Here’s a use case: I often have to open up a bunch of instances of the same website (an internal version of a customer-facing page). They all have the same URL, but because they’re single-page apps, they all have massively different functions. For a few hours, I’ll need to flip back and forth between a few of them at a time, as well as some other websites on different pages, as well as an external program that I’m referencing or modifying. Then I don’t have to do that again for a week or two. So I use a tab group to put all of them in, and then once they’re done, I save and close the tab group to reopen next time.

Here’s another use case: I can use a single tab inside a “tab group” but use the tab group label to “name” the tab. That way, even though I have a dozen tabs open with the project name I work on at the beginning of the title, I can look at the label and know which one is the Jira ticket for the devops task I’m working on, which one is the Jira ticket for the new feature I’m waiting for QA signoff on, which one is the Jira ticket for the dependency update I need to do, etc. I also use this functionality when I have a bunch of stuff processing and I need to remember which one is on which step; do I need to do step 3 on this one or step 4? The tab group label knows.

Or here’s another one: I’m currently in the middle of a big accessibility push for our product’s front-end. I have all of the various tabs and resources and Jira tickets and specs open in a tab group, and I can flip between all of them. I open them all every time because it’s rare that I only want one of them (though, if I do, it’s nice that Firefox automatically sleeps all but the active one when I reopen the group). When I’m working on the project, I open that tab group. When I’m done, I save and close it.

Tab groups were literally the only thing I missed from Chrome when I migrated. I’m so glad to have them back, even though it did take seven five long years. Since it was available as a feature flag, I’ve used it so much.