A few weeks back, Amy covered the launch of Firefox 4. In her brief review, she mentioned that she had switched from Firefox to Chrome due to the latter’s speed. I know that other ProfHackers have switched to Chrome
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A few weeks back, Amy covered the launch of Firefox 4. In her brief review, she mentioned that she had switched from Firefox to Chrome due to the latter’s speed. I know that other ProfHackers have switched to Chrome for similar reasons. On the other hand, I’ve remained a fairly faithful Firefox user because there are some add-ons / extensions that have become integral to how I like to work.
While the new Firefox is faster than the old version, there are other new features that are worth exploring as well. I want to draw attention my favorite of all the changes: a new tab management tool, Tab Groups.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a metric ton of tabs open in your browser for different reasons: tabs for research; tabs for things that you want to read later (even though you might be using something like Read It Later); tabs related to your service; tabs related to hobbies; and tabs that you’ve honestly forgotten why you opened them but that you keep around just in case you remember. Up until now, organizing these tabs has been limited to drag-and-drop re-ordering in one or different browser windows, but Tab Groups is an entirely new approach to organizing things. As Firefox puts it, “With Tab Groups you can visually group related tabs, switch between groups and quickly search through all of your tabs.”
Mozilla has a great video that explains how to use Tab Groups:
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I use Tab Groups for the different sorts of browsing that I mentioned above. Here’s a snapshot of my current Tab Groups (click for a larger version):
I’ve got a “main” group that has the bulk of my tabs that I’m using on a daily basis. I have a second group for a project I’m working on evaluating a number of recent surveys I’ve conducted. And I’ve got a “music” group with, well, music I want to check out. And if I can’t remember where something is, I can just start typing on the Tab Groups page, and it searches across the titles of all your different pages. For those who love keyboard shortcuts for EVERYTHING, you can drop in or out of Tab Groups by hitting Control-Shift-E (Windows) or Command-Shift-E (Mac).
All in all, I’ll agree that Chrome is faster, but I still prefer Firefox for working and Tab Groups has made that process even easier. Are you using Tab Groups in Firefox 4? How are you using them? Let us know in the comments!