Tab Groups in Firefox 4

Hello!

If you use Firefox 4, there's a new feature called tabbed groups. Basically, people are bad at managing their Internet lives and end up opening too many tabs at one type, and can't keep them sorted/straight, so Firefox now lets you cluster different tabs together, and show one cluster at a time, hiding the rest. Here are my four, new groups:

• Development: mostly Google Summer of Code right now
• Education: school pages, a diverse set
• Friends and Fun: the epitome of procrastination, all Facebook and LiveJournal pages go here
• Long Term: these are tabs that I've carried for two years or more. They require a lot of time and effort to handle (e.g. interacting with the real world to accomplish something important)

I often get up near 100 tabs in a session, and usually get as low as 20. (Wikipedia and Google Reader are great sources for transient, short-lived pages that balloon a session.) Tab Groups will only make this worse, by making me forget just how many I have open in other groups. This will really slow down your computer! I have two other tricks to manage the abundance.

• I use the Bar Tab extension. This prevents pages from actually loading and thus taking up memory and CPU. They still appear in your tab bar, with the title and icon, but loading is delayed until you actually go to read it. Right now, I have it set so I have to actually refresh the page to get it to load (since I often end up on tabs I don't mean to open by closing some other one). This means that, often, I might have 5 out of 50 tabs actually weighing down my browser. Before this, I had to switch to Google Chrome (which has a task manager that tells you which tabs are slowing me down most). I am really grateful for Bar Tab, and it's on-demand style.
• I also use the Tree Style tab view extension. I use it to make my tab bar a vertical list on the side of my browser, rather than a strip across the top. This is nice, because the tabs remain a fixed width forever, and they stack upon one another. Because they build in their thinnest direction (tabs are shorter than they are wide), it's harder for them to disappear off my screen (as with the default top tab bar, tabs would disappear off to the left and right). I wonder why it's just not the default? Its second benefit is that it's a tree of tabs, so if you open new tabs from one, they appear as indented children to that tab in the list. It's great.

Oh, and finally, something I enjoy about Firefox 4 is the ability to pin a particular tab to your browser so that it will always be there and won't go away. The pinned tabs appear at the start of your tab list, and usually just show the icon. I can't accidentally close them carelessly using ctrl w either. They're intended for web apps that you often use, and I use a pure Google set:

• GMail
• Google Reader
• Google Calender
• Google Docs
• Blogger (wow, something that doesn't start with a G!)

Good day to you.