabs of that group from scratch and close them when the tab group is no longer in use. This approach could bring less memory usage I assume, compared with having multiple windows. Maybe the engineering complexity is also reduced since a "tab group" would serve just as a list of urls and all the browser needs to do is close all current tabs and replace them with the ones defined in the tab group, like a shortcut of sort.
PS: I'm no macOS engineer so probably I don't know what I'm talking about.
Of course I'm not suggesting to not have multiple windows anymore. That feature is also of course very useful and has it's own use case I just see that multiple windows and tab groups to simply be different features and trying to blend them into one thing is a shame :/
rant over, thanks for reading.
TheUser1 We will be doing something like this, when we introduce persistence through iCloud.
basically the idea is that if you just open a window it acts as temp window like now. But if you rename it (thus it becoming a "named window" aka "named tab group" it starts to persist. Meaning you can close it (fully freeing resources) and then reopen it later.
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Named windows feature looks good.