The 50-Tab Chaos
Browser tabs are the digital equivalent of hoarding. You start your day with one tab open. By lunchtime, you have forty. You have three tabs open for a work project, seven tabs open researching a new camera you want to buy, four tabs of news articles you want to read later, and five tabs for your company’s HR portal.
The tabs become so small you cannot even read the text on them. Finding the specific Google Doc you need takes ten seconds of clicking randomly. More importantly, when it is time to switch tasks (e.g., stopping work to plan a holiday), you do not want to close your work tabs, so you just open more tabs, adding to the visual chaos.
Apple built a brilliant organizational tool directly into macOS Safari to solve this problem. It is called Tab Groups. It allows you to bundle specific tabs together under a single label and instantly swap between entirely different workspaces, hiding the tabs you don’t need right now.
How to Create a Tab Group
Tab Groups are managed in Safari’s Sidebar.
- Open Safari on your Mac.
- Look at the top left corner of the Safari window, right next to the red/yellow/green buttons. You will see a small icon that looks like a square with a sidebar. Click the Sidebar icon.
- The Sidebar will slide out, showing you how many tabs are currently open.
- Click the New Tab Group button (the square icon with a plus sign next to it).
- Select New Empty Tab Group.
- Type a name for this workspace. For example, type Holiday Planning and press Enter.
Using the Workspaces
When you press Enter, all of your existing tabs instantly vanish. Do not panic; they are not deleted. You have simply switched from your main view to your new, empty “Holiday Planning” workspace.
Now, start searching for flights, hotels, and restaurants. Open as many tabs as you want. All of these tabs are automatically saved directly into the “Holiday Planning” group.
When your lunch break is over and you need to get back to work:
- Open the Safari Sidebar.
- You will see a list of your groups. Click on [number] Tabs at the top of the list (this is your default, original workspace).
Instantly, all your holiday research vanishes, and all your messy work tabs reappear exactly as you left them. You can create as many Tab Groups as you want (e.g., “Q3 Financials,” “House Hunting,” “Daily Reading”).
Saving Existing Tabs into a Group
What if you already have a massive mess of tabs and you want to organize them retroactively?
- Find a tab that belongs to a specific project.
- Right-click (or Control-click) on the tab itself at the top of the screen.
- Hover over Move to Tab Group.
- Select an existing group from the list, or click New Tab Group to create one on the fly.
The tab will be teleported out of your current view and safely tucked away in that specific project folder.
The Apple Ecosystem Bonus: Syncing
The most powerful aspect of Safari Tab Groups is how deeply they integrate with iCloud. If you create a “Holiday Planning” Tab Group on your Mac and fill it with five hotel websites, that exact Tab Group will instantly appear in Safari on your iPhone and your iPad.
You can close your laptop at work, get on the train, pull out your iPhone, open Safari, tap the Tab Group menu, and seamlessly continue reading the exact same tabs you found on your Mac.
Conclusion
Stop leaving forty tabs open at the top of your screen. By utilizing macOS Safari Tab Groups, you can compartmentalize your digital life, instantly hiding distractions and pulling up the exact set of websites you need for the specific task you are working on right now.