[Non24Throw]

> I don't really think it would work as well for the "tab collectors" as they think.

I’m a collector and it’ll definitely help me a lot in one specific use case: I have a ton of tabs open and want to close some of them, but not all of them

Very often I’ll be growing the tab count on one subject (usually because I can’t find a satisfactory answer), finally I’ll piece that answer together and start applying the new knowledge elsewhere... then come back to my browser and all those extra tabs are now useless, but I can’t tell where they start or end

Sometimes I can find the “root” (the point where I started opening tabs on that subject) and know I can safely close everything to the right. But sometimes other important things are mixed in, so it’s not always possible, and even if it is that still means I need to find the root

The usual solution is having to cycle through every tab, take on the cognitive load of having to identify whether the tab only applied to that subject or not, then close it or keep it

Sometimes that means evaluating the relevance of 30 different tabs of 30 different sites that all look different, and rarely do they have “SUBJECT X” printed at the top

It’ll be really nice to be able to just close the group and not think about any of it and not worry about whether I closed something important, I’m really looking forward to this feature

[quicklime]

Is there a reason you can't already do this with windows (which are a visual grouping of tabs)?

You're right that cycling through tabs and making individual decisions on closing each one has a high cognitive load. Closing an entire window is much easier.

A while ago I realized this, and started to front-load that cognitive effort and make sure that the "root" of each "subject" gets opened in a new window (or at least detached early enough once I realized that I was branching off into a new subject).

An example of the root of a subject could be an item in an issue tracker, and that window could also contain tabs for code search windows, Google searches on that topic, Stack Overflow answers, etc. Once I'm done fixing the bug, I just close the entire window/subject/group, without thinking about each individual tab.

The front page of HN is also usually the root of a subject. I'll open tabs for articles and comment pages, and then close the whole window once I'm done with my break and want to go back to work. If there's something particularly interesting that I want to save for later, I'll detach that tab and close the rest.

For the C++/RAII people, this is kind of like making sure that every object has an owner, and that memory is freed when those objects go out of scope. This is a lot easier than manually doing a mark-and-sweep over all your tabs :)

[whymauri]

That's a great point. On my end, I do all my tab management by maintaining separate desktops for different broad topics (school, work, personal). Then I'll have different windows (history seminar, security engineering). And then it just becomes a whole mess and I keep very rough "version control" through note-taking apps.

I used to compress dozens of tabs into a bookmark folder with a date and topic, but now I just have dozens of those folders collecting dust. I often end up in the same situation you do when I mass-close tabs, except I might have to actively open so many tabs to do so that it actually becomes a strain on my computer.

All that said, I'm fully aware this is mostly my fault for being a tab collector/hoarder.

Edit: right now, at the end of the semester when I don't have much school work content open, I still have six Chrome windows. Yesterday I culled about 20 arxiv PDFs I had slowly accumulated since last August (lol).

[jaflo]

I am not sure if this will work for you, but you can move the tabs next to each other and click on a tab, press shift, then select another one and all tabs in between will be selected. Press Ctrl-W and it will close all of those tabs at once.