Tips for Organizing Your Browser Tabs
Sure, sitting atop your desk might be a top-dollar Apple MacBook laptop, a glassy all-in-one desktop computer, or even one of those futuristic 2-in-1 convertible laptops with a stylus, or maybe you’re rocking a uber-fast gaming laptop. But we bet that the surrounding said device is chaos, and inside that digital desktop lurks some clutter in the form of a messy file structure and about 100 open browser tabs simultaneously.
So now that you’ve made the mental commitment to clean up your workspace and purchased a desktop organizer and computer case, it’s time to go inside your machine and get things sorted!
Browse Better
There’s an infinite number of options out there for browser applications. Still, only a few have stayed atop the list for long enough to take seriously. Chrome (a Google product), Safari (native to your Mac), Edge, and Firefox are all standard options. And then there’s the browser that really started it all, Internet Explorer.
Whether you’re on a Mac or PC, trying out several browsers is a good start when figuring out how best to keep your ducks in a row when surfing the wild waves of the world wide web. All of these options will allow you to drag and drop your tabs. Along with that, every browser scales the width of the tab labels depending on how many you have open at once. How these tabs are displayed changes from app to app, but my favorite has always been Chrome.
Tab Groups
Recently, Google announced that it would add a new feature to its Chrome browser called ‘Tab Groups.’ Instead of just re-organizing tabs from right to left, you now can right-click and create groupings that you denote with colored dots. So, if you’ve got ten work-related tabs open, you could clump them all in together for easy viewing. Additionally, drop all those social media tabs into the same bucket. Boom, you’re already starting to look more professional.
If you are already reading the internet through Chrome, check that you have the latest version and then drop in “chrome://flags” into the URL bar, and you’ll be able to enable the experimental version. While this feature is still in beta, it already promises a much cleaner looking browser environment even if we are unsure of its practicality at this point.
Third-Party Applications
While Google may be first out of the gate with this new tidying technique, you can be sure that the market will respond with a lot of competition. At the time of writing, this OneTab is probably the most prominent and capable competitor.
Capable of integrating with Chrome and Firefox, this third party application allows you to do something very similar to Chrome’s newest feature. Also, consider investigating Tab Manager for Chrome and Firefox. These simple additions to your browser can do wonders, though they don’t quite have the same quality of integration as the native Google options.
One other application you should consider is Tab Session Manager for Chrome and Firefox. This unique application integrates a small pop-up window into your browsing session and allows you to organize tabs into groups within that window. Not as great as a built-in solution that displays at the top of the browser, but it’s a step in the right direction!
Quick Fix
Of the various options floating around on the market right now, there is one other low-cost option built into your computer already. If you are really concerned with keeping tabs bundled together in a browser window, you could simultaneously use multiple browsers. This clumping is a solution without a fancy name, but consider for a moment you are working from home right now, and you wanted to keep your favorite news organizations and social media rolling while you have multiple browser windows going. If you two separate browser windows up simultaneously, you will now be able to group your tabs between the two windows.
While none of these are perfect solutions, they are all developing in real-time, and there’s a great chance that by the end of the year, we’re going to have some incredibly innovative tab management software integrated into our current suite of browsers. Now, if you could keep from stockpiling water cups on your home office desk, you might just look like a working professional, crazy browser tabs, and all.
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