When Apple unveiled Safari 15 back in June, it was packed with features and a new design. The new design seemed like a mess initially, but got good enough until the final release. One feature which got sidelined in all the mess was Tabs Groups. It seemed to have a lot of potential during the demo, and here are my thoughts:
The concept of Tab Groups is simple, instead of just having a single row of tabs you can create multiple rows. You can quickly jump between different rows of tabs and can name each row. Tab groups sync across devices and also maintain the sequence of all the tabs within Tab Groups. I don’t like having a bunch of tabs open all the time (have you noticed I am a minimalist 😅). But I also hate closing tabs that I may need in the future. I am not alone in this, and I know people have 100s of tabs open for this very reason.
Tab Groups so far has worked great for me. Currently, I have 7 Tab Groups — Automobile, Travel, Dough (🤑), Writing, Future, Jobs, Housing. Along with these there are the individual device-only tabs at the top. I can group tabs based on their task and the entire set is synced across all my devices. I regularly open tabs when I am home on my MacBook and then later refer it on my iPad when outside. Tabs sync pretty quickly in my experience, and it’s very easy to create/edit/delete tab groups.
Google and other chromium based browsers do have a tab grouping feature, but not as powerful as the one in Safari. If you have not tried Tab Groups yet in Safari, give it a shot. It’s a great feature for researching a particular topic or planning a trip. It might even be worth to switch to Safari entirely for this feature.
PS:
- I do understand a lot of Safari users hate some of the new design decisions. I personally love it and have the compact tab-bar on all devices(on iOS/iPadOS/macOS). What I want to see is more refinement.
- I only once encountered Safari mess up synchronizing Tab groups. Meaning the old set of tabs from iPhone was overwritten to my new set of tabs in iPadOS. But this hasn’t happened again.
