Google Chrome: open all bookmarks of a folder in a tab group

[harlan4096]

Google is working on a new option for bookmarks in folders in the company's Chrome web browser. Launched in Chrome Canary already, Chrome users may use the new feature to open all bookmarks of a folder in a new tab group.

Current stable versions of Chrome display three opening options when you right-click on a bookmarks folder, e.g. on the bookmarks toolbar. The options allow you to open all bookmarks in the current window, in a new window, or in an incognito window.

Starting with Chrome 94, the option to open the bookmarks in a new tab group becomes available.

Tab Groups are a relatively new feature in Chrome that users of the browser may use to group tabs. Each tab group has a name and an icon associated with it, and you may expand and collapse the group for better tab management in the Chrome browser.

When you select the open in new tab group option, Chrome displays the standard tab group dialog. You may use it to change the name of the tab group, the default is set to the name of the bookmarks folder, and the color. The group is expanded by default, but you may collapse it with a click on its header.

The feature appears to have problems with large bookmark collections; while it worked fine if a bookmarks folder contained ten or less tabs, it crashed during attempts to open large and very large bookmark collections. Canary is a development version, but Google needs to address this before rolling it out in stable versions of Chrome.

Google added first bits of the Tab Groups feature to Chrome in 2020. Rumors about the upcoming feature emerged in 2018, but it took nearly two years to integrate core functionality in Chrome. New features, like the ability to collapse tab groups, something that is highly important, were added in 2020 as well to Chrome.

Other Chromium-based browsers support Tab Groups as well. Microsoft is using the core Tab Groups feature in its Edge browser, but it works better in my opinion, because of Edge's support for vertical tabs.

Vivaldi supported tab groups for longer, then called tab stacks, and has expanded the functionality in recent time. The browser supports three different modes in the current version: besides tab stacks, it supports two level tab stacking, which displays a second toolbar with the tabs of the selected tab, and accordion tabs, which work similarly to tab groups in Chrome.

Firefox used to support tab groups, called Panorama, but Mozilla removed the functionality years ago. The only option that Firefox users have is to use add-ons, but these are limited in what they can do. While you may get grouping functionality, e.g. by installing Tiled Tab Groups, or Panorama Tab groups, extensions may not display the groups in the browser's tab bar.

Now You: do you use tab groups?
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