I hope OP does not mind, but I’m looking for the exact same thing and only Arc does it this way. See the following video:
- Normal/temporary/default tabs are on the bottom
- Above them are pinned tabs, which persist and cannot be closed, but otherwise act just like normal tabs. You can navigate inside of them, but can always return to their pinned URL, which "resets" them.
- Favorite tabs are at the top, as minimized icons (similar to pinned tabs in Orion)
Both normal tabs and pinned tabs can be grouped in folders – real folders whose function is to collapse/expand multiple tabs and which do not open a webpage. This is in contract to the first tab in a group/folder/stack acting as the "folder", which is currently the case in Orion and other browsers.
The important part is that pinned tabs are permanent and cannot be easily closed/removed, like bookmarks (you can right-click and remove them, but not close them with a keyboard shortcut). But in contrast to bookmarks, they ARE the tabs and do not open new tabs, which would just pollute the tab bar with a lot of new tabs when using the bookmarks constantly. If you navigate away inside of a pinned tab and the URL is on the same domain, a "Back to pinned URL" button appears which "resets" the pinned tab to the URL it was pinned to.
Orion has pinned tabs, but they appear as small icons without text, which is not viable if I want to make multiple tabs with the same favicon permanent. Also, without being able to group in folders, pinning is unfortunately not an alternative to old-school bookmarks. The folders in Arc can be nested infinitely, which makes them fully-fledged "bookmarks".
There was a topic on the forums where you presented a UX study about grouping tabs, which I also found really good, but it seemed to be put on hold. This in combination with OPs feature request would make Orion an instant replacement for Arc for me.
