Open a web browser and you step into a garden of forking paths — where news, messages, memes, work, learning and cat videos all compete for your attention. Every click sprouts another tab. Before you know it, your author has opened 68,000 tabs in one year alone, while some people manage to keep 7,000 tabs open for years. Firefox Tab Groups is designed to help you organize tabs, offering a better way to browse.
(Eager to try it out? Jump to getting started with Tab Groups.)
How too many tabs drain your focus and time
Research shows that tab overload can start with just five to eight tabs open. And when you factor in how many tabs we open each day, it’s clear we need better tools to stay organized.
If you use a browser at work or school, this scenario may sound familiar: You are writing in one tab when you realize you need information from another. You go on a tab hunt, scanning the tiny icons in your tab bar, skimming the first few letters of each tab title, navigating from window to window, searching for that elusive document or presentation.
You finally find it. Victory is mine! But before you can celebrate, you have to find your way back to that first tab. And so the cycle of tab re-finding begins anew.
Or you glance at your browser and feel overwhelmed. So many semi-random tabs open that the only solution seems to be to declare tab bankruptcy, close everything and start over.
These are all symptoms of information overload, the condition of having more information than you need to make a decision or complete a task efficiently. It is one of the defining challenges of our digital age. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt once said, “There were 5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization and 2003, but that much information is now created every two days.” Whether or not you believe the numbers, the feeling is real: We are surrounded by more information, more distractions and more tabs.
Firefox Tab Groups are designed to give you more control, whether you manage thousands of tabs or prefer to keep just a few open.
How to organize your tabs with Tab Groups
Tab Groups add a layer of color-coded organization to your browser, making it easier to keep related tabs together. You can create groups for topics, projects or recurring tasks — like the news sites you read daily, ideas for a new woodworking hobby or research for an upcoming trip to Thailand.
Ideas for organizing your tabs:
- By urgency: Tabs for tasks you need to finish soon, like a “Friday to-do” list
- By frequency: Sites you visit daily, such as news or email
- By topic: Tabs for different courses, hobbies, or areas of interest
- By project: Resources and tools collected for an important project
- By type: Similar tabs grouped together, like PDFs or pages from the same site
Once you have a few groups set up, it becomes much faster to find your tabs and switch between tasks.
Getting started with Tab Groups
Starting with Firefox Version 138, available April 29, you can manage your tabs more easily with the new Tab Groups feature.
Here’s how to get started:
- Create a group: drag a tab on top of another, pause and drop
- Name and color the group (name is optional)
- Add or remove tabs from a group by dragging tabs in and out of a group
- Manage the group by right-clicking the group label. From there you can:
- Create a new tab in the group
- Move group to new window
- Save and close the group to free up space on the tab bar
- Ungroup tabs
- Delete the group
- Reposition a group on the tab bar by dragging it
- Expand or collapse a group when you single-click the group label
- Retrieve a group. Browse all groups in the List all tabs menu (a downward caret in the top right corner of the tab bar)
See our support page for Firefox Tab Groups for more details.
Other ways to use Tab Groups
If you manage a lot of tabs, you might want to explore Firefox’s new Vertical Tabs mode. With vertical tabs, you can expand or collapse the amount of the tab title you see, which can make it easier to re-find the tab you need.
You can also combine Tab Groups with add-ons to manage your tabs even more efficiently. If you’ve ever closed a tab and wished you could get it back, Firefox has plenty of add-ons to help you recover and organize your tabs.
New APIs (tools that help programs work together) are on the way, giving add-on developers even more ways to manage tabs and groups. If you’re using add-ons with Tab Groups today, just keep in mind that some add-ons may move tabs into or out of groups, or close grouped tabs.
Making tab management even smarter with AI
Tab Groups make it easier to stay organized, but even with better tools, tab management can still be a chore — especially as your habits and needs change.
To make it even easier over time, we’re exploring new AI-powered tools for organizing tabs by topic. You can try an early prototype today with on-device AI in Firefox Nightly, our next-generation browser for testing and development.
Shape what’s next for managing tabs
Try out Tab Groups in Firefox and tell us what you think in our community forum, Mozilla Connect.
If you want a sneak peek at what’s next, you can also test an early AI-powered prototype in Firefox Nightly and look for the “Suggest more of my tabs” button when creating a group. And unlike other browsers, with Firefox you can always feel confident that no one sees your tabs except you, even if you organize them with AI.
The web will keep growing and changing. With Firefox, you stay in control of your tabs and the path you choose to take.
