How to group tabs on Mac, and when grouping is not enough

Grouping tabs is one of those tasks where the mechanics take four minutes to learn and the decision behind them takes considerably longer. Both browsers that ship on a Mac have a grouping feature, both are free, and both work well. The reason people go looking for instructions is rarely that the menu item is hard to find. It is that the tab strip has stopped being navigable, and grouping looks like the thing that will fix it.

Sometimes it is. Grouping is very good at one specific problem and structurally unable to touch another, and the difference between those two decides whether the tab strip stays tidy for a week or for a year. What follows covers how to do it in each browser, what each method quietly carries with it, and where the boundary of the technique sits.

Grouping tabs in Chrome

The action itself is a right-click. Right-clicking a tab gives an option to add it to a group, either a new one or an existing one, and the group then appears as a coloured, named segment of the tab strip. Clicking the group name collapses it, which is the part that actually reclaims space, because a collapsed group of twelve tabs occupies about as much room as one tab.

Two behaviours make Chrome groups more durable than they first appear. The first is that a closed group is not lost. Chrome keeps saved groups accessible from the bookmarks bar and from the menu, so a group can be closed at the end of a task and reopened intact later. The second is that groups travel:

When browsing history and tabs are synced with your Google Account, changes to tab groups are automatically saved and synced across all of your devices. Source: support.google.com

That sentence contains the condition worth noticing. Groups sync through the Google Account that Chrome profile is signed into. A group created in a work profile appears on other devices signed into the work account, and does not appear in the personal profile on the same Mac. For anyone running two profiles this is exactly the desired behaviour, and it is also the first hint that groups sit inside a boundary rather than crossing one.

Practical habits that make the feature hold up: name every group, because a colour alone stops being distinguishable past four groups. Keep groups collapsed by default and open one at a time. Move a group to a new window by dragging it out, which is useful when a task grows enough to deserve its own space.

Grouping tabs in Safari

Safari calls the same idea Tab Groups, and the Apple documentation states the purpose directly.

You can organize tabs into groups that make it easy to quickly switch between groups of related websites. Source: support.apple.com

Two routes exist for creating one. An open set of tabs can be turned into a group in a single step, which is the fast path when the tabs already exist. Alternatively an empty group can be created and named first, then filled by dragging tabs in or using the control-click menu, which suits a group intended as a permanent home for a recurring task.

Safari's model differs from Chrome's in an important way. Groups are listed in the sidebar rather than laid out across the tab strip, and switching to a group replaces the tab strip entirely instead of expanding a segment of it. The result is that Safari groups behave more like separate rooms and Chrome groups behave more like folders on a shelf. Neither is better in the abstract. Safari's approach scales further before the interface becomes crowded, while Chrome's keeps everything visible at once, which matters when tasks are actually interleaved rather than sequential.

Safari also has a second layer that Chrome handles differently, which is profiles. Apple describes their purpose as keeping personal browsing separate from work, school, and other browsing by creating a profile for each part of life. A profile carries its own tab groups, so the sidebar in a work profile shows only work groups. One consequence is documented and worth reading before assuming profiles separate everything:

If you store passwords with iCloud Keychain, the passwords are available in any profile you create. Source: support.apple.com

Two features that make grouping hold up

Grouping on its own tends to decay after a fortnight. Two neighbouring features are what keep it usable, and both are already installed.

The first is pinning. Chrome's documentation describes it simply: right-click the tab and select Pin, after which pinned tabs are smaller and show only the site's icon. Pinned tabs sit at the left of the strip, cannot be closed with the usual keystroke by accident, and come back when the window reopens. This matters because pinning and grouping solve adjacent halves of the same mess. Pinning is for the five or six things open every single day. Grouping is for the twenty things open because of a particular task this week. Mixing the two categories is what makes a tab strip unreadable, and separating them is most of the cure.

The second is tab search. Chrome exposes a Tab Search control in the tab strip, and the documentation lists the Mac shortcut as Command ⌘ + Shift + a. Typing a few characters of a page title finds it across every open window, not just the current one. Safari has an equivalent in the tab overview and in the sidebar search field.

Tab search changes the calculation behind grouping more than people expect. Past a certain count, arranging tabs so they can be found by eye stops being possible, and searching by name becomes faster than any arrangement. Once that threshold is crossed, the purpose of grouping shifts. It stops being a retrieval system and becomes a way of marking which tabs belong to unfinished work, so that everything unmarked can be closed without hesitation. Groups used that way stay small and get retired when the task ends, which is the version of the habit that survives.

A naming convention helps here more than a colour scheme. Naming a group after a deliverable, such as a client name plus what is being produced, makes it obvious when the group is finished. Naming it after a topic produces a group that is never finished and therefore never closed, which is how a tab strip fills up with archaeology.

What a group is, and what it is not

A tab group is a label attached to tabs that already exist in one window, in one profile, in one browser session. Everything follows from that sentence.

It is excellent at reducing visual noise. Twelve collapsed tabs stop competing for attention, and a named group makes a half-finished task findable tomorrow, which is the main reason tabs get left open in the first place.

It does nothing about sessions. Tabs inside a group share the same cookies as every other tab in that profile, so two groups cannot hold two accounts on the same service. Signing into the second account in the second group signs the first one out. Anyone who came to grouping hoping to keep a client account and a personal account apart has picked a tool that cannot do it, and the fix belongs at the profile level rather than the group level.

It does nothing about notifications either. A grouped and collapsed chat tab still makes noise, still increments a badge, and still pulls attention away from whatever is in front of it. Collapsing hides the tab, not the interruption.

The one genuinely dangerous failure is a group holding a task in progress being closed with the window. Chrome's saved groups reduce the risk considerably, but a group is still not a place: it is a set of tabs that happens to be labelled, and it exists at the mercy of the window it lives in.

If an extension is on the shortlist

Tab management extensions remain popular, and the ecosystem has changed enough recently that older recommendations cannot be taken at face value. Google's own deprecation timeline records two dates that matter:

With Chrome 138 all users on all channels of Chrome have now Manifest V2 extensions disabled. Source: developer.chrome.com

The same timeline records that all remaining Manifest V2 extensions were removed from the Chrome Web Store on August 31, 2026. An article from a few years ago recommending a tab manager may be pointing at something that no longer runs or no longer has a listing. Opening the store page before installing is now part of the process.

There is also a permissions question that applies regardless of manifest version. An extension that organises tabs necessarily sees every URL open in the browser. That is a reasonable trade for a tool that earns its place, and a poor one for a tool installed on a whim and forgotten.

Four approaches next to each other

Method	Boundary	Survives closing	Separates logins	Cost
Chrome tab groups	A label inside one window	Saved groups reopen	No	None
Safari tab groups	A room in the sidebar	Persist in the sidebar	No	None
Browser profiles	A separate session and window	Yes	Yes	A switch per account
A window per web application	An application, permanently	Yes	Yes	Setting it up once

The table makes the pattern visible. The first two rows are about visual order and cost nothing. The last two are about identity and continuity, and they ask for a decision about how the day is arranged. Choosing a row from the wrong half is the most common way this goes wrong, and it usually shows up as someone regrouping the same tabs every few days.

When a group should have been a window

There is a reliable signal for this. If the same group is recreated after every cleanup, and the tabs inside it are opened first thing every morning and closed last thing at night, that group is describing an application, not a task. Applications used that way are badly served by living in a tab strip. They need to stay signed in, they need to be reachable without hunting, and they must not disappear because a window was closed by accident.

That is the shape a browser built around one window per web application is designed for. Instead of a label on a set of tabs, each service gets a persistent space with its own session, so a second account on the same service stops being a conflict and a purge of research tabs cannot reach the mail client. The features overview sets out how the separation is arranged, and the comparison with Shift covers how this category of tool differs internally. Common questions about migrating from a tab-based setup are collected in the FAQ.

What to change first

Spend ten minutes grouping and naming the tabs that belong to genuine tasks, then collapse all of them. Whatever refuses to fit into a task group is the interesting part of the list: those are applications, and they need a permanent home rather than a better label, which is what SpaceDeck provides.