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Tab groups
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).
- Edited
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.
9 days later
a month later
17 days later
@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
- Edited
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.
- Edited
@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.
3 months later
I'm also excited about the "named window" concept. Maybe the named window dialog box could allow selection of a Firefox style container? While I'd still like profiles to be separate from containers, the users who want containers would be probably be thrilled.
a month later
- Edited
Orion already supports the concept of tab groups due to its tree-style tab implementation. This is great for organizing tabs, but it needs one small tweak to make it really useful:
Currently, tabs and groups are the same thing. Any tab can be a group and all groups are tabs. This is fine for ad-hoc grouping, but to create a more permanent group, we need a special type of tab called a "Folder". A folder would be a regular tab with an about:blank URL, and the ability to rename it. You could add a folder at any level in the tab hierarchy using a right-click operation, or by clicking a plus folder icon, which would appear next to the existing plus sign, which adds a tab.
So, to give a very simple example, suppose you have a group of tabs that you use at work, and a group of tabs that you use at home. Sure, you could group them into separate windows, but like many users on here, I feel that the multi-window approach is messy and creates clutter, plus it requires additional clicks to switch windows, you end up having to move and resize windows, etc, etc, etc... I hate to use more than one window in any application. From your previous comments in this thread and other related threads, I can see that you don't get this concept; you think it's fine to use lots of windows. I'm not saying that in a bad way, it's just that you think differently from many Orion users. If you implemented this very simple tweak, you could make lots of us really, really happy, without having to do hardly any work.
Instead of having to put my work tabs in one window, and my home tabs in a separate window, I could click the folder icon and create a new folder called Work, then click it again and create a new folder called Home. Again, these "folders" are just tabs that can be named, and that don't have a URL. Now, I can conveniently group all my home tabs under the Home folder, and all my work tabs under the Work folder, and do it all in one window. This would make me super-happy, and I'm pretty sure many other Orion users would feel the same way. The beauty of this approach is that it's already built. You went to the trouble to make a really nice hierarchical tabs list. All that we're asking now is that you take the last step, and make it useful for how we want to work.
Thank you for listening!
8 days later
This is actually how it should work by default. When you select another window, the previous one should be closed. If someone wants not to close the previous window, they should choose an option "open window" or sth like that. However, by default it should work like Safari Tab Groups. I don't need to have 5 windows open at the same time. It's unproductive. Even if I wanted, I would open them manually. I need a quick solution.
3 months later
The tabs system in Orion feels like it's tthe same system in safari but much worse, like someone just wanted to make them look the same. I think this is really frustrating and disappointing cause I was really starting to like the browser, I hope they fix it.
This post is closed please do not post here. There are other threads of interest like the one about handling named windows.
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